google releases a high quality video codec
Written by: daniel
May 19, 2010
This is some good news for the cross-browser video support in html5. As you might already know, there is a video tag, that allows videos to be played in browsers without any third party plugins (like flash player, for example).
The problem was that browser developers could not agree on which codec should be used for video encoding. There is the h263 mp4 codec used by many vendors, and which offers a ver good quality and a small size, but it’s protected by patents, which makes it a no-option for many people. (Btw. did you know that most of cameras, even the “professional” ones that allow to record natively in mp4, don’t allow for professional usage of the recorded videos by licence?)
On the other hand there is an open source theora video codec which offers quite good quality (we used it for www.tvmallorca.net project) and it seems not to be limited by any license (although some vendors like apple or microsoft say otherwise)
This gives a big headache to us, developers, because we need to prepare content in many different formats to be sure everyone will be able to watch it. Not fun at all!
Luckily, google released today an open web media project, which includes they recently aqqured vp8 codec. Will this finally bring the html5 video to the masses? Let’s hope so. Youtube, Chrome browser and Firefox already support this codec in their nightly builds, and hopefuly other vendors will jump on the wagon soon.
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