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

[Dave Singer]

At 19:28  +0200 27/03/07, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
>
>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.

I have a hard time believing what I am reading here.  A new video tag 
cannot 'replace' flash support unless Adobe wishes it.  Apple has 
neither power or desire to stop people implementing the video tag on 
any platform, and indeed the whole point in helping develop open 
standards is tyhat we want there to be broad support and 
interoperability.  In many places, we openly encourage companies to 
implement standards, or we open-source software to make it easy 
(webkit, Darwin Streaming Server, to name but two).  Our interest in 
multi-vendor multimedia standards is deep and long-lasting, 
interoperable, and very open.

Really, conspiracy theories are out of place here, please.

>
>But I think this codec discussion isn't a reason to block on the
>discussion of how this element should work.

I am glad we agree on that!

>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.

Agreed as well.

>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.

Yes.  I re-iterate;  we have nothing aganist the Ogg or Theora 
codecs;  we just don't have a commercial reason to implement them, 
and we'd rather not have the HTML spec. try to force the issue.  It 
just gets ugly (like the 3G exception).
-- 
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime