On 20 March 2012 09:59, Tei oscar.vives@gmail.com wrote:
What perhaps can be done, withouth hurting the cause of freedom much, is to have the encoder. So if you uploade a propietery h.264 video, its encoded into a free format. You still helps the H.264 to spread, so is not that cool. If the owners of h.264 start asking money to encoders, you can drop support for the format. Nobody is damaged (people sould change habits of what format video to upload).
We should definitely be able to ingest H.264. (This has been on the wishlist forever and is a much harder problem than it sounds.)
The problem can be output. What free format a iPhone support?, if the reply is none, then you have to choise no service at all, or output video in h.264. Not serving people is bad, and serving h.264 is bad because you help h.264 gains more ground, hurting the cause of open formats. Theres no good option. IF you can serve a video that a iPhone can watch, even if using some crappy javascript or java format, you avoid pushing h.264 (so you help the cause of free formats). If this solution is slow, you create a incentive for iPhone to support a open format (what is good again), and everyone can watch all videos (what is good again).
Android supports Theora. The significant holdout is Apple.
- d.