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

[Christian F.K. Schaller]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 09:04 -0700, Dave Singer wrote:
> At 13:26  +0200 27/03/07, Maik Merten wrote:
> >It's good to know that Apple considers interoperability as something
> >important.
> >
> >Of course in case of the iPod the highly proprietary DRM scheme is
> >preventing true interoperability if someone condiders DRM a must for his
> >business needs and Apple's credibility concerning true, termless
> >interoperability sadly is taking some damage there.
> 
> I think we're getting well off topic of HTML here, but a good 
> discussion of the problems here can be found in Steve Jobs' open 
> letter.
> 
> >
> >What matters here in the context of web-video is Apple's commitment to
> >get <video> working on all platforms and all environments (either
> >proprietary or free software or whatever categories there may be).
> 
> We'd really like to get to a good design on this, as the mess of 
> embed/object plug-ins we feel is limiting both functionality and 
> interoperability.

That is a matter of perception. Flash player which is the de-facto
standard at this point provides support on at least linux, windows and
Mac. We do risk that if this element is provided it could replace 
Flash video with something that only supports Windows/Mac like Quicktime
or Windows only like Windows Media. So this could turn out to be a step
backward for interoperability. And I do prefer Adobe as a neutral broker
to be our 'evil overlords' if that is the choice given than someone like
Microsoft or Apple which has a their operating system platforms to push
and thus has an inherent interest to make life hard for Linux and
Solaris users.

But I think this codec discussion isn't a reason to block on the
discussion of how this element should work. I think there are many
common sense decisions that can be made there which are irrelevant to
whether there are a baseline set of codecs and container format defined
in the spec. If the end result is a specification contains requirements
for Vorbis and Theora and Apple choose to not be spec compliant with
Safari or Apple gets support for not including any mention of specific
codecs in the spec is in some ways irrelevant to the discussion of how
these elements should work.

Christian