On Mar 22, 2007, at 3:33 AM, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
A fallback without a mandated 'minimum' codec is next to worthless.
Standards
with similar goals of interoperability, like DLNA, have ended up
choosing some
mandated codecs (which are all 'older' codecs) and some optional
higher quality codecs.
A standard which does not mandate any codecs in this area quickly
becomes a joke as
you might easily end up having no two implementations actually be
interoperable.
Even interoperability at the API and markup level would be a huge
step forward relative to the current state of web video. While also
having a single universally implemented codec would also be good,
that may not presently be feasible.
Regarding the specific issue of mobile devices this is a highly
speculative argument.
There is nothing stopping Theora chips from being produced and
since many
'hardware decoders' are actually programmable DSP's this is even
less of an
real argument.
This is true of hardware audio decoders, but not hardware video
decoders, which use dedicated circuit blocks. If Ogg suddenly became
popular it would likely be a several year pipeline before there were
any hardware decoders.
Case in point: my Nokia N800 certainly does not play H264. The
Flash videos that it
can play are not played using hardware decoder support. I don't
know many
hardware players that actually play H264 - I'm guessing the iPod
video is one of the
few, and that player does not support web browsing.
Most Flash video uses on the Sorenson Spark codec which is based on H.
263. This is a much less processor-intensive codec than more modern
options, but also gives worse compression. H.264 has been approved as
one of the codecs for 3GPP so you can expect it to be supported by
mobile devices in the future. Modern hardware decoders these days
support H.263, MPEG-4 Part II, and H.264. These also happen to be the
3GPP codecs.
We are very sympathetic to the desire for interoperability, and we
would really like there to be a codec that every browser can feel
comfortable implementing. But we are not sure such a codec exists at
this time (except for really primitive things, if you want to count
animated GIF or APNG as video codecs).
I am sure that if everyone else starts supporting Theora and Vorbis
then Apple will quickly
start feeling comfortable, it's the way the market works.
Apple doesn't currently support WMV, despite it being a popular
format for video on the web, so I'm not sure that follows.
Regards,
Maciej
