[Advocacy] Bundle minmal ogg vorbis/theora player with firefox

[Richard Spindler]

Hi,

i sent the following message to the mozilla.wishlist newsgroup at
mozilla.org, what do you think of this idea?

-------- forwarded message --------
From: Richard Spindler <oracle at propirate.net>
Topic: Bundle minmal ogg vorbis/theora player with firefox
Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:37:19 +0200
Newsgroups: mozilla.wishlist

Hi,

I have the following problem, well it's not a problem but ...

I am developing a free, open-source video editor, and I'm thinking about
how to provide an export format, that would enable the user to easily
publish video content on the web.

This is no problem so far, because there are plenty of formats available
that work. However, formats like mpeg2, mp3 and others require royalties
whenever used commercially which severely limits the availability of my
app for commercial linux-distributions, who are often unwilling to
package the required libraries. This is because of legal issues and
stuff.

There are however royalty-free and opensource codecs like ogg vorbis
+theora from xiph.org. These provide an excellent alternative. But
unfortunately they are not too wide spread, must users won't have the
necessary software on their PC to watch the content without additional
Downloads.

This is why I'd propose to add a minimal ogg vorbis/theora video and
audio player to the firefox package. This would ensure that every user
that runs firefox also has the appropriate software an his machine to
watch web-videos without additional software, and it would hopefully
increase the awareness for free multimedia formats.


Hope you like that idea.

-Richard