log.illsley.org

I’ll confess that I’ve been a little sceptical about the Mozilla Popcorn.js effort over the last year or so. Putting twitter feeds beside a video doesn’t feel particularly interesting. The mozillapopcorn.org site says “Popcorn makes video work like the web”, but I haven’t understood what that means until now. It means 2 things. Firstly, a radially different video-on-the-web experience, where content and video are interleaved. Where video insn’t relegated to being a box on the page with a set of controls. Even simple things like being able to add a ticker to the bottom of the video which contains other ‘page’ content allows the video to be given much greater prominence. And secondly, it’s about the ‘view-source’ nature of the web, and extending this to video effects. Popcorn.js isn’t ‘editing’ the video, but applying effects and overlays in a non-destructive way. This makes it possible for people to come along and discover and learn how things were done. It’s early days for much of this, but I now at least understand why there’s so much excitement as it might have a profound impact on the future web.