[whatwg] Removal of Ogg is *preposterous*

[Geoffrey Sneddon]

On 11 Dec 2007, at 19:04, Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) wrote:

> You are right.  My bad.  Why don't we write in the spec?
>
> "Examples of widely recognized free-for-use audio formats are Ogg  
> Vorbis and
> FLAC"

It was intended as meaning "recognized" in the sense of browsers  
recognising them. No currently shipping browser recognises either Ogg  
Vorbis or FLAC.

> The answer to that question is that Apple and Nokia don't want us to  
> use Ogg
> Vorbis because they sell their own, encumbered tech and we would be  
> less
> likely to license (read: give them monopoly rents) their tech.  The  
> very
> MENTION of Ogg in the spec threatens their monopoly rents, and  
> that's why
> they had it removed.
>
> It's just dollars.

Apple does not license Apple Lossless to anyone else AFAIK, and the  
only standards that MPEG-LA collects money for that Apple receives any  
share of whatsoever is "MPEG-4 Systems" and IEEE 1394 (Firewire).  
Neither of these have anything to do with audio/video codecs. Saying  
that Apple has a financial interest in wanting MPEG codecs mandated in  
HTML 5 is totally untrue.


--
Geoffrey Sneddon
<http://gsnedders.com/>