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I wonder how many people watch video in their browser and disable JavaScript. That certainly seems likely to be a tiny minority to me.

Practically speaking, JavaScript is already a requirement to get Flash embedding to work correctly across all browsers without the headache -- hence tools like SWFObject, flashembed.js, etc.

That's mostly because of IE's fault wrapping security thing around normally embedded flash.

It looks like it only needs javascript for the flash fallback, and it wouldn't be too hard to put something in the video tag that would work as fallback for those without either html5 video or javascript.

I think the only reason they didn't show this is because it's extra complexity for something that many people don't care about. For those that do care there's Kroc Camen's "Video for Everybody"

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

As a side, I was struck by the really nice use of the css property 'text-shadow' on that site.