The Ogg codec pack is being installed by default in the new Windows Insider build, with an eye towards turning it on by default in the future. Awesome!

This includes Ogg and WebM container, Vorbis and Opus audio, and Theora and VP8 video (and VP9 video if hardware-accelerated or manually enabled).

Appears to include both standard <video> and <audio> support and MSE streaming. The main hurdle left to deal with for future streaming support is VP9 being disabled when not hardware accelerated; that means we'll need to keep shipping VP8 video alongside VP9 (or if we resolve the licensing issues, H.264 alongside VP9). The VP8 (or H.264) would be less bandwidth-efficient.

I'll see if I can wrangle a more direct contact to ask about the VP9 support and whether there's any way we can opt in to software VP9 decoding (still more efficient than using the ogv.js shim).

To summarize, current state:

Edge without the codec pack: * audio: plays MP3 natively if present, otherwise plays Ogg Vorbis through ogv.js * video: plays WebM VP8 through ogv.js

Edge with the codec pack: * audio: plays Ogg Vorbis natively * video: plays WebM VP8 natively

-- brion

On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 9:18 AM, Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:

Microsoft has introduced a codec pack which adds support for Ogg Vorbis and Theora media to the Edge browser, as well as enabling WebM VP8 and VP9, in regular <video> elements.

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/12/05/introducing-web-media- extension-package-ogg-vorbis-theora-support/

They seem to have done it right -- if you install it, Commons will automatically pick up the native WebM or ogg playback and use it in place of the ogv.js JavaScript shim. Neat!

If we're lucky, this'll get rolled into a default option some day; if not, we can still point to the download fairly easily as an "improve your playback experience" warning. (Filed https://phabricator.wikimedia. org/T182129 to improve this.)

-- brion