[whatwg] Video Tag Proposal

On 29/03/2010, at 7:11 AM, Kelly Clowers wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 10:49, Ashley Sheridan <ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote:
>> I was under the impression that Apple were one of the main opposers to using
>> free codecs in-place of their proprietary QuickTime.
> 
> For Theora. They haven't really said much about Vorbis AFAIK. And I think an
> audio codec is less likely to have patent issues than a video codec (especially
> since Vorbis has a lot of high profile use that should have drawn out any patent
> trolls) , and that is what Apple supposedly is worried about.

Apple is at heart a hardware company. My understanding of their objections to OGG have been also largely due to a lack of hardware decoder support in their iPods/iPhones.

>> Also, when was the last time you ever knew Microsoft to go with standarised
>> formats when they can just as easily push one of their own?
> 
> <shug> MS isn't quite who they used to be. They open-source things, and put
> things under the open specification promise, and they seem to be very serious
> about CSS3 and (X)HTML5 standards now. I think there is at least a chance of
> them supporting Vorbis.

IE 9 (though not the platform preview) will support H.264 video in the <video> element:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/16/html5-hardware-accelerated-first-ie9-platform-preview-available-for-developers.aspx

I would be inclined to suggest that MS will implement video playback via DirectShow (theoretically enabling any codec the user has installed), but that's pure speculation on my part.

?Kit Grose

Received on Monday, 29 March 2010 01:41:03 UTC