Re:HTML 5 drops open source video codec
by ubernostrum on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @05:00AM
(#691168)
Please write on the blackboard 100 times: "HTML5 has to be something that works well on mobile devices, not just on desktop/laptop machines."
And right now that's going a long way toward killing Theora; mobile devices need a power-efficient hardware decoder to do video, and if they don't get one for Theora they're not going to run everybody's battery life into the ground by using software decoding.
Well, HTML5 is not going to be adopted by tomorrow. The adoption will take longer than the mobile devices lifespan.
It means, that if TI/Qualcomm/etc start developing Theora DSPs this year, they will be on the market and in the devices before HTML5 goes mainstream.
Standardizing on Theora is pretty good incentive to have it hardware accelerated.
Well, Safari supports it today including on the iPhone as of verison 3.0. If YouTube rolls out HTML5 support in the next six months, that covers what, a third of all the video on the web (on YouTube itself and embedded on blogs)?
Safari supports HTML5 video element, but not HTML5 per se. It is not finished yet.
Interestingly, when YouTube supported only Sorenson, Apple didn't care for that and went on ignoring YouTube. Why it is suddenly a problem?
Also, it's not like their hardware can't support it right now; Ogg video in Firefox 3.5 runs just fine on my Mac.