On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 16:57, Ian Forrester <ian.forres...@bbc.co.uk> wrote:
> "Web video has never really been open, unencumbered and free. We've had Real > Networks RM format, Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media Video (now > standardised as VC-1), the DivX and XviD codecs, and Adobe Flash among > others. There might never be one open standard, simply because some content > owners will want to include DRM (Digital Rights Management) copy restrictions. > > However, the web would benefit from having an open, unencumbered and free > video format that enabled HTML programmers to include a video as easily as > they now include a headline or a photo, wouldn't it? How do we get to that?" Not the way Mozilla is going about it, that's for sure - they're trying to solve all of the problems at once, but without any support from the people who _need_ to support this stuff in order for it to be effective. Without the likes of Microsoft and Apple getting behind Theora and giving it a clean bill of health, patent-wise (and in Apple's case, making use of silicon which decodes it), it's going to go nowhere fast and people will abandon Firefox for Chrome if they want video. The way I suspect this will, eventually, play out is that under pressure from "stakeholders", software *decoders* for H.264 will become exempted from the patent regime by the MPEG-LA. This still leaves the thorny issue of encoders and the sites streaming the content, but that's far less of an issue for the end-user, and another battle for another day. Dirac, as lovely as it is, doesn't have the traction, and doesn't (in its current form) seem to be too well-suited to the vast range of applications that H.264 is used for. In the meantime, though, Firefox is going to get left behind. Some sites will go to the trouble of transcoding to Theora, but mostly they'll just run with H.264 + Flash or QuickTime fallback (which works pretty well in my testing, if done carefully). M. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
