[theora] bad news: IE9 with HTML5+h264

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 20:57, Michael A. Peters <mpeters at mac.com> wrote:
> 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.

Video using GStreamer on Mac is available now, see e.g.
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/03/12/new-mac-snapshot

> 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.

I haven't tried the Fluendo plugins (because I don't have them), but I
once tried on a system with -ffmpeg -bad and -ugly and that worked.
Not very well tested though.

> 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?

My guess is that they use Media Foundation, for which there is no Ogg
decoders in development that I'm aware of.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt