Diving into the open video player initiative
If you’re a web veteran or even a new but frequent user, you’ve more than likely run across a few sad excuses for video players. If you’re a Flash developer, you’ve probably struggled with many of the problems at the root of said video players. Either way, it’s unlikely you were happy about being on either end. Many of these video player inconsistencies can be attributed to one thing – the lack of a standards based approach to web video development. Fortunately, there’s hope. The Open Video Player Initiative aims to make these user and developer time-wasters a thing of the past by developing a standard approach to web video development.
Our interactive developer Brandon Bone dove into this open-source project and its resources for developing against the initiative’s standards. The official initiative is the brainchild of the folks over at Akamai, with development partners like Microsoft and Adobe (itself a collaboration of industry giants unlikely to be seen again). Unfortunately, this collaboration has failed to provide any real solid ongoing community support at OVP’s main site.
From what Brandon could gather, immediately after the initiative’s conception, the site featured videos and tutorials rich with code examples on how to build a player from the ground up using the OVP framework. This is no longer the case. The site’s video section is peppered with high level talks about the initiative that provide little, if any, development examples. The site goes down pretty regularly, and sadly, it seems to serve as more of a repository for news releases and links than as a hub for information about the initiative. To top it all off, the initiative shares all of its code through the web dinosaur that is Sourceforge.net
It’s not all doom and gloom though. While examples may be sparse, it’s safe to say the code being delivered by the initiative provides a great base for more reliable development of web video players. In fact, the OVP framework is currently being used as the based for Adobe’s own Open Source Media Framework project (previously known as Strobe).
Still, what we find most interesting about the project is the collaboration between Microsoft and Adobe. It’s not an exaggeration to say these two companies have been sworn enemies of rich interactive web development — a battle that has become more apparent with Microsoft’s rapid development of Silverlight. So why would Microsoft partner on a project with Adobe that obviously benefits the latter’s current domination of online video delivery? There’s no way to be absolutely sure.
The simplest explanation could be that Microsoft would like to get in good with Akamai and their expectations for content streaming while their product is still in its early stages of development. After all, even with Silverlight 3’s long list of new features, it’s still no Flash. This would minimize the number of poorly developed, shoddy looking video players built on their platform. That’s one answer, but it doesn’t account for Adobe’s continued participation.
Consider this alternative explanation. If you’re like us, you’ve more than likely heard of W3C’s plans to deliver HTML 5 as the new web standard. With it comes a fancy new video element aimed at freeing web video from the narrow, proprietary world of plugins — something neither Microsoft nor Adobe can be too happy about. With the both of these companies allotting resources for this project, the two stand a much better chance of denying HTML 5 the chance to decouple web video from plugins by creating a more promising and reliable standard outside of HTML 5.
Either way, we’re pretty excited to see where this rare collaboration goes and what it brings to the realm of online video. Want to know more? Brandon handpicked some resources for you below:
