Vid.ly: Universal Video Linker

[admin]

With Google's recent decision to drop H.264 support for Chrome, viewing videos online could be about to get even more confusion, as a mixture of Flash, HTML5, H.264, WebM and Theora of various profiles and encoding types means that it's harder and harder to link to a video that simply works (almost) everywhere.

In comes Vid.ly, a new service from encoding.com that aims to solve this problem. By entering the URL of an existing video, you can get a Vid.ly shortcut that links to your source video, and the Vid.ly servers will do their magic ("transcoding" being the more technical term), and present you with video links that will work on any browsers, HTML5 or otherwise, and even on a variety of mobile platforms such as Blackberry, the iPhone and Android.

It's a free service, currently in beta testing at the moment, but it aims to make compatibility problems a thing of the past.

You can try it for yourself at Vid.ly, using the invite code HNY2011.

More:

http://blog.encoding.com/?p=764

[admin]

I tested this service with a 1080p HD video source (Transformers: Dark of the Moon trailer, download here), and the service does work, didn't take too long, and the quality is pretty good (for a web video, although the way the service works, it depends on which browser you use, since it will use a format that's native to each browser, eg. H.264 for IE, OGV for Firefox, etc...). Here's it is (in embed form):

Here's the link (http://vid.ly/2p7c4m) in QR code form, for mobiles:



Confirmed to work on Android (but only using default browser, not Opera)