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

[timeless]

On 6/25/07, Spartanicus <mk98762 at gmail.com> wrote:
> My main worry relates to the usability and accessibility of future audio
> and video web content. Content including the wrapping should be free,

you don't quite mean that. if a content producer wants to make pay
content, it should be free to do that too, no? There are huge
industries which drive a large portion of the industrialized world
based on a premise like this.

> Support in clients with a small market share like Opera and Safari is
> imo unlikely to be a significant consideration for content creators when
> deciding which encoding format to use.

Unless they're targetting the mobile market which is basically
dominated by Opera and WebKit (Safari and a Nokia derivative). (I'm
excluding Pocket IE, I've never seen real people actually use it. And
while I know the minimo team, I've never seen normal people use it
either and I don't know of any devices that ship with it, so the
market share there today is effectively 0).

> MS and Mozilla with their ,
> combined ~95% of the market will probably determine what will be used.

Again, this is dependent on the market. In Korea, the market says you
must use IE because of the crypto layer. In the mobile market, the
considerations are different. I can't speak for Nokia any more than
Dave or any of the other Apple employees can speak for Apple, but
shipping ogg is currently not an option. We tabled the ogg discussion
a while ago, this advocacy is a huge waste of electronic bits.

As for codec download urls, they really don't work. If I use iCab
(npapi,macosx,ppc) and get sent to an ActiveX/w32/ia32 codec download
url, it doesn't help me. And unfortunately even having the right
"browser" (e.g. WMP10), when it does "know" the codec from the
"stream" and does know "where to phone home", it can still fail to
find the relevant codec.

Embedding the codec name into html is a non starter, the codec could
change or authors could have no clue and will get it wrong.

> Opera and Safari will probably have to follow suit if they can. If IE
> and Mozilla support a common codec,