The Internet Archive Gets a HTML5 Player for Its 500,000 Clips

The Internet Archive may be going old school with its plan to start archiving physical books, but it's still in touch with technology, in fact it's just rolled out a massive update to its video section enabling all of the 500,000 or so videos will be available via a HTML5 player provided by Kaltura.

"The Internet Archive... assets, announced today that it has adopted Kaltura's Video solution to enable its entire digital video library to seamlessly support both HTML5 and Flash in order to provide viewers an optimal online video experience across all browsers and on any portable device," Kaltura said.

"Kaltura's video player automatically identifies whether the device and browser require a Flash or HTML5 player, and delivers the content accordingly," it added in the announcement.

If you're running a modern browser with support for HTML5 video, which pretty much means every one of them, from Internet Explorer to Opera, you will be able to view all of the clips stored by the Internet Archive via the native player rather than the Flash one.

The move also means that the videos are available on mobile devices which don't have Flash support, like the iPhone or the iPad.

Of course, there is still the issue of the codec used, since not all browsers agree on what video codecs can be used for HTML5 video.

Chrome, Opera and Firefox are putting their effort behind WebGL and Ogg Theora, while Microsoft and Apple support H.264, though IE will play files encoded in other formats if the proper codec is installed.

Still, the HTML5 player has some advantages over the Flash one like support for subtitles, enabling more people to watch the videos.

The Internet Archive has over 500,000 videos raging from full length movies to news clips. Most of the content is available via a Creative Commons license and there is plenty of public domain stuff in there as well.