Browser manufacturers forced W3C to abandon free HTML5 codecs

Browser manufacturers have failed to stop at one format for encoding audio and video data for the new <audio> and <video> tags, thereby forcing the W3C to completely exclude support for any codecs from the upcoming standard.

“After long and stormy discussions of this situation, I, to my regret, came to the conclusion that there is no such codec that all manufacturers would like to implement in their products ,” said the main HTML5 developer Ian Hickson .

Apple, for example, is not going to add Ogg Theora support to its QuickTime, worrying about some potential problems with patents, even though it can be used for free. Opera and Mozilla, on the contrary, are against using H.264 because of possible problems with its licensing and distribution. Google also has its own similar troubles, although they have already included both codecs in Chrome. And Microsoft is not going to support the <video> tag at all. Such are the cases.
')
via Slashdot