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I wouldn't agree. The choice between a patent-encumbered h264 or an improving open standard? If you read this part: http://www.diveintohtml5.org/video.html#lic
by kilian 17y ago
I wouldn't agree. The choice between a patent-encumbered h264 or an improving open standard?
If you read this part: http://www.diveintohtml5.org/video.html#licensing http://www.diveintohtml5.org/video.html#licensing it becomes clear that h264 isn't really a viable option for an open web. You will have to start paying licensing fees by 2011 if you use the h264 codec. Now I'm not against paying for good things, but paying $2500+ per year per video doesn't sound too attractive...
- zokier 17y agoThe point is that there is no need to make a choice between h264 and Theora. Firefox could easily support both (and a variety of other formats) if MozCo would allow it. I'm not against endorsing Theora, but it shouldn't break interoperability/compatibility and degrade overall user experience.
- davidblair 17y agoBy not supporting h264 it helps prevent that codec from becoming the standard. If Firefox were to support ogg/h264 and everyone else supported only h264 then no one would bother with the ogg support. The format war would be lost at that point.
- AlexMax 17y agoWhat "format war"? Everyone already standardized on h264 years ago, and there is a built in h264 decoder on damn near everything these days. Keeping two copies of every movie would be a waste of CPU cycles, disk space and bandwidth (Theora videos are bigger than their h264 equivalents). Dropping support for h264 in favor of Ogg is also not an option due to h264 being in everything.
- papaf 17y agoAm I right in thinking this license fee is only in the US? As far as I know the rest of the world (Europe at least) doesn't recognise patents on software or algorithms.