3 ms·

Sure, but it could've been so much better, with almost no extra effort. In the end, we have the worse of two options for absolutely no gain.

• anonymfus 14y ago
  In the end patents will expire. 15 years left.
  • wtetzner 14y ago
    And that's one of the biggest problems with software patents. In 15 years, we'll likely be using a different codec (or, at least I would hope we'd make some progress in that amount of time).
    • protomyth 14y ago
      Probably sooner, H.265 is next on the list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding http://www.h265.net http://www.h265.net
• acdha 14y ago
  You say "no extra effort", as if widespread platform support, hardware acceleration, more than one high-quality implementation, significant support by authoring software, and direct-to-format hardware capture would happen for free. Avoiding royalties would be nice - although it's almost certain we'd still have lawsuits absent patent reform - but as a business decision that's a LOT to give up. I really think Mozilla did the web a disservice. They should have implemented platform codec support immediately and added other formats so content vendors could adopt HTML5 video independent of the codec wars