RE: Mandated Video Format

On Fri, 2007-04-06 at 01:29 +0200, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> Chris Wilson wrote:
> 
>  > > We would personally prefer the MPEG-4 family of codecs (AAC, MPEG-4
>  > > Part II, H.264) to be a common baseline.
>     
>  > > We don't think it's appropriate to mandate it in the spec, though
> 
>  > Yeah, what he said.  :)
> 
> Let me take a different view. 
> 
> I will argue that (a) having a universally understood baseline video
> format is a good thing for the web; (b) that in order to achieve this,
> the specifications must mandate it; and (c) that MPEG-4/H.264 isn't
> it.

Your argument makes a good case for a standardization effort.
If there are two other member organizations that support it,
that's sufficient to start an incubator group.
  http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/

By making your argument here, you're asking me chair a discussion
of which video codec is right for the web. I'm nearly overwhelmed
by the breadth of the discussion topics already in our scope
without adding this one.
http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html#scope

If there were consensus to add this to our charter, I would consider
putting together a proposal to the W3C membership to do so.
But opinions are clearly divided, so I suggest we leave it
out of scope for this Working Group.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E