[whatwg] on codecs in a 'video' tag.

[Spartanicus]

Maik Merten <maikmerten at gmx.net> wrote:

>Well, too bad there's no royality-free, termless licensing for a
>baseline of H.264. The current terms (
>http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf ) absolutely question the
>suitability of H.264 for free browsers (beer and speech). The licensing
>costs can pile up to considerable amounts (hundred of thousands of
>dollars) if you ship as many browser packages as e.g. Mozilla does.
>That's most likely an unacceptable money bleed for a zero-revenue
>product.

Even if it wasn't, using a commercial codec as the baseline codec may
require people who wish to author content using that format to pay for
the privilege. This is currently the case for mp3 [1]. Although afaik
this isn't currently the case for non commercial usage, the rights
holders can change that at any given moment.

[1] http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/index.html#4

-- 
Spartanicus