VideoPress Now Supports HTML 5 Video Playback

This is the moment every VideoPress user has been waiting for. On March 9th, it was announced on the official VideoPress blog that the service now supports the HTML 5 video format.

VideoPress now supports HTML5 < video > playback in supporting browsers without Flash playback support. Low-power devices such as smartphones can now play MP4 (H.264 video, AAC audio) and Ogg (Theora video, Vorbis audio) content natively in the browser. VideoPress also supports Apple’s AirPlay streaming technology to share video between supporting locally networked devices such as iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV. Videos with associated transcripts, such as WordPress TV, include WebVTT < track > data for display by supporting browsers.

This is great news for videos uploaded to the service from now on but unfortunately, it doesn’t look like videos uploaded before March 9th will be able to be viewed by an iPhone since those have already been encoded. (I’ve been informed that the HTML 5 changes only apply to WordPress.com hosted videos and not to the VideoPress plugin for self installed WordPress sites. I hope it comes down the pike though.) It would be cool to see an option to re-encode the videos so that HTML 5 support could be added.