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.

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.

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.

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.

YouTube and Vimeo is kicking Adobe's Flash to the curb in favor of the sharp new HTML5. Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash.

Over the past few years many different browsers have been created and become very popular for example Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, however, there are many browsers which are generally unheard of among the majority of web users. Here are 5 of them.

Last week, Google announced that it plans to remove support for the H.264 video codec from its browsers, in favor of the WebM codec that they recently made free. Since then, there's been a lot of discussion about how this change will affect the Web going forward, as HTML5 standards like the tag mature.

One week after Google open sourced its $124.6m VP8 video codec, Mozilla and Opera have called for its inclusion in the still-gestating HTML5 specification. As it stands, the HTML5 spec does not specify a video codec. Browser makers are free to use any codec they like, and the big names are split between the patent-backed H.264 and the open source Ogg Theora.

Google and its applications are fast becoming the backbone of the internet. They seem to be solving everyone’s problems with free stuffs. Just when you get happy with something like Firefox, Google comes along and makes a browser that’s fast, super secure and has all kinds of add-ons and themes to personalize it.