Some quick thoughts…
In HTML5 there is is new video tag allowing to embed a video in a web page as we do for a picture. As for the img tag (for pictures), the W3C (who defines HTML) does not say which format should be used for the content itself. So in a img tag you can put PNG, BMP, JPEG, GIF… whatever you want, as soon as it is recognized by web browsers.
Internet Explorer does not support video, Firefox supports it but reads only videos encoded in the Theora format, Chrome and Safari support the tag but read only H.264 encoded videos.
Technically, for the moment H.264 seems to be better than Theora. But Theora is an open format while H.264 is crippled with patents and using it requires paying huge royalties (depends of what kind of license but some people are talking about 5 million dollars).
I don’t remember seeing any “official” position from Mozilla why they do not support H.264 in Firefox, but from people working at Mozilla, they usually provide good arguments like:
- the web is based on open, free and patent-free standards (this is very important, changing that will fragment the web)
- they would prefer doing more useful stuff with 5 M$ than paying for a codec
- supporting H.264 is not a good idea since it will be valid only for the version distributed by Mozilla, not the one embedded in your Linux distribution for example
I completely agree with that.
I wonder why lots of people on the internet would like Mozilla to support H.264 while they don’t ask Google and Apple to support Theora. For images, they are all able to read different formats, while should they be limited to only one video format? Google and Apple have nothing to pay in order to support Theora (except their developers to include it).
The other thing, why MPEG LA (licensing H.264) does not make H.264 a patent/royalty-free codec? OK, because MPEG LA was created to collect fees for patents covering MPEG technologies.
And the nasty idea, why Mozilla does not make a Firefox Europe Edition? In Europe, software patents are not allowed (kind of, it’s not really clear, it looks like quite often software patents are granted while they are not respecting european legislation). Doing a Firefox version including H.264 but distributed only in countries that do not allow software patents could be interesting. First in Europe, it may clarify what the status of software patents is, then it will hassle the MPEG LA and finally it may show to the US and US companies that they are not dominating the world and imposing their rules everywhere (and maybe make them change their patents laws (yes, sometimes I’m overly optimistic ;-))).
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