As many people may have heard or noticed both Vimeo and Google’s Youtube have started a test with an HTML5 player. This is great, good riddance Flash (I’m a -user and for us Flash is a pain-in-the-ass easily pushing your CPU 10 degrees up the scale).
Principles
Supported browsers for this HTML5 player? Safari, Chrome and IE with Chrome-frame. Wait a second, no Firefox? Nope, no Firefox because Mozilla has principles.
The new HTML5 player use, as you might suspect, the h.264 codec on which a patent relies which requires a license. Mozilla won’t have this and has no support for h.264 in any way, putting it out of the league when it comes to the new HTML5 players.
Mozilla is pushing for Theora which is a codec they claim can be freely redistributed. As Apple and other parties have pointed out, there are no assurances about possible licensing and patent claims and so they won’t redistribute the Theora codec until that has been cleared up (which is a quite impossible task).
Besides that, Theora lacks hardware implementations which makes it quite unsuitable for mobile devices and h.264 delivers higher quality than Theora. H.264 has already seen wide adoption and though Theora could see wide adoption a side-effect of that wide adoption will probably be smacking into a huge patent wall by some stupidly obscure random over-expanding US patent nuking Theora’s free-ness and freely redistributeability resulting in patent claims and pricey settlements for everyone involved (yes, drama-queen).
Standard for audio and video
Because of all this, it seems HTML5 won’t have a standard codec for the <audio> and <video> tags. Apple refuses to implement Theora into Quicktime directly, Mozilla refuses H.264 because of licensing and Google has said it will support H.264 and Theora though it seems unlikely Google will provide it’s content in a theora-format on Youtube just like Vimeo probably won’t, they’ve already got their whole catalogue in H.264.
Opera? Well, although they prefer Theora over H.264 my best bet is that they’re going to do the smart thing and support both of them. Opera has a small user-base and if it wants to grow it will have to support everything to attract new users.
That leaves us with Microsoft… Nevermind, they’re still struggling with decent HTML4.01 and CSS2.1 rendering, HTML5 is not for another 10 years but truth be told, Microsoft, just like Apple, isn’t going to implement or deliver Theora without being sure it’s not going to get hit with a big claim on the head.
Reality check
So, Apple says no to Theora and wants h.264, Mozilla won’t budge of Theora and Google says we’ll do both but probably provide our own content in H.264 so we can also serve our mobile users from the same platform.
Either someone is going to have to come up with a codec that suits everyone, hardware implementation and freely redistributable or we’re going to end up with a split marketplace were h.264 is most likely going to have the upper hand.
The argument that h.264 wouldn’t be a big win over Flash compared to Theora is one I discard as foolish. Flash is horrible for video, the only implementation that only slightly sucks is the Windows implementation, there’s still no hardware acceleration support for either Mac or Linux since Adobe uses DirectX and the 64-bit builds are still scarce.
Even though it wouldn’t “just work” (that sounds strangely enough like something Steve Jobs would say) a prominent codec and moving away from the grips of Adobe when it comes to video on the web would be a victory for everyone, especially when it comes to audio and video quality.
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