[Advocacy] Re: This is a sad day for interoperability in the Web

[James Cloos]

While it would’ve been most cool were Adobe to have also added Theora
and Vorbis — and Speex & Flac while we’re at it — to the reference flash
players, we have to face the fact that (as I see it) they added H.264
and HE-AAC because there is a larger demand for those formats right now.

The mainstream consumer camcoder market is in the middle of a move to
264.  Many (all?) current video-enabled cell phones also record in 264.
The demand for sharing 264 video is large and growing.

Sites like youtube can’t help but prefer to accept submitted video w/o
re-encoding it, so they’ll want their viewer to support the same codecs
their users are submitting.  And the *vast* majority of submissions will
always be at most linearly edited clips from a consumer recorder.

A chicken and egg game it might be, but there needs to be much more
Theora video out there before a company like Adobe can be expected to care.

On the plus side, perhaps the Beeb will advocate Dirac well enough to
get it — and Vorbis — into a future version of the reference flash player.

-JimC
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James Cloos <cloos at jhcloos.com>         OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6