[theora] HTML 5 drops open-source video codec

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 7:35 PM, Hannes
Hauswedell<theora.list at soulrebel.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> 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.

Right now in the W3C, Apple is the one keeping Theora from becoming
baseline codec. If it goes into the standard, YouTube may be keen to
follow - but they don't have to. However, all new sites will likely
deploy in Theora, possibly weakening YouTube's monopoly. I think it
may be easier to get Apple to adopt Theora than to get YouTube to
adopt it - YouTube require a lot more effort to do all that
transcoding!

Cheers,
Silvia.