Maik Merten wrote:
Okay, this is a rather lengthy list. So I'll hurry up and put my opinion into a nutshell:* Video support in browsers is important IMO. Otherwise the web may more and more slip into dependency on Flash or similiar formats ("We have to use Flash anyway for video, so why not make the whole site with Flash?"). * Browser makers should negotiate on one base format. This format should be free and available on all platforms. I don't say formats that need patent licensing are evil by-itself, but I'm pretty sure Debian and Fedora would have to remove video support from their browsers if that functionality would depend on a format that needs such licensing. To my knowledge only Ogg Vorbis+Theora are performing well enough and are usually accepted to be "safe" and open.
I had about three goes sending a message saying the following in a more reasoned and verbose way, but my computer is playing up. So, in brief:
The Theora developers have a deployable codec, but it's not the reference implementation currently available for download (which is slow, incomplete and crashes on malformed input). This next-gen codec could be cleaned up and shipped fairly quickly if people expressed an interest in putting it in something.
They estimate the increase in download size for a browser shipping Ogg + Theora-ng + Vorbis at 130k.
Gerv
