[whatwg] on codecs in a 'video' tag.

[Maik Merten]

Dave Singer schrieb:
> At 18:44  +0200 3/04/07, Maik Merten wrote:
>> Personally I don't see a reason why Apple couldn't simply queue an Ogg
>> Theora component provided by a 3rd party into the QuickTime component
> 
> Alas, that wouldn't be Apple then that was complying, merely that we
> make it possible for each end-user to make their browser compliant.

I'd guess that'd be nearly as convenient for the end user. He encounters
content encoded in whatever format, a dialog pops up "I need to download
a codec, sit back and enjoy" and few seconds later the Apple customer
can access the content in whatever format.

I think as we're talking of web video optional codec downloads should
just work as well as hardwiring things. If Apple is willing to accept a
third party component to enable playback of whatever "base format" Opera
and Mozilla are going to use that'd be a good solution for the
interoperability issues. Seeing that Apple accepted the VP3 component in
the past to make Apple customers happy (business reason) I have hopes
that a similiar solution can be found to make sure Apple users can
access web content even if it doesn't happen to use a format QuickTime
supports out-of-the-box. In case of Microsoft I guess they'd prefer
making their user's life difficult over offering non-Microsoft formats
with their download service (did that ever deliver a codec I found
useful? No.), but seeing that
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html lists coding
technologies I never heard of I am optimistic that things can be worked out.

This is vastly off-topic, but is there a formalized way for 3rd parties
to register their qt components and have them in the download service?
If e.g. Xiph.org could negotiate a deal of that sort I'd say the whole
codec discussion would loose its significance (and work can go on the
core functionality of <video>) as no matter what codecs Apple chooses to
deliver by default things would be "interoperable enough" with a simple
"ok, download the codec" from the Safari user.


>> Devices that do play H.264 usually have a H.264-capable DSP - like the
>> Video iPod. That one comes with a Broadcom DSP which is 100%
>> reprogrammable and is well suited for Theora decoding (so I am told).
>> Now, of course that's implementation work, but so is the whole WHATWG
>> spec and I'm sure Broadcom would prefer doing the implementation work
>> over losing customers.
> 
> We're back to giving Broadcom (and others) business reasons to implement
> codecs, yes.

Yes. Business reasons would be the driving force behind that.