[whatwg] More YouTube response

[Nils Dagsson Moskopp]

John Harding <jharding at google.com> schrieb am Thu, 1 Jul 2010 15:59:37
-0700:

> 1. Standard Video Format
> […]
> On the current path, a content provider knows
> that by offering H.264 and WebM, they can reach all HTML5-capable
> browsers.  This honestly is a reasonable state for YouTube right now
> - we use H.264 in cases outside the <video> tag as well, but it would
> be nice to converge on a single baseline format at some point in the
> future.

Practically, I think the ball is / was in Apple's court to decide this.
While to this day other browser makers have decided to ship two (!)
royalty-free video formats (Theora and VP8), Apple is the single H.264
holdout, and they have a tight itegration to their hardware as well.

Sadly, I do not have hope for any consolidation regarding video
formats. And while Youtube may be fine with having to provide only two
formats instead of a dozen, for the common smaller webmaster this is a
significant task, as transcoding resources are limited.

Recently, I have been discussing <video> implementation with the
administrator of an imageboard. It was ultimately decided to not add
this feature, precisely because of the multitude of video formats of
which none can be played in every modern browser. It's a shame.

> […]

> 3. Content Protection
> […]
> The basic requirements
> around content protection that we get from content owners basically
> consist of encrypting the content and limiting the decryption to a
> "verified" and authorized client - the realm of traditional DRM.

This can not possibly work if you have an open standard, which by
design has to be implementable by everyone who cares, which includes a
wide range of free and proprietary software vendors.

> Rather than ask browsers to get into the DRM business, what I think
> would work best is having a means for 3rd party DRM providers to
> supply browser plug-ins which implement the <video> tag for protected
> content - not all that different than selecting a pluggable codec.

To define a feature like that would hurt an otherwise open standard and
help to balkanize the browser market even more. If you really want to
do this, why not just use flash / java / whatever can deliver using
already available proprietary means ?

> […]


Greetings,
-- 
Nils Dagsson Moskopp // erlehmann
<http://dieweltistgarnichtso.net>
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