The Internet Archive’s entire stash of digital videos — that’s more than 500,000 assets — now supports HTML5 as well as Flash.
The Archive, which is best known for hosting older versions of websites, is using technology from open-source video company Kaltura to get the job done.
The Kaltura video player automatically recognizes whether a user’s device and browser need a Flash or an HTML5 player. Then, the video content gets delivered accordingly.
The Wikimedia Foundation is also using Kaltura’s tools in a related project.
The Internet Archive’s video library contains more than 500,000 educational assets, most of which are under Creative Commons licenses. These assets will now be more accessible, particularly on mobile devices, including iOS devices, as well as on HTML5-supporting browsers.
And because Kaltura’s technology supports the HTML5 standard for timed text such as subtitles, hearing-impaired and multilingual users will also benefit from the videos.
“As the leading open source video company, our goal is to enable advanced online video functionalities on any device using free and open standards and technologies,” said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura’s chairman and CEO, in a release Wednesday morning. “Our mission is even more so inspiring and impactful where free educational content is also coupled with these tools, as is the case with the Internet Archive and the Wikimedia Foundation.”
Image courtesy of Flickr, mdurwin
More About: foss, HTML5, internet archive, kaltura, open source, video
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