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

[Maik Merten]

Nicholas Shanks schrieb:
> 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)

Browsers should ship with their own decoders (at least one set) because
depending on what platform you are the choice of codecs that are
installed varies greatly and as a content producer you have no idea what
the clients can decode in that scenario. If IE supports WMV, Safari
supports MPEG4 and Opera and Mozilla support Ogg out of the box you can
at least be somewhat sure that if you provide content in those 3 formats
your visitors will almost certainly be able to access the content (and
that's a worst case scenario where interoperability is pretty poor).

Browsers don't rely on the OS to decode JPEG or PNG or GIF either - I
assume that's driven by similiar reasons.

Hooking into the media frameworks of the various platforms may be a good
idea despite of this, albeit that may mean that on one platform e.g.
Firefox can decode WMV while it can't on some other (and in this case
content providers may choose to not provide content in alternative
formats because "Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows cover 95% of
potential customers and they all can do WMV" - that could grow to an
unfortunate situation where actually "improving" interoperability with
one media system slams the door for Linux and MacOS users).


Maik Merten