Wikipedia Embraces WebM with new HTML5 Video Player

Wikipedia already hosts all sorts of media, text, images and audio, but video presents a unique challenge due to the large size of the content. With help from Kaltura and Google Wikimedia has taken up that challenge and is now introducing a new video new HTML5-based video player.

The older Wikimedia video player only supported Ogg video and has now been superseded by the new video player that also supports WebM, closed captions, and timed text among other benefits. Contributors can submit captions for videos and translate them into many languages, making video accessible to those with disabilities or even those who just don’t understand the language of the original video.

The new TimedMediaHandler extension for MediaWiki brings all these changes, and as expected the extension is open source as well. As such other MediaWiki-based Wiki deployments can use the extension to add similar features to their own Wikis.

To learn more about this announcement you can visit the Wikimedia blog and you can learn more about the extension itself, and download it, from here.