[whatwg] Codecs for <audio> and <video>

[Lino Mastrodomenico]

2009/7/1 timeless <timeless at gmail.com>:
> I have no idea about purchasing costs (again, we work on software),
> but I think people will accept that the cost for an FPGA is orders of
> magnitudes higher than and not commercially viable in contrast to
> ASICs.

I think we can all agree that a FPGA is being used only for
development and debugging of a Theora hardware decoder
(<http://www.students.ic.unicamp.br/~ra031198/theora_hardware/>),
while the final design will be burned to an ASIC if/when there's
commercial demand for it.

> Sadly, Apple gets no points for being Pluggable on Desktop (QT has an
> open API). If I were to complain about Mozilla not being open, they'd
> claim "oh, we're open source, anyone can contribute". That isn't true
> btw, if I were to write a pluggable module for video, their benevolent
> dictator has every right to veto it.

I fear that wide support for pluggable codecs for the video element
may end up putting end users in a "codec hell". If there's only one or
at most two supported video formats/codecs, then it's obviously
responsibility of the websites to correctly encode their videos.

But if Firefox starts supporting any codec that happens to be
installed on the system, many small and medium websites will probably
start using videos in a lot of different formats (that "works" on the
computer of the web developer) and the burden of finding and
installing the correct codecs for each site will shift on the end
user.

Not good for interoperability, non-x86 platforms, and a good
opportunity for spreading malware using trojan codecs.

So please browser vendors, don't do this. The only exception is
Safari, since it wouldn't otherwise support Theora.

-- 
Lino Mastrodomenico