HTML 5 drops Ogg Theora as its video codec
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 07 July 2009, 21:38 IST   |    1 Comments
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HTML 5 drops Ogg Theora as its video codec
Bangalore: HTML 5 will no longer specify Ogg Theora as its video codec, due to opposition from Apple and other browser vendors. This was announced by the Ian Hickson, a Google employee who maintains this web-coding standard. In short, this means that HTML 5 will not specify a single codec for Web development. "I have therefore removed the two subsections in the HTML 5 spec in which codecs would have been required, and have instead left the matter undefined, as has in the past been done with other features like IMG and image formats, embed and plug-in APIs, or Web fonts and font formats," Hickson wrote. One of the key features of HTML 5 is its ability to handle rich media such as video and audio through the video and audio tags, which meant web developers, do not have to rely on proprietary products such as Adobe's Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight. According to Hickson, Google has implemented both H.264 and Ogg Theora in However, Google cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Linux version of Chrome called Chromium. Google believes that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube. Hickson wrote in his personal post that he felt sorry for the current situation of codec. Hickson added that situation in audio codec is similar, but as there are more formats available in audio, the problem is not that critical. He hopes that in future there will be a common codec surface, which will help all browser vendors.

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