The Video Bay, Now In Beta

poundhard writes "Some two years ago, it was mentioned on TorrentFreak and Slashdot that The Pirate Bay team were working on a YouTube competitor. At the oral proceedings of the Spectrial, I believe it was Peter Sunde, aka Brokep, who said to the prosecutor that it was one of those side projects that failed. A few days ago though, he appeared over Skype at the Open Video Conference in New York, and apparently said that they were about to launch something new. It has been speculated in Norway that it will be the IPREDator. But I checked out The Video Bay, and hey, it is about to go live! This is what they write: 'To stay in the spirit on which TPB was founded and using the Latest Technology, TVB aims to use the new HTML5 features, more specifically the <video> and <audio> tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats. This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly.'"

Comments

The point of the tag? Stupidity?

[Hurricane78]

I have to ask: What is the point of the video> tag, when there is a perfectly good and very flexible tag?
I used that thing back in 2004, to allow me to play back anything that I throw at it, as long as the browser supports it. It worked nicely.
The only thing missing, was that the browser could not overlay HTML over it. Just as with form fields. Which was a bug, and should be fixed.

So those new tags are really pointless.

The only reason I can think of, is to follow the general philosophy of HTML5 (vs. XHTML2), to foster the ability of unprofessionals and idiots to use it, despite their output being riddled with bugs and horrible stuff. Because <object data="some-media-file.ext">, and the ability to define the mime type and interpreter (eg a java app) is too complicated for them.
Do we really want to go back to 1999? With 2009s version of intro Flash movies, marquee elements on extreme texture backgrounds and bad animated gifs?

"The homepages are back! Now with even more pointlessness, horrible code and flashes that make your children twitch!"

Myspace on IE - The Goatse of web design! ;)