[Foundation-l] No default codec for <video> and <audio> in HTML5

[Brian]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist at gmail.com>
> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 7:22 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at 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.