2008/9/28 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
Unfortunately there's some reluctance right now to supporting Theora natively and by default in some browsers, like Safari, due to the risk of submarine patents.
Well, that's what Apple and Nokia say. Nokia also tried to advance the odious and bare-faced lie that Ogg Theora and Vorbis was a proprietary format (and thus MPEG-4 formats were a much better idea), so for some reason I'm reluctant to ascribe an excess of good faith to either company on this one.
I think that if users start thinking they suck for not providing Theora/Vorbis, their business interest will convince them to join the party soon enough. There's no way it's worth us compromising one jot in this regard.
But those browsers can still use Cortado just fine, so again, no users lost.
Particularly as Java is part of Mac OS X. (Not iPhone, but being left behind is what Apple get for trying to implement Trusted Computing.)
Everyone's aware that Wikimedia supports Theora, and it *has* made a difference. But video on Wikipedia is hardly so make-or-break that we could strongarm anyone into supporting our format of choice --
I did expressly ask whether we count as a large enough content provider, Hixie said "no." So obviously we need more and better video content ;-D
- d.