Zardon

The first big scoop for HTML 5 video embedding functionality has appeared in the shape of a front end to YouTube which allows the end user to stream video without the need for Adobe's Flash Player.

NeoSmart Technologies has gone live with a new front end for Google's mega popular video sharing site which streams the MP4 - stored by YouTube for streaming video to Apples iPhone and Ipod Touch systems which currently lack a natively coded Flash Player.

Any HTML 5 browser in theory should work fine with the video tag used by NeoSmart's front end but Firefox for instance will need an Mp4 decoder before playback will display correctly. This is because of restrictive licensing issues on the MP4 codec which Mozilla choose not to deal with.

Once Firefox is configured properly to play MP4 files (or you use Opera which is HTML 5 compliant) the setup works well - you enter the URL of a Youtube video to get an HTML 5 video container returns with full options for media control, such as play, stop, rewind etc.

Allan Campbell: Heaven Media