[theora] Update on HTML5 video support in browsers and websites

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 6:56 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, we discussed these issues on irc yesterday.
>
> I think somebody has already pointed Google at ffmpeg2theora so as to
> create higher quality Ogg Theora files. Same goes for Dailymotion, who
> initially used ffmpeg for encoding.
>
> There is also a rumour that Chrome is getting Ogg support as we speak
> - some commits on the chromium developer list indicate this.
[snip]

Chrome's been working on adding video support via February.

Unfortunately they are accomplishing it by linking FFmpeg. I say
unfortunately because ffmpeg is currently a particularly poor choice
for theora decode support.

FFmpeg has a built in Theora decoder which is not full spec, it's also
very slow compared to libtheora.  Fortunately we've managed to trap a
ffmpeg community member in #theora and he has been fixing a few
things, so at least the worst of the long standing compliance bugs
should go away once he gets his code in and once chrome resyncs their
fork with the upstream.  Chrome's use of ffmpeg also makes things like
support for Ogg/Kate subtitles more difficult (firefox doesn't do kate
yet either but there is a patch) and may also have the same effect for
other unencumbered codecs (My impression is that post 3.5 firefox will
also ship flac, speex, and dirac).