
We here at OSNews have taken somewhat of an interest in the new HTML5 video and audio tags, which should - some day - make embedding audio and video material into web pages as easy and straightforward as embedding images, allowing the web to finally remove the shackles of dreadful Flash video. Sadly, the problem with these new tags are the codecs; as it turns out,
browser makers have not reached an agreement about what codecs to choose for video, with mostly Apple throwing a spanner in the works, and Microsoft shining in absence.
Member since:
2006-03-22
The #1 hurdle looking to hold back adoption of Ogg Vorbis/Theora is Google/YouTube's current preference towards H.264/AAC. Their current HTML5 test page only works in Chrome as it does not use Ogg [ http://youtube.com/html5 ].
I assume the primary reason behind this isn't really that there's that noticeable a quality/size difference, but rather almost all the video on YouTube are already encoded with Mpeg4 as Flash and their iPhone app support it. To support Ogg will require a major re-encoding of all their videos meaning quite a great deal of time & money they aren't prepared to spend right now. If YouTube sticks with MP4 only, then Ogg probably won't ever get a real shot at taking off :/