Re: Codecs for <video> and <audio>

On Jul 2, 2009, at 6:27 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Maciej Stachowiak<mjs@apple.com>  
> wrote:
>> - has off-the-shelf decoder hardware chips available
>
> Given that this is a requirement that simply isn't satisfiable, I
> don't think it's a reasonable requirement.

There are audio and video codecs that have off-the-shelf decoder  
hardware available, so the requirement is definitely possible to  
satisfy. As it happens, I don't think any video codec satisfying this  
requirement also satisfies all the other requirements. I don't see why  
this is the requirement that should be dropped. I understand that it's  
less important to Mozilla than some of the other requirements, so that  
Mozilla is willing to go with a codec that doesn't satisfy it. But for  
other parties this requirement represents large amounts of money at  
stake. For Mozilla, enabling royalty-free downstream distribution of  
Firefox and guaranteeing royalty-free authorability of Web content are  
important priorities. I believe these are the primary reasons H.264 is  
a nonstarter for Mozilla currently. For Apple (and I imagine other  
vendors), ability to deliver a high-quality experience on mobile  
devices at reasonable cost is a high priority. Even considering the  
goals of the W3C as a whole, I don't see a principled reason to  
override either of these requirements.

>
>> - is used widely enough to justify the extra patent exposure
>
> Why is this a requirement for video decoding, but not for the multiple
> other technologies that exist in HTML 5 (or any other W3C spec)?

I don't think anyone is concerned about risk of additional patent  
exposure from other HTML5 technologies, to the point that this is a  
showstopper for implementing.

Regards,
Maciej