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

[Christian F.K. Schaller]

On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 08:12 -0700, Kevin Calhoun wrote:
> On Mar 23, 2007, at 2:56 AM, Maik Merten wrote:
> 
> > MPEG4 adoption to the web has been poor from my point of view. Today  
> > I'd
> > guess the absolute king in marketshare is Flash video, then following
> > Windows Media, then followed by QuickTime (that may carry MPEG4... but
> > the container is not MPEG) and perhaps a bit of RealVideo in between.
> 
> Just a quick correction here: QuickTime does support the MPEG-4  
> container format.

Yes, but that is the opposite of the stated issue. The issue is that
the .mov files out there are actually not valid MPEG4 files. Which means
that with a MPEG4 compliant demuxer one would not be able to demux a
Quicktime file. So Maik's claim still stand, MPEG4 has almost no
adoption on the web. Apple could have solved this of course by making
sure .mov was MPEG4 compliant, which would have been a natural step
after pushing so hard to make the quicktime container format the basis
for the MPEG4 container format, but I guess the temptation of
proprietary lock-in was to big.

Christian