[theora] HTML 5 drops open-source video codec

[Hannes Hauswedell]

Am Mittwoch, 8. Juli 2009 06:15:21 schrieb Gregory Maxwell:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Yanito Candra<pitulloz at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Link here http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-318208.html
> >
> > Will H264 become web standard in the future?
>
> False dichotomy. In terms of HTML5 standardization H.264 is even worse
> off than Theora is, since encumbered technology is forbidden as a
> matter of W3C policy.
>
> The standard merely recommends nothing now, rather than something specific.
>
> The real question should you be asking "is proprietary flash the
> future of the web?" because everyone being stuck using flash is the
> real risk of not having a just-works-everwhere baseline for the video
> tag.
>
> The headline is also misleading: Theora and Vorbis were removed as a
> recommendation from the HTML5 draft over a year ago now. All the video
> tag adopters so far, except for Apple, have shipped it anyways.
>
> Right now Theora is the #1 codec for video tag adoption, both in terms
> of content provider support and client support, as far as I know.

It all really depends on Google. As http://youtube.com/html5 shows, all major 
video-content the world cares about could soon be available as h264-in-html5. 
And proprietary flash-fallback already exists for that. Also, sooner or later, 
Mozilla would allow Codec-Plugins to not be laughed at.

OTH should google reencode its content to theora, than by summer next year it 
will be de-facto-standard whether or not the W3C recommend it.

Kind of a sad state for billion-people network to depend so strongly on the 
decisions of a single company, but I guess thats the way it is right now. 
Are there plans to create more pressure on Google? What about a compaign? If I 
understood the W3C-discussions correctly, Wikimedia and Mozilla are already 
in, the FSFs (with less lobying power) would definitely be in aswell.
Something a long the lines "Free Youtube" or "Liberate Youtube" or a more 
general "PlayOGG"-Campgain, or "Open Standards Web"...
If Mozilla and wikipedia prominently linked to the compaign, it would sure a 
get a lot of attention.

Regards
Hannes