---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Alberto Barrionuevo <[email protected]> Date: 2009/7/4 Subject: [DS-public] No video codecs for HTML5 because software patents :'( To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Finally the comercial interest of Apple has won: HTML5 won't include any open standard codec to embed video. It is explained by Ian Hickson, the HTML5 specification responsible at W3C: http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020620.html But Ian is wrong in his reasoning arguing that including OGG/THEORA in the HTML5 wouldn't help to interoperability neither would make it mandatory finally for the browsers. First of all, H.264, the (only) competitor of OGG/THEORA never should have been an option, since it is full covered by (expensive & discriminatory) software patents and this is agaisnt the historical policy of W3C on granting only open standards and not patented (RAND) standards. Just taking in care that H.264 would leave out the market to the second most used browser (Firefox) because being open source it should be enough not to indeed consider it. Apart of this, by including OGG/THEORA in the specification you would grant a special promotion and power to the adoption of OGG/THEORA. For example, if any goverment adopts HTML5, as is expected to be done in all the government interoperability frameworks, they would be, at the end, adopting OGG/THEORA no matter of the interests of Apple. Unfortunatetlly, in this way, we are just converting W3C in a rubber stamper of the iPod commercial interests. And what is worse, opening the door to Microsoft to impose its closed video formats from Windows Media Player with the next version of their (poor but widelly spreaded) browser. Saludos, -- Alberto Barrionuevo Open Standards WG Ex President FFII www.ffii.org -- Public mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digistan.org/mailman/listinfo/public -- Diego Saravia [email protected] NO FUNCIONA->[email protected]