The Wikipedia HTML5 Video Sequencer Is Now Available to All

Support for video files on Wikipedia has been "coming" for quite some time now, but, just like most Wikipedia projects, progress has been rather slow. While the platform now fully supports video content, adoption has been slow.

There are plans to raise awareness of the feature and the new HMTL5 web-based video sequencer should be a great help.

The Kaltura HTML5 video sequencer, which enables users to edit video content for any Wikimedia page, is now enabled for all projects and has a become capable enough to make a viable alternative to other lightweight options.

"I am happy to invite the Wikimedia community to try out the latest Kaltura HTML5 video sequencer as part of a Wikimedia/Kaltura Video Labs project that can now be used on Wikimedia Commons with resulting sequences visible on any Wikimedia project," Wikimedia's Michael Dale wrote.

"For those that have been following the efforts, it has been a long road to deliver this sequence editing experience within the open web platform and within the MediaWiki platform," he explained.

The Kaltura HTML5 video sequencer is now fully usable and the latest updates should make it easy for everyone to edit video content for the site.

The editor relies on the latest web open technologies and is entirely based on JavaScript and HTML5. However, some of the most advanced features are rather specialized and are only available in Firefox 4 for now since they tap into specific Mozilla APIs.

The editor should, in theory, work with any HTML5 supporting web browser which, with the launch of the IE9 beta, should be every browser out there. In practice, it works best with Firefox 4.

The use of open formats like OGG further limits the number of browsers with support. The team relies on some low level Firefox features like the ability to encode video in the browser as well as the recently introduced Audio API.

You can find all of the technical details in the blog post. You can also jump right in and start editing video in the browser. Again, this works best in recent Firefox 4 beta builds.