Adobe announces HTML5 Video Player widget

Adobe's Dreamweaver Team Blog today broke the news that they've created an HTML5 Video Player widget which generates code to play video in the best player for a specific platform using a variety of video codecs.

The widget is available through the Adobe Widget Browser and works with or without Dreamweaver CS5. It is based on the Kaltura open source library, and is compatible with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

The team blog noted that HTML5's <video> tag has limited browser support at this time, forcing web designers to "scramble for a solution" that would work regardless of browser or platform. The widget shifts from the <video> tag to Flash Player when the tag is not supported, and does this regardless of the device on which video is being watched.

The standalone widget can run from directly inside Dreamweaver or as a standalone app using Adobe AIR.

Hat tip to our old friend David Chartier.