[Xiph-Advocacy] Xiph.Org Statement Regarding the HTML5 Draft and the Ogg Codec Set

[Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves]

Hi Peter,

On 12/13/07, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at stpeter.im> wrote:
> For those of us who are not following the story, could you add a link to
> the relevant W3C WG, protocol draft, or statement? Have they decided to
> favor MPEG over Ogg in some way? Is there a petition we can sign?

This has been a large mess that got bigger when peope started putting
submissions in Slashdot and Reddit.  The WHATWG HTML 5 spec may be
found at [1].  They have removed the explicit mention of Ogg, Theora,
and Vorbis, at least temporarily.  There's a large anti-sentiment
against one of Xiph's codecs, namely Theora, as Apple and Nokia have
showed concern that submarine patents may exist.

The gist of this is:
* No, there's no petition to sign
* WHATWG and associates are looking for a solution to state a baseline
codec with no possible submarine patents, so far with no success
* While Theora is indeed the better solution, an independent entity
say like the W3C needs to run a patent search on it to dispel the
concerns of those two companies
* We seriously need people out there to put out more content in Theora
to make our case stronger.

You may also read more about the story at my post in SOM[2] and
Mozilla's Chris Double's own post[3].

-Ivo

P.S: I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your friend Max.  May he rest in peace.

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/
[2] http://spreadopenmedia.org/2007/12/11/the-html-5-wars-and-why-you-should-avoid-them/
[3] http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2007/12/video-element-and-ogg-theora.html