HTML 5 video tag codec issues

One of the most hyped features of HTML 5 is the video tag. A proper implementation of this would spell trouble for the third party browser plug-ins like Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime etc. But there’s a big war going on in the browser world regarding the implementation of this tag. The video codec that will be used for implementing the video tag is still under dispute. W3C has not yet concluded on what codec to use and each of the Browser builders are thinking of their own options

Mozilla and Opera wants to go with Ogg Theora, which is an open source, patent free video codec. But the issue lies with the fact that it is of not so great quality and will be unable to give out high performance videos.

H.264 is another codec build and patented by the ISO Moving Picture Experts Group (aka MPEG). This has a great quality associated with it and follows all the standards too. Another big positive for H.264 is the fact that all the You tube videos are in this codec.. Sounds great? Well the problem is the fact that you have to pay licensing fees to MPEG to use this codec. Microsoft has already approved this codec are going to use this in their IE 9 browser. Mean while Google Chrome uses ffmpeg library that supports both Ogg Theora and H.264

Apple Safari wants to go with their custom quick time implementation.

You see… it’s a mess. It will be sometime before we see anything meaningful out of HTML 5 video tag.