On 26 Jun 2007, at 17:46, Maik Merten wrote:
* The spec can be practical about implementing the <video> tag
and
specify H.263 or MPEG4 as a baseline. Existing multimedia
toolkits
can be reused in implementation and thus all browsers can
support
the standard. Users will use the format thanks to ubiquitous
support. The "tax" will be a non-issue in most cases despite
leaving a bad taste in the standard committee's mouth. Up and
coming browsers can choose not to implement that part of the
standard if they so choose or piggyback on an existing media
player's licensing.
Free Software like Mozilla cannot implement MPEG4 or H.263 and still
stay free. The "tax" *is* an issue because you can't buy a "community
license" that is valid for all uses.
Plus even if you implement H.263 or MPEG4 video - what audio codec
should be used with that? Creating valid MPEG streams would mean
using a
MPEG audio codec - that'd be e.g. MP3 or AAC. Additional licensing
costs
and additional un-freeness.
Don't get me wrong: MPEG technology is nice and well performing - but
the licensing makes implementations in free software impossible (or at
least prevents distribution in e.g. Europe or North America).
Under the current spec it is merely a "SHOULD" — you can have an
implementation of the spec that omits it. MPEG4 and WMV are the
current de-facto standards. We should really just pave the cowpaths
here, meaning those are the real two options. WMV has absolutely no
publicly available documentation, so it makes no sense to reference
that. MPEG4 has publicly available documentation, but is patent-
encumbered. MPEG4 looks better on grounds that it is at least
implementable by people outside of MS without reverse engineering it
themselves.
- Geoffrey Sneddon
