[whatwg] Codecs (was Re: Apple Proposal for Timed Media Elements)

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Mar 22, 2007, at 1:29 AM, Martin Atkins wrote:

> However, as others have pointed out, MIME types only represent the  
> container format and not the codecs inside, so content negotiation  
> would need to be extended to somehow allow audio and video codecs  
> to be presented in addition to container formats. Note that this  
> problem applies when doing object-style fallback on the <video>  
> element too, as you need to specify something in the type="..."  
> attribute to avoid the browser having to request every  
> representation in turn to reject it.

There's a MIME extension for codecs (see link in the published  
proposal). But it's impractical to specify all codecs and codec  
profiles the UA can support in an Accept: header, compared to  
specifying the codecs used by a specific media item.

Regards,
Maciej