[whatwg] codecs and containers

[Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves]

On 12/10/07, James Justin Harrell <herorev at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Matroska is produced by an effort focused solely on producing a container
> format, while Xiph was
> more concerned with the codecs. Ogg's purpose was to contain Theora and
> Vorbis, quickly, while
> Matroska is a powerful general-purpose media container that is built to
> last.

Those are fairly big words by someone who seems to have no idea what
they're talking about.

Xiph's Board Director, Christopher Montgomery, started the development
of the Ogg container prior to the creation of Vorbis.  Ogg is highly
scalable and able to contain any kind of data, including executable
and scrippted applications, digital signatures, DRM, and anything else
you may want to throw at it including, of course, basic video and
audio streams like the web requires.

> Most importantly, Matroska is
> already a much more popular container format for video than Ogg.

Do you mean perhaps in pirate releases of Japanese anime coupled with
patented video technology?  Yeah, I'll give you that.  Otherwise, no.
You will find more legal Ogg video on the web than Matroska video.
Look into Wikimedia Commons or the Creative Commons databases for
statistics.

> Are user agents
> supposed to come with
> support out of the box, or could they satisfy this recommendation with a
> mechanism that
> automatically finds, downloads, and installs the appropriate codec when
> first needed?

I believe that is up to the user-agent vendors.  So far, however,
Opera and Firefox are building native support while Konqueror relies
on existing system libraries.

-Ivo