French video portal Dailymotion is ditching the use of proprietary plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight for its "pré bêta" Dailymotion site. Instead, the open video site is exploring the possibilities offered by HTML 5 and the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5.

Rather than using a plug-in, the HTML 5 video player used by the video portal integrates content encoded using open source video codec Ogg Theora via the forthcoming HTML 5 video element. The player itself consists of JavaScript, CSS3, SVG filters and PNGs. To play content from the beta site users are asked to install the pre-release version of the Firefox 3.5 browser, which includes a decoder for Ogg Theora and its audio equivalent Vorbis. Users who visit the site using any other browser are told that viewing videos requires a 'more advanced browser'. The code is currently optimised for the Mozilla browser, but, according to the Dailymotion-blog, they "would be happy to work more closely with developers from WebKit and Opera."

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