What's the status of the HTML 5 <video>

Question

Even though it seems to be in some kind of jeopardy, the open video standard is a great idea. I saw some demos on motion tracking with it - just proofs-of-concept, but interesting nonetheless. Now, I'd say that concepts like these would really be a gain, if there would be access to the user's webcam... Just imagine browsing through Flickr with your hands in mid-air.

I have Googled a little, but I can't find any detailed discussion on the subject. It is mentioned in some places, but that doesn't get me very far. Does anybody know whether support for this is planned? If yes, any prognosis on the 'when'? ;-)

Of course, I guess they'd have to dream up a pretty good security model for it..

Answer 1

It will never be possible because it is the last use of plugins which open web standards cannot accomplish. The day streaming audio/video from client to server will be the end of flash/silverlight/what have you. Also there is software patents issue which will make it impossible to encode media if current state of affairs on decoding means anything. There are just too many obstacles before privacy or technical issues. Flash has been doing it for years without anybody whinning about any privacy problems. Geolocation is potentially more dangerous but nobody thinks twice considering its rich possibilities. The closest thing you can get is a webcam with MJPEG stream that is wrapped in multipart-replace and using canvas API to get the image pixels.