arstechnica.com — The HTML 5 video element has the potential to liberate streaming Internet video from plugin prison, but a debate over which codec to define in the standard is threatening to derail the effort. Ars takes a close look at the HTML 5 codec controversy and examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of H.264 and Ogg Theora.
Jul 5, 2009 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountJul 7, 2009
Mp3 is an old technology as well and look how much better is has gotten since 2001.
brim4brimJul 7, 2009
Hardware not supporting OGG is a non-issue. If its selected then devices that support it in hardware will arrive and people will migrate over time.
altotusJul 7, 2009
The only problem I see in that is that Ogg may well ultimately be patent encumbered (no evidence for that, but you never know until someone comes forward), or may be eclipsed by something with 2x the compression and 2x the quality tomorrow. Ideally, the codecs would have two attributes: there'd be no restriction on playback, and they'd be available in byte-code for execution in an open-source codec shell, such that the codec will always be available, can be arbitrary/change on the fly, and be available everywhere that supports the video tag. It's technically feasible, but legally, not so much.
kkiranJul 7, 2009
If both Ogg and H.264 can coexist, why can't Opera handle an H.264 video?@DarkShroud : Silverlight may be an easy way to do things but we are talking about an open standard and MS wants to define rules which isn't a fair practice.
Closed AccountJul 7, 2009
@gamepr0That's why patents suck.. You shouldn't be able to patent code.. It just creates monopolies on software..
Closed AccountJul 7, 2009
Yeah, I always hate spending hours just trying to even get a page to look how I want it to.. I guess it really is a giant mess and might be easier just to start over with some thing else.. But how long will it take W3C or whomever to realize this?..
sageerrantJul 7, 2009
Yes, you CAN rip and transcode Blu-ray video.This is not a new thing.
int19hJul 10, 2009
Why can't we have a <video> tag where the codec is included with the video? A codec needs just a subset of what a regular application needs and should be possible to sandbox or check so that it's safe. This would allow websites to upload any codec they had the license for, and the codecs could be cached so that people only needed to download them once.
msandersenJul 25, 2009
Maybe the solution is to forget about both H264 and Ogg Theora and go with the dark horse: BBC's Dirac. It was developed for streaming HD video at a quality comparative to H264, and the BBC hold the patents and provide them free with no licensing fees. The current software implementations are all opensource. There are GStreamer plugins for it, and FFmpeg and VLC both support it.<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)</a>