Video codecs and HTML5
Want a really good reason why no one should be jumping on the HTML5 video bandwagon? Go read this CNET story about MPEG LA's move to extend the free web usage of the H.264 until 2015.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000040-264.html
This is all playing out exactly as many online commentators, including myself, have predicted, except now the timing is official and about exactly right to screw over as many people as possible. The general expectation is that the world will be ready to fully consume HTML5 content in 4-5 years, right when MPEG LA will be in a position to change their minds about their "generosity" and start imposing license fees to use H.264 on the web.
As the CNET story mentions, Mozilla is already in a position where they'd have to pay $5million to add H.264 to Firefox and presumably Adobe paid up already in order to allow Flash Player to playback H.264 content (incidentally, this is one of the reason's Flash Player can't be entirely open sourced, it contains licensed codecs which Adobe has paid for and can't give away).
Unfortunately Ogg Theora still isn't up to the task of delivering top quality HD video so it's out. This leaves our only real hopes on what I first said when Google announced they intended to acquire ON2. I maintain that Google will put out whatever ON2's latest greatest codec is with a perpetually free to use license, build it into Chrome's video tag support and then encourage everyone else to do the same.
The video tag in HTML5 is useless unless every browser supports the same video codec. This is why Flash works right now. We can all publish FLV videos and know that every single Flash Player out there can playback that video to user's without any problems.
Oh and one more thing I just thought of…maybe for some organizations video codec uniformity isn't a concern. If you upload videos to a hosting service like Youtube, then you can count on that service rendering all the different variations of your video and even determining how to deliver the right one to the user's browser. The real problem is for people hosting their own video or trying to build rich web experiences that incorporate video. Having to render and host multiple source video files and then browser detect to deliver the right one, the complexity of production is growing massively for web developers and content creators.
This is all a step backwards. In the last few years for the most part we've enjoyed fairly smooth cross-browser development (which the exception of IE6's continued but fading existence). We are now on the cusp of going back to the early days when browser makers felt it was cool to introduce their own tags as they pleased.
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