News & Resources

HTML5 Video Content Repositories

Wikimedia Commons – A database of 6,251,355 (and counting) freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.  Check it out:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Public Videos – a repository of open, original, high-quality, and royalty-free video footage that are released or waiting-to-be-released into the commons as public domain with the help of the website users.  Check it out:  http://alpha.publicvideos.org/

Pad.ma – short for Public Access Digital Media Archive – is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.  Check it out:  http://pad.ma/

Metavid.org — Metavid is a community driven archive of legislative video from both houses of the U.S. Congress, spanning from early 2006 to the present. The archive is searchable by speaker name, spoken text, date, metadata scraped from outside sources and user contributions. Check out http://metavid.org

What is HTML5?

HTML5 is a set of web standards being developed by the “Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group” (WHATWG). As of December 2009 all major browser vendors have participated to some degree in the standard’s process. The HTML5 standards process outlines many new features for more dynamic web applications and interfaces. One such component being specified and implemented is the video element.

The HTML5 video element is presently supported by Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome comprising about 33% of the overall browser market. The HTML5 video standard is also supported in mobile devices such as Apple’s iPhone and version 2 of the Google Android platform. Both of these popular mobile platforms don’t support Flash plugins and subsequently the video tag is the exclusive mechanism to distributed video in these mobile HTML browsers.