With HTML 5 around the corner – and looking like it will be supported by all the major browser manufacturers – it would appear the browser wars are drawing to an end. Except, that is, for the area of streaming video. The new standard replaces the need for a Flash plugin with built-in tags for displaying video; something that would be a good idea if the browser manufacturers could agree on a way of displaying the videos. The problem is they cannot agree on a codec.
Codecs are a small block of code used to interpret video and work in much the same way as a device driver. Your printer driver, for example, shows your computer how to talk to your printer. Likewise, a video codec shows your computer how to interpret a video so it can extract video, sound and subtitles and show them at the appropriate time. The browser manufacturers are coming down into two camps. Apple and Microsoft prefer the H.264 codec while Google and Opera prefer the interestingly named Ogg Vorbis.
The main reason for this is royalties. H.264 is proprietary. If you use it – especially commercially – then you should pay royalties. However this is currently not the case as the owners of the code, MPEG LA, have said that it will remain free until 2016. After that a lot of people may have to look through their websites and get their checkbooks out. Ogg Vorbis, on the other hand, is open source and has proven very popular with Linux users, amongst others.
As a result of all this we are probably going to find that some videos will work on some browsers and not others. The likely upshot of this: most websites will stick with using Flash.
