[whatwg] Google's use of FFmpeg in Chromium and Chrome

[King InuYasha]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Kristof Zelechovski
<giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl>wrote:

>  The VIDEO element will not be useless without a common decoder.  Its
> usefulness depends on its content: it will be limited to user agents that
> support at least one encoding offered by the author.  Even if a common
> decoder is specified, many authors will not use it because they do not know
> it, they do not have the tools, they are reluctant to learn or they consider
> the proprietary solution better for production and valid for their target
> audience.
>
> IMHO,
>
> Chris
>

Ahh, but the thing is, there ARE tools to make Ogg videos. And more would
spring up if Theora was chosen as the common codec. Already quite a few
proprietary and open source multimedia manipulation programs support the Ogg
container and Ogg Vorbis codec out of the box. A good example being Nero
Burning ROM.

The thing is, the "audience" won't know the difference. To them, its just a
faster player playing videos without crashing their browser or causing it to
slow down at odd times. The content makers are not going to have a problem
making Theora videos. Besides, most content making software use either
DirectShow codecs or ffmpeg on Windows. On Mac, generally they use QuickTime
codecs. And on Linux, usually GStreamer or ffmpeg is used.

Since Theora/Vorbis codecs for all of those platforms are available,
existing software would be able to output Ogg videos.

And where the heck would "reluctant to learn" come from? This isn't a
programming language, it is a codec! All they have to do is change the
selection of codecs on the output of their video.

As for "not knowing it," there is already some publicity on Ogg Theora
videos from the Mozilla team. And Dailymotion has converted a portion of
their library for the purpose of experimenting with it. Wikipedia/Wikimedia
uses it already. The Internet Archive also uses it. There is no doubt that
people already know it.
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