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

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On 3/30/07, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Gervase Markham wrote:
> > Dave Singer wrote:
> > >
> > > No, writing it into the HTML specification is not a commercial reason.
> >
> > Assuming you have commercial reasons for supporting HTML 5 (which I
> > suspect you do, otherwise you wouldn't be here) then having Ogg
> > specified gives you a commercial reason to support it.
> >
> > If that's not a commercial reason, then what would be a commercial
> > reason? If everyone else implemented it?
>
> A _commercial_ reason would be "our customers demand it". Customers in
> this case would be users, and users would demand it if a big video site
> started using Ogg Theora.

You'd be surprised at the number of people coming to the Xiph
community and asking for Ogg Theora support for their Mac. Fortunately
there's XiphQT. Similarly for Windows - and again, fortunately there's
OggCodecs.

Not everyone knows what happens when they go to a video site and are
unable to play the video. Your ordinary consumer will just shrug and
go away. A free codec without any marketing and sales behind it will
never cause the same sort of customer demand as when there's
marketing.

In any case... this discussion is slowly going off topic...

Regards,
Silvia.