[theora] Safari 4 Plays Theora/Vorbis

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Michael Dale<mdale at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Sounds good.  Yea I think apple could be converted... Its important that
> we campaign around supporting free codecs ... if everyone has a
> fall-back to h264/mp4 then apple will see little need to ship support.
> (yes I am aware that I run the metavid.org site with flash fall-back but
> this was setup in a pre-firefox 3.5 environment we are looking at
> drooping or de-prefacing flash fall-back where high quality ogg
> solutions are simple to install and run)
>
> Perhaps the petition could include IE / Microsoft at the same time.
>
> Although all of this may be somewhat of a waste of time since
> politically it make little sense for Apple or Microsoft to help
> accelerate the decline of their platforms.

Microsoft has already lost the web multimedia format wars.
Sliverlight may do them some good, but not for basic video playback.

Adopting open multimedia formats for the web would be an opportunity
to gain goodwill at the same time as salting some of the earth they
haven't been able to win themselves. Unfortunately we don't seem to
have anyone's attention over there.

I wouldn't hold my breath with Apple: Their rejection of open and
unencumbered multimedia formats has a long history.  For this reasons
it is important that XiphQT be made as sold and as easy as possible.
Right now the installation process is somewhat convoluted.  Once the
install process is completely painless it'll will be easier to
convince site operators to adopt "Nag the user to install XiphQT" as a
'fallback'" rather than "fall back to flash".

(And don't knock nagging the user as a fallback. Thats how flash got
to where it is… Though flash is an unusually painless and small
download)