[whatwg] Some <video> questions

> [Oliver]  Subsequently you turned it into the well covered topic
> of codecs...

The question was:  As designed, is <video> a cross-browser, cross-platform
solution for exactly one format, which is whatever is decided on as the
freely-implementable and royalty free combination of container and
compressed video and audio formats?

Note that I'm not asking what those container and compressed media formats
might be.  I'm just trying to understand the scope of the problem that
<video> is supposed to solve.

> [James]  Can you explain it again, because I'm not sure I fully
> understand what you're trying to say and I don't seem to be the
> only one.

The <video> element doesn't appear solve the problem of how to embed video
content in a player- and browser- agnostic fashion.

HTML 5 provides an opportunity to normalize how video embedding is done for
most scenarios, making it as easy to embed video as it is an image.  But as
designed, <video> appears to only address an as-yet-undiscovered combination
of container and media formats.

This seems like a missed opportunity at best.  Technically, it doesn't seem
like it'd be difficult to allow various media runtimes to register as
first-class <video> clients.

-- Charles

Received on Tuesday, 29 January 2008 14:47:33 UTC