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

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

Hi Jerason,

I think there may be a lack of information about Theora rather than
anything else.

On 6/27/07, Jerason Banes <jbanes at gmail.com> wrote:
> If I may, I'd like to echo Timeless's point here. I've been watching this
> thread with great interest and believe I understand both sides of the issue.
> Theora is appealing because it provides a Free as in no-cost to implement
> and Free as in no-encumbrances solution. However, it also provides a
> solution that nobody uses today. Perhaps even worse, there doesn't seem to
> be a lot of interest in adopting Theora in the future.

It is not true that Theora is not used today. Wikipedia allows it as
the only video codec to publish content in on their site. Archive.org
support it as a format. And just about all video published by
Linux-related conferences is now published in Ogg Theora. Even some
social video hosting sites support it now.

I agree however that it is early days and that there is a lot of
education to be done around Ogg Theora.

> And can you blame web users? Theora provides a solution that's high
> bandwidth and low quality.

What makes you say that? Ogg Theora is comparable to MPEG-2, WMV,
RelPlayer and many other proprietary codecs - the only codec really
outperforming it is H.264.

> If and when the Dirac codec is completed, there will be a viable alternative
> to the non-free video codec problem that might justify the risk/reward
> equation for support.

Yes, Dirac is comparable in quality to H.264, but just hasn't got the
tool support yet that Ogg Theora has. If we are standardising for a
few years down the track, we should indeed consider Ogg Dirac/Vorbis
as an alternative.


Regards,
Silvia.