4 ms·

just wondering why video is not in HTML-5, or am i missing something?

• jherdman 16y ago
  HTML5 is a documentation spec, not a video encoder. I think you knew that, but language is surprisingly precise, so before commenting I wanted to ensure that we were talking about the same thing. Having got that out of the way, the HTML5 spec for the VIDEO tag is a bit tenuous at the moment. Though the API is laid out in full, there are essentially three competing encodings vying for the default: Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG-4, and VP8. Only Mozilla supports Ogg as other parties feel uncertain about its defensibility in a patent war against MPEG-LA. MPEG-4 is not F/OSS, ergo Mozilla isn't supporting it. Google has purchased and opened VP8 in hopes that it will become the open standard, thereby assuaging Mozilla's and the F/OSS' community's fears, though Apple has yet to be sold on VP8's defensibility again MPEG-LA. To wrap this up, if you do a little digging you'll find that Apple used the MOV container to hold an MPEG-4 video. This is just fine and dandy in the current state of the spec, though it would have been nice for Apple to use a different container format.
  • sound 16y ago
    i guess i was talking about VP8 on HTML-5, thanks for the detailed info ...
  • ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    As noted in other comments, Apple is only serving the HTML5 video tag to Safari. Even other webkit-based browsers that support H.264 get the proprietary plugin fallback. Also, both Google Chrome and Opera support Ogg Theora video, not just Mozilla. The only ones claiming to be worried about patents are the well known supporters of open technology at Apple and Microsoft.
  • kinetik 16y ago
    Only Mozilla supports Ogg Chrome/Chromium and Opera also support Ogg Theora/Vorbis out of the box.
    • jherdman 16y ago
      Many thanks. I hadn't realized that.