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I’ve been working on a small project to bring support for the HTML5 <video> tag to older browsers, hoping to encourage use of this tag.  The idea is to use Flash’s video/mp4 support as a “downlevel” emulator for the video tag.

It uses an HTC binding in IE and an XBL binding in Mozilla to create a flash video in place of the video tag itself. The flash video support is provided by the excellent FlowPlayer, which supports playing mp4 videos out-of-the-box.

Right now, video4all only supports videos that are statically added to your page. I hope to add support for dynamic addition of videos soon. The videos must be encoded in both video/mp4 and video/ogg formats to properly support Firefox, Safari and the Flash fallbacks. You’ll need to ensure that your video sources are properly tagged with the correct MIME types so that the script can pick them up.

The currently released browsers (that I know of) that support <video> are:

  • Firefox 3.5
  • Safari 4
  • iPhone 3.0

This project extends support for <video> to:

  • IE6+
  • Firefox 3.0
  • Safari 2-3
  • Opera (9.x)

For more info, visit the project page.

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