HTML 5 Drops Open-source Video Codec

Sunday, 05 July 2009 22:32 ZDNet

Article Source ZDNet News
July 6, 2009, 6:32 am

HTML 5 will no longer specify Ogg Theora as its video codec, the Google employee who maintains the burgeoning web-coding standard has announced.

Ian Hickson wrote on Monday that he was reluctantly dropping the open standard due to opposition from Apple, and said the rival H.264 codec could also not be specified due to opposition from other browser vendors. This means HTML 5 will not specify a single codec for web development...

ZDNet

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written by Christopher Howard, July 06, 2009

Chalk up one victory for Apple, one defeat for freedom.

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written by midnitte, July 06, 2009

Well I suppose H.264 not being specified is also a victory... its quite ironic that apple opposed ogg considering webkit is open source...

sat
written by Dev Khadka, July 06, 2009

ohh its very frustrating that all the browser vendors couldn't came to some midpoint agreement.
I suppose this issue will settle down soon.

The patent war goes on...
written by Gergely Máté, July 07, 2009

An open codec is a good thing.

I heard that the new Firefox 3.5 supports OGG out of the box. Maybe creating many websites with embedded OGG media could make a change... Standards often just follow what people already established.

If the world's 10 most important websites embed OGG videos, the standards will surely adapt...

Just put out OGG on your websites, and leave the rest to the future!

(You can do it with an open source applet if you intend to support unfriendly browsers, see this link about Cortado.)