Hey brain,

We are developing a video-training / instructional video "library institute" that liberally rips off khanacademy, except rather we want to host our videos instead of streaming it with a third-party. This is a simultaneous effort with the instruction and reference librarians to wean video production from flash but still have features like, ah, tables of contents, TimeJump, testing, and so on.

There is a pretty large group who make tutorials and stuff for the library / university, so I'm trying to keep the HTML5 video process for them as simple as possible by automating a lot of it, but they are having to convert their videos to OGG, export SRT files for captions, and enter the timestamp anywhere they want a table of contents (like, "Section Title: 1m23s").

So I'm already feeling guilty about laying it on, until one of the stakeholders of the project who is writing up format-conversion tutorials asked if before we really get started we should add a third format - WebM.

What do you think?

I feel like between mp4 and ogg I'm hitting all the browsers. I can see the benefit of serving WebM and OGG to keep everything open, but they use tools like Camtasia and Captivate which pump out MP4 natively. Is either Ogg or WebM on its way out? Should I just say, "uh, yeah, might as well throw WebM in there."

I appreciate your insight  : ),

Michael Schofield(@nova.edu) | Web Services Librarian | (954) 262-4536
Alvin Sherman Library, Research, and Information Technology Center

www.ns4lib.com