Posted by The Blogging Desk on Thu, Mar 17, 2011
IE Blog:
Today IE9 can play HTML5 video in both the industry-standard H.264 format and the newer WebM format. With the WebM Project’s release of WebM Components for IE9 (Preview), Windows customers running IE9 can play WebM videos in Web pages. IE9 is the only browser today committed to supporting both formats directly.
In the newly published Video Format Support demo at the IE Test Drive site, you can try out for yourself Web pages with both video formats on them in different browsers. You can see how Web site authors can adjust the experience on their pages based on the browser and operating system the visitor is using. You can also see the opportunity that HTML5 video offers publishers to make video an integral part of the Web experience, especially when it is fully hardware accelerated.
Internet Explorer is really making strides to become a forward thinking browser when compared to others. While Microsoft could be considered behind the times in other facets of their company, this is a great step to ensure they can compete. WebM is a standard attempting to be popularized by the Google as the official open standard in HTML5 video.
While Google does has a vested interest in its success, Apple does not. Currently, iOS has no support for this video alternative, and presumably has no plans to do so. Those fancy embedded videos that play on your iPhone or iPad are H.264. WebM is Google's answer to H.264 so you'll most likely be hearing much more about it in the near future. Trigon has you covered, don't sweat it.
