[theora] <video src="*.ogg">

[Denver Gingerich]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:38 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fortunately flash itself proves that massive adoption through manual
> client installs is possible.

To be fair, Adobe scored a distribution deal with Microsoft that got
Flash shipped with most versions of Windows XP.  While we don't know
the terms of the deal, I'm betting Adobe didn't get that for free.

I'm not saying we can't get massive Theora decoder adoption, just
saying it's not as easy as it was for Adobe (unless we have a big
corporate backer).

> On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:06 PM, Michael A. Peters <mpeters at mac.com> wrote:
>> Java really is not
>> the best tool for the job. Hopefully basic ogg vorbis/theora comes to
>> flash soon.
>
> I don't think anyone is anticipating formal support from Adobe in the
> flash binary distribution. So, about the best we could expect is a
> flash-vm implementation.

Agreed.  I've pitched Adobe on adding free codec support but there
isn't much interest on their side:

http://ossguy.com/?p=330

Note in particular the comments, where John Dowdell (an Adobe
employee) explains why he doesn't think Adobe should use Theora/Dirac.
 There seem to be two major reasons:

1. perceived lack of quality per bitrate compared with H.264
2. production shops use "H.264 workflows"

I think it's important that we address these issues (yes, I know #1
has been addressed repeatedly and it's hard to do more than we have
already) or at least that we're aware of them.  Also, there is the
perception that a move to Theora is not in the users' or content
producers' best intrest:

"The big desire for consumer support of patent-unencumbered codecs
seems to come from that small minority of toolmakers -- not consumers,
not content creators."

I'm not sure what we can do about this, but it's worth keeping in
mind.  In general, it seems that a lot of pro-proprietary codec people
have an "if it works, use it" approach that doesn't take into
consideration the unintended consequences of such an approach,
including reduced innovation in tools and higher barrier to entry for
video hosting sites and video editor makers.


As others have suggested, Alchemy might be a possibility for getting
Theora support in Flash, but it's very much a beta thing right now and
I don't think any Flash players support it yet.

Denver
http://ossguy.com/