Adobe Strikes Back With Flash/HTML 5 Hybrid Widget

Adobe announced Thursday the release of HTML 5 Video Player, a widget that Web developers can embed that will use HTML5 to playback video when it is supported, but then use Flash Player when the video is being viewed in a browser or device that doesn’t support it (i.e. some non-iOS mobile devices).

“Limited browser support for the HTML5 <video> tag has forced web designers to scramble for a solution that would work across platforms as well as browsers,” Adobe wrote in a blog entry. “To help customers overcome these challenges, Adobe has released an easy-to-use, totally CSS-customizable solution that shifts gracefully from the HTML5 <video> tag to the Flash Player when the tag is not supported.”

The widget is designed to allow developers to offer video and have the player look the same whether they are viewing it on an iOS device, a computer that supports Flash, or one of the Android devices that supports Flash.

It is customizable with CSS, and it can be used with or without CS5 Dreamweaver. Adobe also said it was fully cross-browser compatible with support for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

The widget was built with the use of a subset of Kaltura open source library. The folks at Kaltura posted an announcement through their blog that includes some technical info about the widget.

Adobe Flash

Adobe Flash