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
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