Paul Sturgess

A plug-in free browsing future?

There is a vision of the future where browsing the web will no longer require third party plugins for videos and audio playback, that it will be native to the browser. All made possible through the adoption of HTML 5.

Google strongly supports this view and at its’ recent I/O conference it showcased numerous demos of html 5 and the capabilities it will bring to modern browsers – Web Monkey has a good write-up.

One example showed how you could browse YouTube without the requirement for Adobe Flash Player.

However, this vision will only become a reality if all of the various browser vendors adopt a common audio & video codec and this is where the problem lies.

It had been thought that the open source Ogg Theora codec would be the answer and would be part of the HTML 5 specification.

In fact Firefox 3.5 ships with full native support for media playback using the Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs. Google Chrome supports Ogg and the H.254 codec.

Other browsers vendors (Such as Apple) prefer the H.264 codec. Yet it requires costly patent licenses that both Mozilla and Opera do not want to pay.

Without getting into the details of the ins and outs of why the various browser vendors prefer specific codecs the bottom line is that no consensus on which codec should be implemented across all browsers has been agreed.

As a result the W3C have updated the draft HTML 5 spec to no longer recommend web browsers support audio and video playback using a specific codec.

Going forward the W3C have said that should a single codec emerge as the common codec they will consider updating the specification.

So a plug-in free browsing future hangs in the balance. For now.

Tags: video, codecs, youtube, google, apple, browser, html, w3c

Comments: 1

James
commented on

Nice Article

Add a comment

Note: comments are moderated before publication.

Most Popular

Now residing at 171 High Street, Guildford

Peter Roome

NEW ADDRESS: Kyanmedia, Guildford, 171 High Street, Guildford, Surrey, GU1 3AJ Yes thats right, we have made the big move, a week earlier than the scheduled 24th July. The impromptu decision was made mid morning Friday (17th July, 2009) after discovering, Smithbrook was…

Number one in Google

Paul Sturgess

Good listings across multiple search engines can make or break a website, at Kyan we believe there are no real secrets to search engine optimisation (SEO). Transparency with our clients is key, we don’t keep our techniques behind lock and key as we believe SEO is not just the re…

Garmin Edge 705 Data Recovery with DD & XML

Joel Richards

After recently taking part in a race across Scotland, using a Garmin GPS device (Edge 705) I had around 12 hours of GPS data which unfortunately seemed to get corrupted during the ride. The device was properly displaying the data on the unit, but Windows, OSX and Linux were all …