Mozilla Takes on YouTube Video Choice
A disagreement between Google and Mozilla is making a once-obscure debate into a real issue for those who watch Web video or host it on their own sites.
Last week, Google's YouTube announced early support for HTML5 video,
which can be built directly into Web pages and viewed with browsers
without relying on a plug-in such as Adobe Systems' Flash, Microsoft's
Silverlight, or Apple's QuickTime. Another Web video site, Vimeo,
followed suit.
Native video on a Web page sounds nice, and many Web companies support the effort broadly. But there's one big devil in its detail: the HTML5 specification, still under development, doesn't say which "codec" technology should be used to encode and decode video, and different browsers and Web sites support different standards.
YouTube, which delivers vastly more video streams over the Web than any competitor, has come down on one side of the divide, supporting the H.264 codec for HTML5 video on its TestTube site. But after Google made the move, several involved in developing Mozilla's Firefox browser began preaching a royalty-free alternative called Ogg Theora.
Mozilla grew to its present status of second-place browser in large measure by the power of word of mouth, and there's evidence the Mozilla community has begun making itself heard. After an Ogg Theora petition request on a Mozilla mailing list, requests for Ogg Theora support are on both on the YouTube product top ideas and hot ideas list.
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