The GTK port of the WebKit HTML rendering engine has gained support for the HTML5 video element. The media backend, which uses GStreamer, was implemented by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin of Collabora. Developer Alp Toker integrated the backend with GTk/WebKit's Cairo graphics pipeline, making it possible for the video content to be embedded in SVG and manipulated with CSS and JavaScript.

GTK+ 3.2 has been released with two eagerly expected features: experimental support for Wayland and HTML5 "Broadway" backends. The HTML5 "Broadway" backend allows rendering GTK applications in HTML5-capable browsers. That means that you can run Gedit, GIMP and other applications in a web browser (both local and remotely).

YouTube have announced a beta of HTML5 support. These are broadcasting videos in H.264 format for browsers that understand HTML5's tag. The choice of H.264 is perhaps unsurprising, since that's what Apple's iPhone supports natively (and indeed, is how the YouTube mobile application is rendered). This means that other browsers that don't support H.264 won't be able to render content.

"The git repository has multiple branches which means a little more git usage is needed to get at the Ogg (and soon, GStreamer) backends. [...] By default the 'master' branch has a checked out working tree. Building this produces element support without any decoder. One approach to building the Ogg backend is to create a local branch with the commits from the remote branch origin/ogg and build that..."

Since last week's announcement of the YouTube and Vimeo beta versions which use HTML5's element, the Mozilla developers have been defending the fact that Firefox 3.6 cannot play the content on these betas even though it supports HTML5. The reason for the problem is that the HTML5 working groups decided not to specify which video codecs the tag would support.

You've heard all of the advantages that HTML5 brings to your web experience, but how far away are we from enjoying the benefits of HTML5? With several browsers already supporting HTML5 video, I selected Google Chromium which was available for my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop and gave it a try.

"Version 5 of the patch to add Video element support to Firefox is up. This version rewrites a lot of the code to match the pseudocode in the WHATWG specification..."

We're on the verge of a serious evolution on the web. Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology that is a massive resource hog. The answer is the HTML5 video tag

Google will soon make its VP8 video codec open source, we’ve learned from multiple sources. The company is scheduled to officially announce the release at its Google I/O developers conference next month, a source with knowledge of the announcement said.