Gregory Maxwell wrote:
A huge amount of streaming video on the Web requires
codec downloads,
but Windows Media player will autodownload most of them, although it
will not autodownload theora this is why the en vogue video glurge
sites use flash based players.
If you want mostly painless universial support for Windows users, what
you should be arguing for is a java Wikipedia player (which is
certantly possible).
Fluendo's got a GPL'd Java applet player that can play streaming Ogg Vorbis and
Theora. I've tossed up a quick test page using a random short video clip I
grabbed off of Commons:
http://test.leuksman.com/video/
Seems to work for me in:
* Mac OS X 10.4: Safari 2
* Mac OS X 10.4: Firefox 1.5
* Windows XP SP2: IE 7
* Windows XP SP2: Firefox 1.5
I haven't tested other systems extensively but would like to see some
compatibility feedback.
NullC reports it works with gcjwebplugin on Linux/Firefox, though perhaps slowly.
Unfortunately the market penetration of Java on Windows and Linux isn't what it
was at the peak of the browser wars; Microsoft no longer seems to bundle Java
and many Linux distributions still aren't shipping a Java plugin. So it may
require some people to separately download and install Java.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)