As some of you all know, I'm been working for a couple years on a project called Air Mozilla. The goal of Air Mozilla was to build on some of what we did with the Firefox 1.0 event and streaming audio and live chat. In 2007, we launched our first streaming video event, Air Mozilla Live, an Interview with Mitchell Baker. That became a regular happening and we produced dozens of live video programs with people from all over the Mozilla project. Then, last year I added our project wide Mozilla Status Meetings to the Air Mozilla schedule.
But with Firefox 3.1 in beta testing, with native Theora video support and the very cool new HTML 5 <video> element, it didn't seem like the best thing to continue streaming our Air Mozilla broadcasts using a Flash-based system. Not only would we be missing the opportunity to test our new features ;-) but we'd be missing the chance to start advocating for a better way, an Open Video way.
It's still very early and the site is just a draft, but I figured I'd announce it sooner rather than later and encourage all of you to take a look at the new Firefox-powered Air Mozilla. The next scheduled live event will be Monday's Mozilla Status Meeting, but I'm also lining up some new interview shows and hopefully some more Mozilla Labs discussions. Until then, you can watch recordings of several of the previous live events.
You'll need Firefox 3.1 beta or newer to play these videos (or a separate client like VLC.) There's still a lot of design work to be done -- this is just the draft to test out the basic functionality, but I'm interested in your feedback.
And for the curious, my set-up is pretty simple. I'm Theora encoding DV from a Panasonic AG-DVX100B on my MBP, pushing that to an IceCast server, and then using the <video> tag to display it on the page. The recordings are from the live stream and could have been somewhat better quality if I wasn't trying to live stream them :-)
