We've discussed the arcane notion that Flash might be a problem...and that an open source video codec might allow more innovation for editing tools, web presentation/interaction, and mobile devices.
Looks like Google is officially diving into this idea: http://www.osnews.com/story/23135/Google_Puts_Weight_Behind_Theora_on_Mobile Remember that Google bought ON2 last year...the company who open sourced the Theora codec. If Google open sources ON2's latest version, it could really rival H264. The fact that Google is putting money behind Theora is huge. Video can be as free as the word. After praising Theora's quality and compression levels, Google states in no uncertain terms that Thoera is patent free. "The overwhelming feature that makes it stand out from its rivals is the fact it's free," the company writes, "Really free. Not just 'free to use in decoders', or 'free to use if you agree to this complicated license agreement', but really, honestly, genuinely, 100% free. The specification for the stream and encoder/decoder source is available for public download and can be freely used/modified by anyone. Theora was designed and is maintained with the overriding goal of avoiding patents. No other codec can come even close to claiming to be as patent or royalty free as Theora can, whilst still holding a candle to the alternatives." Jay -- http://ryanishungry.com http://twitter.com/jaydedman 917 371 6790 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
