[whatwg] H.264-in-<video> vs plugin APIs

[Mike Shaver]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 9:37 AM, Chris DiBona<cdibona at gmail.com> wrote:
> I tried funding dirac a while back, to some good end, and we provide
> students, but here's the challenge: Can theora move forward without
> infringing on the other video compression patents?

We certainly believe so, but I'm certainly not qualified to evaluate
the different techniques.

Would Theora inherently be any less able to than any other codec
system, though?  I hope you're not saying that it has to be H.264
forever, given the spectre of the streaming license changes at the end
of 2010.

If Youtube is held back by client compatibility, they should be glad
that we're working hard to move ~25% of the web to having Theora
support in the near future!  Google could help that cause a lot by
putting (well-encoded, ahem) Theora up there, even if it's just in the
experimental /html5 area.  It wouldn't hurt to use the reference
libraries rather than ffmpeg for the client either, since we've found
significant differences in quality of experience there.

Mike