[theora] bad news: IE9 with HTML5+h264

[Michael A. Peters]

Hannes wrote:
> Am Donnerstag 18 März 2010 09:00:55 schrieb narendra sisodiya:
>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 1:22 PM, dos386 <dos386 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> An IE9-Preview has been shown[1], with HTML5-Support for h264,
>>>> mp3 +
>>> aac. No Ogg-Codecs
>>>
>>> Exactly as expected :-( How long will it take until FireFox and
>>> Opera add H264+MP5+AAC ???
>> It depends on patent expiration !
> 
> I don't think it does. If Google doesn't do some VP8-magic very soon, 
> html5+h264 will replace Flash on major sites in the next year.
> 
> Mozilla will add a plugin-system to their browser that allows adding 
> h264 manually or they will lose market share. Opera already uses system-
> gstreamer on unix IIRC. Also for the big-market of mobile devices it 
> should be noted that many hardware vendors have h264-licenses so Opera 
> could maybe even use those.

Opera is using GStreamer on Windows too. Unless they have come out with 
a developer release since I last looked, MacOS X doesn't use GStreamer 
*yet* but they are working on it. I believe Opera bundles a minimalist 
GStreamer for the development version of Windows and probably will for 
OS X as well. How easy it will be to install plugins into the bundled 
GStreamer I do not know, I only personally care about Linux.

In my own tests of Linux development Opera with GStreamer and the 
fluendo plugins, mp3 worked as well as ogg but h.264 did not work. But 
it was a development release so it's not ready. I did not try with the 
"bad" or "ugly" gstreamer plugin support for h.264, only fluendo codec 
package.

IMHO Mozilla should go the GStreamer route. Not because it needs support 
for H.264 but because GStreamer is open source and adding support for 
any new media codecs should be as easy as installing a GStreamer plugin. 
But it is their decision, not mine.

I'm glad to see IE 9 is at least somewhat embracing HTML 5 now. I 
presume that when IE 9 is released, Ogg plugins could be installed into 
Windows Media Player or Silverlight or whatever their media backend is 
called to give IE Ogg support the same way you can do it with QuickTime 
for Safari?