Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 31st Jan 2010 14:20 UTC, submitted by lemur2
Despite the recent interest in adopting HTML5's video tag, there is still one major problem: there is no mandated standard video codec for the video tag. The two main contestants are the proprietary and patended h264, and the open and free Theora. In a comment on an LWN.net article about this problematic situation, LWN reader Trelane posted an email exchange he had with MPEG-LA, which should further cement Theora as the obvious choice.
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Member since:
2009-07-21
The potential for Theora improvement is limited. Theora is based on the ten year old VP3, and the Theora bitstream format was frozen in 2004, and is missing some similar features to more modern video encoding standards (VC-1, H.264, even newer On2 codecs), so any further improvement comes only from improving the encoder. But H.264 encoders improve too; in fact, there are enough users of H.264 that there's competition.
This does not work in the millions of already deployed embedded devices with no 3D acceleration, but with a H.264 decoder.