[whatwg] Video Tag Proposal

[Kit Grose]

On 29/03/2010, at 7:11 AM, Kelly Clowers wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 10:49, Ashley Sheridan <ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote:
>> I was under the impression that Apple were one of the main opposers to using
>> free codecs in-place of their proprietary QuickTime.
> 
> For Theora. They haven't really said much about Vorbis AFAIK. And I think an
> audio codec is less likely to have patent issues than a video codec (especially
> since Vorbis has a lot of high profile use that should have drawn out any patent
> trolls) , and that is what Apple supposedly is worried about.

Apple is at heart a hardware company. My understanding of their objections to OGG have been also largely due to a lack of hardware decoder support in their iPods/iPhones.

>> Also, when was the last time you ever knew Microsoft to go with standarised
>> formats when they can just as easily push one of their own?
> 
> <shug> MS isn't quite who they used to be. They open-source things, and put
> things under the open specification promise, and they seem to be very serious
> about CSS3 and (X)HTML5 standards now. I think there is at least a chance of
> them supporting Vorbis.

IE 9 (though not the platform preview) will support H.264 video in the <video> element:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/16/html5-hardware-accelerated-first-ie9-platform-preview-available-for-developers.aspx

I would be inclined to suggest that MS will implement video playback via DirectShow (theoretically enabling any codec the user has installed), but that's pure speculation on my part.

—Kit Grose