HTML5 Video in danger of repeating old mistakes
Last week YouTube and Vimeo introduced experimental support for HTML5 video but their choice of video codec, H.264, has caused a bit of a stir. One of the aims of HTML5 is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based technologies such as Flash through the use of the new video tag for embedding video in web pages. The problem with using H.264 for these videos is that it is patented in many countries and its use in a product (eg. a browser) requires a licence from the MPEG-LA. So is it really any better than Flash, Quicktime, Real Video and all the other proprietary standards we’ve had to suffer over the years?
It’s not as if there aren’t free, open source alternatives available, the Ogg Theora codec for instance was actually recommended in earlier drafts of the HTML5 specification.
Whilst H.264 licensing isn’t a problem for Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. it’s a different issue for free and open source software, not just from a cost perspective, but also from a philosophical one. Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of engineering explained why Firefox won’t be supporting H.264 video for this reason:
“there is no apparent means for us to license H.264 under terms that would cover other users of our technology, such as Linux distributors, or people in affiliated projects like Wikimedia or the Participatory Culture Foundation. Even if we were to pay the $5,000,000 annual licensing cost for H.264, and we were to not care about the spectre of license fees for internet distribution of encoded content, or about content and tool creators, downstream projects would be no better off.”
Granted, these are only experimental options so far, but YouTube in particular, has a huge influence here due to its ubiquitousness; how many people would be happy with a browser that won’t work with YouTube? Admittedly, Flash support isn’t going to go away for a long time yet but if H.264 gets entrenched as the default HTML5 video standard early on by such an influential content provider then the situation is unlikely to change.
In large the web is built on open technologies and HTML5 video has the potential to open up one of the few areas where proprietary technology has a hold. Let’s hope it doesn’t fall at the last hurdle.
As is the way these days, there is a petition to make YouTube use open media codecs.
