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

[Robert Brodrecht]

Maciej Stachowiak said:
> I have no idea if any of
> these is practical or even desirable, but I think we will need to
> think along these lines rather than trying to bless one format
> without consensus.

Then it might be best to bless two.  One for the vendors who have payed
for MPEG4 and one for the one's who haven't.  While supporting one codec
is ideal for developers, there obviously isn't a consensus.  If Apple +
Microsoft supported MPEG4 and Mozilla + Opera supported OGG, using the
fallbacks that were described in Apple's specification, developers could
encode two versions of their video (sucks, but we do what we have to) and
nest the tags.

What I, personally, want to avoid is having the 4 major browsers
supporting 4 different codecs (like Apple doing MPEG4, MS doing WMV, Opera
doing OGG, and Mozilla doing DIRAC, for example).  I think I could deal
with two major codecs as long as the tools to create them are readily
available.  The real problem is if there are 3 or 4 codecs, one or more of
which I can't encode on my operating system of choice.


-- 
Robert <http://robertdot.org>