It turned out I had updated my monitor firmware and didn't resent the audio out to the external speakers I have. The audio plays just fine now.

Yes, I am able to view the videos just fine.

There is always Quicktime, but that would require that Windoze users have the free QT plugin.

You could always use Flash as the codec which is cross platform till HTML6 is more thoroughly distributed.

Very cinematic background score on the main video!