In an move designed to kickstart the widespread adoption of Ogg Theora video, the Open Video Alliance, comprised of Mozilla, Kaltura, the Participatory Culture Foundation and the Yale Law School's Information Society Project, has launched the "Let's get video on Wikipedia" campaign

"The proliferation of standards-based video sharing and collaboration is set to take off with a $US100,000 grant from the Mozilla Foundation to fund the development of the Ogg Theora video codec and server-side streaming software.

"...'Ogg' is a wrapper that ties together 'Theora' encoded video and 'Vorbis' encoded sound. Together, Ogg Theora+Vorbis give users a way to see movies on your computer. Ogg Vorbis+Theora are not known to be encumbered by any patents (the only applicable patent on Theora’s predecessor, called 'VP3', was licensed for everyone to use in any way they want).

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.

"It was announced at the Firefox Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So and will support those codecs built into Firefox itself..."

In a move that will boost support for open video on the mobile Web, Google has provided funding to TheorARM—a project that produces an ARM-optimized implementation of the Ogg Theora video codec.

"After several years of development, the first beta release for Ogg Theora 1.0 - a free video codec - is now available. Now all we have to do is to get some content in the Theora format."

the and tags along with native support for Theora video and Vorbis audio are currently enabled in the Firefox nightly builds. This will ship in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 coming later this year. This is not new news but I did want to provide my perspective on why this is important[...] Download a Firefox nightly build here and test it out here or on Wikimedia Commons.

"...Firefox and Opera will support a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in Web pages. [...] If video encoded in Ogg Theora plays directly in the browser..."