[whatwg] The issue of interoperability of the <video> element

[Nicholas Shanks]

I don't quite get some of the arguments in the thread.
Browsers don't (and shouldn't) include their own av decoders anyway.
Codec support is an operating system issue, and any browser installed  
on my computer supports exactly the same set of codecs, which are the  
ones made available via the OS (QuickTime APIs in my case, Windows  
Media APIs on Bill's platform, and from the sounds of it, libavcodec  
on the Penguin)

So Mozilla and Opera wouldn't need to license MPEG to get MPEG  
support, they would either get it if the user had an MPEG codec  
installed, or they wouldn't. And that would be no different from IE  
or the user's other browsers, so they wouldn't be at a disadvantage.

If a browser implemented it's own codecs, they would almost certainly  
be slower and more buggy than the ones that exist on the system already.

WRT Apple and Ogg Theora: Iagree that given the high risk-to-reward  
cost of Theora to Apple, it's their right not to ship it, but it  
would be most consumer unfriendly not to link to xiph.org when a  
theora video is first encountered. And this link should probably be a  
redirect via the apple.com domain so that they can intercept and  
change the path if the destination changes. Hard-coding URLs for  
codecs into either the HTML or the shipping software is a bad idea.

- Nicholas.


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