They position it as jQuery for video and the little time I’ve had to play with it would certainly support this notion. With the recent announcement from Adobe of their discontinued development of Mobile Flash this comes at a very opportune time. It’s OpenSource and fully extensible with it’s own plugin system (anyone fancy working on VAST support?) which I think will be one of it’s biggest benefits. I’ve got high-hopes for this project, anything that can level the playing field in HTML5 especially in video is to be applauded.

Link: http://mozillapopcorn.org/

This technique uses the open-source ffmpeg package, you don’t really need to know exactly how ffmpeg works suffice to say it’s an extremely powerful command-line application that allows you to work directly on files, but I will try and explain a little of how it works here. This article is intended as a simple guide as to how easily you could amend a file’s attributes, this process for a 15s video will take approx 5s to process which would free up significant time and stop a lot of too-ing/fro-ing between Ops & Creative Agency.

To reduce (or increase) audio levels is a one line command like this:

ffmpeg -i myinputfile.flv -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vol 128 myoutputfile.flv

The above command is saying to the system – “Run ffmpeg using myinputfile.flv as the input file, copy all video and audio streams to the new file but amend the audio levels to be 50% of the original file”. This isn’t as complex as it looks, I’ll explain what this does:

ffmpeg -i myinputfile.flv -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vol 128 myoutputfile.flv
This runs the program and tells it the file you want to convert is called myinputfile.flv (or whatever you’ve called the file), the -i stands for ‘inputfile’.

ffmpeg -i myinputfile.flv -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vol 128 myoutputfile.flv
This part of the command is telling ffmpeg that you want to simply copy the video stream directly top the output file, ie; you don;t want to convert it or treat it in anyway

ffmpeg -i myinputfile.flv -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vol 128 myoutputfile.flv
This is the same as -vcodec but instead is telling ffmpeg that you simply want to copy the audio stream to the new file (don’t worry we’ll work with audio levels next)

ffmpeg -i myinputfile.flv -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vol 128 myoutputfile.flv
The -vol flag sets the output file’s volume relative to the input volume. To copy the audio at the exact same level as the input file you would write:
-vol 256
To set it to 50% of the input file you would put
-vol 128
To Set it at 150% of the input file’s audio levels you would put
-vol 384

ffmpeg -i myinputfile.flv -vcodec copy -acodec copy -vol 128 myoutputfile.flv
Lastly you need to specify the output file’s filename.

ffmpeg is an extremely powerful tool but the learning curve can be steep, however, it is open-source, there are plenty of training and informational resources available and best of all, it’s free.

Related links and tutorials:
http://ffmpeg.org/
http://linuxers.org/tutorial/ffmpeg-tutorial-beginners
http://www.wikihow.com/Use-FFmpeg
http://www.bala-krishna.com/convert-video-files-to-flv-using-ffmpeg-command/
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/ffmpeg-made-easy

Mike Chambers has an additional piece as well from his own testing:
Relative Performance of Rich Media Content across Browsers and Operating Systems (does not ‘perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows’).
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/03/01/relative-performance-of-rich-media-content-across-browsers-and-operating-systems/

This is a bit of an old article, sorry but it managed to not get published when it was supposed to.