[whatwg] forwarded: Google opens VP8 video codec

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Adam Harvey <adam at adamharvey.name> wrote:
> 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
>

Add to that the announcement that Adobe will ship VP8 in Flash and you
can get a huge installed base of the codec in no time flat - hopefully
it will somehow be possible to access the installed codec library from
IE9  - bingo!

Silvia.