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HTML 5’s support of using the Ogg Theora video format in the upcoming <video> tag looked really promising for innovation in the web video area, but not everyone agrees on the new spec.
The critical different between Ogg Theora and the competing H.264 formats are that Ogg carries no petent license fees, while H.164 requires anyone who implements it to pay a patent license. Because of this, Mozilla and Opera would prefer to use the Ogg Theora format, as planned
Apple and Google, however, aren’t jumping on the boat, though. Apple, who has been a major supporter of H.164, using it extensively in iTunes videos, is apparently concerned about unknown patents which Ogg might violate. (Remind you of the whole Novell-Microsft thing?) Google, on the other hand, simply cites Ogg Theora’s supposedly lower quality, though they have not released anything to back the claim that Ogg offers much lower quality at the same bandwidth.
It just doesn’t make sense to make a video format that requiers a patent license in a standard like HTML. HTML is an open standard so that people can implement it – it shouldn’t depend on someting you have to license.
Firefox 3.5 Preview Shows New Hope For Open Media Standards
The preview release of Firefox 3.5 is showing some neat tricks relating to online video, but not the kind that comes in a little proprietary bubble of Flash.
For example, the new Firefox 3.5 will be able to smoothly resize videos on the fly within the page. The interesting part, though, is that these videos are in OGG format – in other words, entirely open. With such a mainstream browser showing off what can be done with open video formats, there is a good chance that flash will lose its dominant position, or at least have to share a little. I’m not one to say “death to Flash” just because it happens to be proprietary, but an open video standard would allow for so much innovation. Already numerous projects are attempting to unify our media-watching experience. Just imagine the sudden freedom to create an even better experience if all that media was available in open formats.
Flash has been essential to the rise of sites like YouTube, but it might be time for something more flexible to replace it.