So Google is planning to do a revamp of YouTube, and Slashdot is talking about it. The most-requested feature is, of course, the replacement of Flash with HTML5 video.
Slashdot being a rather popular destination for open source types, the discussion immediately breaks down into the controversy over whether HTML5 video should be delivered via H.264 or via the Ogg Theora codec.
Sorry, guys, but for anyone who isn’t obsessed with software licensing, the answer here is is obvious. Theora’s a substantially inferior codec, with a handful of implementations mostly in non-mainstream open source software. H.264 is an extremely good current-generation codec implemented by… the entire rest of the world, basically. Game consoles, phones (including both the iPhone and Android platforms), iTunes, set-top boxes, cameras, Blu-ray… H.264 is everywhere.
Despite the Mozilla foundation siding with Theora for Firefox, H.264 is the only remotely plausible choice here. Apple probably couldn’t support Theora on the iPhone if they wanted to, because the iPhone’s video decoding is handled by dedicated hardware, and as far as I’m aware there is no such hardware for Theora, and nobody plans to produce any. And Apple is far from being alone here; the same applies to most embedded devices.
H.264 implementations do require license fees to be paid under certain conditions, yes. But this puts it in the same boat as Audio CD, MPEG-2 (the standard codec on DVDs), MP3, AAC, and numerous other media standards. By demanding not only an open standard, but a codec that requires no patent licensing, open source advocates are holding web video to a standard that has essentially never been met, and are, in fact, effectively standing in the way of standards-based web video.
If the Mozilla foundation doesn’t want to license the relevant H.264 and AAC patents, they should at least let Firefox use QuickTime to handle HTML5 video content in those formats. Anything else puts abstract idealism over real-world interoperability.
[...] previously discussed the dustup over Ogg Theora vs. H.264. Today Google announced it is releasing the VP8 codec as open [...]