Video & audio

Until recently, there have been no standards to show video on the web, so a plugin like Flash was needed to play them. Although Flash has been broadly used, there are some devices like iPad or iPhone that do not support it. Battles between companies like Adobe and Apple remind us of the importance of having standards on the web. That is why HTML5 has the Video label, which is a standard way to show video in a web page.

Anyway, we cannot yet say that the problem has been completely solved, as the big companies composing the W3C, like Apple, Google Mozilla, are trying to impose their own video formats as the standard. The problem comes when these formats are not open. For example, even though h264 is the most used format, it is not open, and it would create problems in the future if they decide to charge for its use.

So for now, if we want to enjoy HTML5 videos in the web, we will need to install extensions in our web-browsers to allow us to play as much video formats as possible. Here is a table with the video formats that the main web-browser supports.