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HTML 5's support of using the Ogg Theora video format in the upcoming tag looked really promising for innovation in the web video area, but not everyone agrees on the new spec.
"The WHATWG HTML 5 working draft has a specification for a 'video' element.I briefly mentioned in a previous post that I was working on implementing this tag natively in Firefox. The intent is to display Ogg Theora encoded video without needing any plugins...
"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..."
"The video element is used to embed video content in an HTML or XHTML document. The video element was added as part of HTML 5..." -- See also:
*Audio
*Using geolocation
"...'Ogg' is a wrapper that ties together 'Theora' encoded video and 'Vorbis' encoded sound. Together, Ogg Theora+Vorbis give users a way to see movies on your computer. Ogg Vorbis+Theora are not known to be encumbered by any patents (the only applicable patent on Theora’s predecessor, called 'VP3', was licensed for everyone to use in any way they want).
"...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..."
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.
Recently I have started to mess around with the Vorbis audio codec, commonly found within the Ogg media container. Unlike Theora, which I had also experimented with but won’t post the results for fear of a backlash, I must say I am rather impressed with Vorbis.