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

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On 3/28/07, Christian F.K. Schaller <christian at fluendo.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 16:57 +0900, Dave Singer wrote:
> > At 19:28  +0200 27/03/07, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
> >  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.
>
> Well so my point is that if this standard do not specify a free codec
> set like Theora, Vorbis or Dirac as its baseline then it will up to the
> vendors out there to define the standard codecs through supporting them,
> just like jpeg, gif and png are the de-facto standard image formats
> today even though they not defined in the current specs.
>
> The chance is that with this standard not specifying any codecs the most
> likely candidates for becoming de-facto standard is either a WMA/WMV/ASF
> combo or a MOV/H264/AAC combo, as those are the options that will be
> pushed by Apple and Microsoft.

I disagree. It will likely result in no change at all and Flash will
continue to be the format of choice for Web developers (for all the
reasons you have pointed out).

I think even worse: people will laugh at the creation of a <video> tag
in HTML that has no recommendation at all about which video codec to
use, since it doesn't improve on the current situation and clarify the
current codec confusion.

BTW: it is not unheard of that the W3C make a statement about the
preferred choice of "codecs". In the press release for the publication
of the PNG recommendation, TBL stated "We are seeing more of our
Members adopt the format and are helping make it the industry
standard." (see http://www.w3.org/Press/PNG-PR.en.html). That press
release even states openly: "The development of the PNG specification
was supported by W3C and by CompuServe - original creators of the GIF
format and now W3C Members - who both wished to see PNG become
accepted as the new Internet standard format for lossless graphics."

Regards,
Silvia.