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.lyshortcut 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.
Discuss this news story, and see some sample videos, in our forum:
http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=94488
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