[Vorbis] Re: [theora] This is a sad day for interoperability in the Web

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/23/07, dan at riga.lv <dan at riga.lv> wrote:
> Flash is proprietary itself, so there ain't no difference whenever the video
> formats it supports are proprietary or not.

Er. Sure there is.

As far as I know, The Adobe implementation of flash is proprietary,
but flash itself has a free and legal (with the exception of the
codecs) reimplementation (gnash).

Even ignoring that: If Flash supported a non-proprietary codec it
would be trivial for sites to offer multiple (autodetected) player
options.

For example if flash supported Ogg/Theora+Vorbis, and a user had flash
a site could play the file using flash. If a user did not have flash
but had Java it could play the file using Cortado. If it didn't have
any plugin stuff but had HTML5 video support, it could just play the
file directly.

Without support for a free format in Flash, a site is forced to choose
between supporting 90% (with Flash) and pay the codec licensing fees,
or ~60% (with Java) and avoid them.

A site could pay the licensing fees and support both if they undertook
the costly effort to maintain two copies of every file. ... but
apparently the extra 3-4% or so of the possible viewers (without Flash
but with Java) isn't worth the cost and complexity of having two
copies of every file.

It's not like Adobe hasn't been asked for support for free codecs in
Flash, including a request from a very high profile site or two...

I don't actually see this as much of a problem as Ivo does:

Sites are using flash for video today because it's what works for the
largest audience. Full stop. Those who use flash for video generally
aren't making use of anything else in Flash. If browsers had the
support for the <video/> tag already sites would not be using flash.

Many sites would rather be able to avoid the codec licensing fees and
complications as well as the proprietary video formats.  Adobe is
unwilling to meet, or is contractually barred from meeting, this
demand. As a result, once browser integrated free codec support gives
free codecs as much reach as Flash, we'll see flash fall out of favor.

Perhaps Adobe will be able to hold on to the web-video-playback market
by integrating DRM type technologies into Flash which the integrated
support will be unable to match. I'm not sure what the impact of that
would be.