Posts Tagged ‘Video’

MPEG LA have come out and declared that the H.264 codec will remain royalty-free for Internet broadcast videos.

This has been one of the blocks for wide adoption on the standard with both Mozilla and Opera opting not to support the format in the past citing royalty concerns.

“MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as “Internet Broadcast AVC Video”) during the entire life of this License. MPEG LA previously announced it would not charge royalties for such video through December 31, 2015, and today’s announcement makes clear that royalties will continue not to be charged for such video beyond that time.”

Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 9 already support videos encoded with the H.264 codec.

Mozilla and Opera are yet to comment on the move.

In response to the recent Chrome browser speed test video from Google, which later proved to have be faked, Opera have made their own browser speed test video spoof.

Watch and enjoy!

Google has announced a new format for the HTML5 video war, called WebM and using the VP8 codec.

The new video format is royalty free and designed specifically for use on the web. The WebM project is sponsored by Google, Mozilla, Opera, AMD, Nvidia and Oracle amongst others and is aiming to become the standard way we view video on the web in years to come.

All major browser have announced support for the format, except for Apple.

“In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows” commented Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch.

“Video will finally become a first-class citizen of the Web. This is a big deal, and the day will be remembered in the history of the Web” wrote Håkon Wium Lie, CTO, Opera Software. Opera also have preview builds of the browser available which support the WebM video format.

Mozilla was also quick to follow, with preview builds of Firefox that also include support for WebM. Chrome builds should follow in the coming week.

Apple has been very quiet on the matter, not stating whether it will support the format in it’s Safari browser, and whether this format could make an appearance on iPhones, iPads and iPod touches.

This is a great day for open web standards.

Dear Mozilla and Opera,

Get with the <video> programme! Ogg Theora has lost the HTML5 video format war.

The evidence is all in front of us. The battle seems to have been won with the final move by Microsoft, who have announced that they will support the H.264 and MPEG-4 formats for Internet Explorer 9, completely ignoring the OGG video and audio formats.

In contrast, both Firefox and Opera only support the Ogg video, which is a free open source video format that is not covered by any known patents.

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