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

[Matthew Gregan]

At 2009-06-30T04:50:31+0000, Ian Hickson wrote:
> The situation for audio codecs is similar, but less critical as there are 
> more formats. Since audio has a much lower profile than video, I propose 
> to observe the audio feature and see if any common codecs surface, instead 
> of specifically requiring any. I will revisit this particular topic in the 
> future when common codecs emerge.

Is there any reason why PCM in a Wave container has been removed from HTML 5
as a baseline for <audio>?  Authors are currently forced to use plugins to
do simple things like play email notifications (for instance, Gmail uses
Flash for this).  Providing a simple baseline audio codec to handle these
common situations would be a big win.

The reason for not selecting a video codec doesn't seem to have much weight
when considering Ogg Vorbis as a required audio codec.  Apple's submarine
patent argument doesn't seem to hold, as many deep-pocketed companies
(including Microsoft) have shipped products with Vorbis support.  It might
also be worth pointing out that the existing working draft of SVG 1.2
includes a requirement for Vorbis support
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-SVG12-20041027/media.html#audio-format).

Firefox 3.5 will be shipping with support for Vorbis, and I understand that
Opera and Chrome have already shipped development builds with Vorbis
support.

Thanks,
-mjg
-- 
Matthew Gregan                     |/
                                  /|                    kinetik at flim.org