<video>? Hopefully sooner than later.

Ars Technica (which I argue has the best tech coverage on the web) has written an interesting article on the status of video media elements in HTML 5. This would essentially allow you to use a <video> or <audio> tag when you want to play a piece a media, just the same way you display an image using the <img> tag.

For anyone producing a large amount of daily video each day this is more than welcome. The idea of allowing users to watch video online without the need of a plugin such as Flash or Silverlight is amazing. The hiccups come in deciding which formats it should support.

As discussed in the article the major hurdle comes down to if the web should adopt a proprietary codec such as H.264 or an open codec such as Ogg Theora.

I believe the only logical solution is to allow the element to be open to many different formats and user the operating system's media playing engine (such as QTKit on a Mac or DirectShow on Windows) this allows the best codec to win out, not simply the codec the W3C deems as the best.  Mozilla argues that this creates a more fragmented environment, but I believe it offers the same benefits of <img> where it supports multiple formats such as IMG, JPG, GIF and PNG.  Each has their own pros and cons, but it give the developer the flexibility to choose what is best for their product.

To read the piece on Ars Technica click here.