Gervase Markham wrote:
Elliotte Harold wrote:
I'm just not sure that I see a strong enough use case here to justify
the introduction of another element most browsers will not support
for years if ever.
I think there's a strong driver for uptake. As I understand it, all
these video-sharing sites are paying mountains of cash to
Adobe/Macromedia for the backend software licences to support Flash
video streaming. If they could have 15 or 20% fewer servers doing
that, and stream to Firefox using Theora instead, the cost saving
would be an incentive for them to change their site.
I believe the fact that the format is open and patent free is also a
good driver.
I am thinking about sites like wikipedia here. They are already good
ambassadors for SVG and Theora (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_Use_Policy#Format )
And there is actually Theora content out there in the wild! (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_15 )
And it seems like the wikipedians are looking for technical solutions to
play sounds and movie clips in their articles (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia#Software_features )
We need to be 100% sure that the format is patent free (no more GIF). I
could have one concern about the Theora licensing. I am not sure what
this 'promise' not to enforce patents is worth legally (
http://www.theora.org/svn.html ). The statement is for example very
focused on the on2 company. What happens if they go bankrupt or decide
sell their patents? Open source licensed patents like BBC/Dirac would
let me sleep a bit better i think. Especially since on2 is also behind
the decoder for flash movies ( http://www.on2.com/ ) - this could
possibly lead to conflicts of interests and nastiness.
Like some previous posters I also think that only a few formats (or
even just one) should be supported by the <video> tag. I specifically
think that we should let the proprietary formats live on in the <object>
world. But it may be difficult to prevent proprietary formats to slip
over to <video>.
/Magnus
- Re: [whatwg] <video> element proposal Magnus Gasslander
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