Open Industry Standards For Audio & Video On The Web
August 13th, 2008
BBC Director of Future Media & Technology Erik Huggers: I believe that the time has come for the BBC to start adopting open standards such as H.264 and AAC for our audio and video services on the web.
Mozilla is going to ship Ogg, since H.264 and AAC aren’t open for open source. Unfortunately, I bet we will continue to hear lots of waffling and waffling by omission on this one. I look forward to many A/V decoders checked in to public version control systems.
via @dewitt
update:: Chris Wilson makes such a good point.
August 14th, 2008 at 6:01 am
The bit where he says he’s completely committed to Dirac but only for high-end in-house use, is particularly depressing.
Then I read he spent 9 years at Microsoft and it all made sense (though is still depressing).
Re OGG, is there a flagship Windows GUI encoder for Theora? I’ve never come across one though I’ve used AutoGK, Avidemux and others. Avidemux is a good cross-platform free video tool however it doesn’t list Theora specifically in the video codec options list. Vorbis is listed within the audio list as is OGM in the format (container) list. However no Theora.
Supporting Theora/Vorbis in Firefox is only one step. There must be a transcoding program at least as easy to use as that which Flash authors use.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I like that Mozilla has native support for Ogg formats. However, it would also help hugely to have support for numerous other formats. Mozilla need not have native support for everything; why not support everything that ffmpeg supports, by using ffmpeg? ffmpeg supports just about any format anyone might want to use.
I want the ability to use things like greasemonkey scripts to rewrite existing flash-based video sites to use video tags instead. I can’t do that if Mozilla doesn’t support the formats used by those sites, such as .mp4 or .flv.