the and tags along with native support for Theora video and Vorbis audio are currently enabled in the Firefox nightly builds. This will ship in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 coming later this year. This is not new news but I did want to provide my perspective on why this is important[...] Download a Firefox nightly build here and test it out here or on Wikimedia Commons.

HTML5 spec is expected to introduce new audio and video capabilities into the HTML language. However, it seems that Nokia and Apple have succeeded in removing Ogg Vorbis and Theora support from the current draft which decision has caused lots of heated political discussion. Some critics claim that the decision is mostly based on reluctance to back a standard that has no provision for including DRM, while others have mentioned potential patent uncertainties as the main reason not to back Ogg Vorbis and Theora.

"...Ogg is professional-grade media format. Ogg Vorbis encodes audio and Ogg Theora encodes video. [...] The companies that control the software design it to restrict the users and spy on them. If you choose Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, you can listen to audio and stream video using many different media players, including free software that respects your freedom..."

"...As some of you Neuros old timers may recall, we were the first to port the Ogg Vorbis audio codec to a portable HDD audio player. Now it's time, hopefully, to do the same with the Ogg Theora video codec..."

"It was announced at the Firefox Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So and will support those codecs built into Firefox itself..."

"...I would like to take this opportunity to talk about one of the greatest things to ever happen to Theora: the Theora Sea website. Really! And I just found out about it now, today, a hour ago. Think of it as a mix of YouTube and Digg for Ogg video only..."

"After several years of development, the first beta release for Ogg Theora 1.0 - a free video codec - is now available. Now all we have to do is to get some content in the Theora format."

"...User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format..."

"Nokia and Apple have privately pushed to give Ogg the noose treatment (and so far succeeded) in HTML5. This destroyed all hope of having free (as in freedom) media embedded in HTML5 in an interoperable way..." -- via slashdot http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/1339251&from=rss