[whatwg] forwarded: Google opens VP8 video codec

[Adam Harvey]

On 20 May 2010 17:55, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/5/20 Peter Beverloo <peter at lvp-media.com>:
>> Microsoft has announced playback support for VP8 in Internet Explorer 9[1]
>> under the condition that one has to install a VP8 codec manually, albeit via
>> inclusion in another program: "In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support
>> playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a
>> VP8 codec on Windows."
>> I think that's fairly significant.
>
> I don't. They're trying to make "if you install it yourself, it'll
> work" look like they're actually doing anything at all. But they're
> not, because the same applies already to Vorbis and Theora. If
> anything, they're just offering not to deliberately stop it from
> working.

It is quite significant: before that announcement, H.264 was to be the
only codec supported in <video> tags in IE9.⁰ Microsoft aren't
intending to allow <video> to use system codecs generally for a bunch
of reasons¹ (probably most notably around security), which has ruled
native Theora in IE9 out for now.

Adam

⁰ http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx
¹ http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx