On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.comSimetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com
wrote:
On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:22 PM, BrianBrian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
It's a shame they couldn't get all vendors to agree to ship both ogg and h264 codecs.
No, it's not. H.264 is patented and you need to pay licensing fees to use it. It's not an open standard and should not be used on the web if it's at all avoidable. It's possible Mozilla couldn't even legally ship it, at least if they continue to distribute under the GPL. (Maybe if they distributed only as LGPL/MPL they could avoid any issues by making the H.264 part BSD-licensed or something.)
A compromise is a win-win. In the absence of a compromise its a lose-lose. Except that H264 wins since almost all of us already support it.