The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that manages Wikipedia and associated projects, on Thursday launched an official HTML5 video player for its websites. The move is an important one as Wikipedia previously relied on an outdated open-source video file format called Ogg, and couldn’t simply switch to newer formats such as YouTube without losing reliability. As Guillaume Paumier, the Wikimedia Foundation’s technical communications manager explained in a post Thursday:
…even if a video is also hosted elsewhere, Wikimedia sites need their own copy to ensure that the resource remains available even if third-party sites disappear. From a privacy perspective, it also ensures that the users’ personal information is not shared with third-party hosting platforms. The new player also complies with free media licenses by displaying author information at the end of the video, wherever it is embedded
The new HTML5 player also offers new features including closed captioning and annotation and Paumier writes that “further improvements are underway…”
