French video portal Dailymotion is ditching the use of proprietary plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight for its "pré bêta" Dailymotion site. Instead, the open video site is exploring the possibilities offered by HTML 5 and the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5.

"Dailymotion is excited to launch a new R&D platform dedicated to free video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com. You don’t need the Adobe Flash plugin to watch videos on this platform - the only requirement is the latest version of Firefox, 3.5 beta, available here..."

For the first time to my knowledge, a conference highlights the convergence between free software and GMO, between software patents and patents on life... -- FSF: http://www.fsf.org/events/paris20080223 -- dailymotion: http://www.dailymotion.com/lucos/video/7661235

ClipGrab is a free GUI Video downloader from the famous online video sharing websites like youtube, veoh, Dailymotion, MyVideo and many other. ClipGrab is very simple (basically just one window to work on). Clipgrab downloads the file and saves it by default to FLV (Flash Video) however can convert the downloaded video on the fly to Windows Video (WMV), MPEG4, MP3 (Audio), OGG Vorbis (Audio).

HTML 5's support of using the Ogg Theora video format in the upcoming tag looked really promising for innovation in the web video area, but not everyone agrees on the new spec.

"...Mozilla, the makers of Firefox and Opera are now working on creating a specification for embedding videos on video sites. The work also includes development and promotion of the open source video format Ogg Theora. The video encoded in Ogg Theora will be directly playable in web browsers thereby freeing users of the hassle of downloading all the three thousand foru hundred and ninety seven plugins. Ok, I exaggerated, but you got the point..."

DamnVid is a cross-platform application to download and convert videos from your hard drive or from dozens of video sharing websites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Veoh, Metacafe, etc. Basically, it's a video downloader and converter that sucks less.

Streaming video websites like YouTube face growing pressure from consumers to provide support for native standards-based Web video playback. The HTML5 video element provides the necessary functionality to build robust Web media players without having to depend on proprietary plugins, but the browser vendors have not been able to build a consensus around a video codec.

clive is an open source command line tool to extract videos and to bypass the need to use Adobe Flash in order to view user-generated content available on video-sharing websites. Clive supports Youtube, GoogleVideo, Dailymotion, metacafe, Guba, Sevenload, Myvideo. Clive converts the downloaded Flash Video into a MP4 file avoiding the need of having a Flash Video Player.