PC World: Mozilla, Opera want to make video on the Web easier
10 CommentsPublished December 10th, 2007 3:38 PM EST By Daniel Goldman
PC World magazine has an article up that talks about the plan for native video support from within the browser.
Along with Mozilla and others, Opera is pushing for the idea of native video support in the browser without the need for any plugins (such as Flash and Windows Media Player).
Video (and sound) should be treated no differently than images. Browsers are very capable of displaying images on their own, and don’t require you to download any plugins.
We’ve recently released a special build of the Opera desktop browser containing native video support.
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A very interesting discussion about Nokia’s oposing viewpoint on using Theora/Ogg for the video element was just recently on slashdot.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/12/09/2045200.shtml
Nokia’s main argument against using Theora/ogg is it’s lack of support for DRM and OGG’s supposedly unknown status regarding patents that might be covering it (although OGG was designed to be patent-free).
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Dane, the choice of video format is independent of the HTML video element. Supporting native video is a proposal standing on its own.
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It would be good to get rid of the Flash plugin per se – typical Adobe: bloated and heavy.
There’s a site that I use that’s all Flash, so I can’t just flip to and fro as only the context menu for Flash comes up :annoying!
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Flash Lite isn’t that bloated and heavy, actually. At least that’s my impression. But it’s for mobile devices only.
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Daniel, the point is the draft in its current state says Theora/Vorbis should be supported as part of the implementation and there’s where Nokia objects as it claims Theora (or Borbis, don’t remember exactly) may have some patent protected portions which would disqualify it as a neutral (money wise) option.
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Percy, my point is that there are two issues being debated in the W3C/WHATWG regarding native video support: 1) Whether and how browsers should support native video 2) Which video format should be supported.
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Yes, the article is only about Mozilla and Opera’s support for the video element but I thought the discussion on the video format was interesting and related to the article.
Also i think the two issues do go hand in hand because if you are to have native support for video without “the need for any plugins” there probably has to be support for a baseline codec built into the browsers…
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I can’t wait till this proposal is realized. Bravo for Mozilla/Opera!
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I can see the end of flash on all my machines…¶¶¶-ØØ-
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I think native playback of video is a great idea, not only from a usability viewpoint, but from a security viewpoint as well. I have seen very few persons actually updating their flash or quicktime or real plugins, even though they they update their browsers regularly. Assuming that the vendors are responsive enough to close their security holes fast, that will be a good protection against malware.
AQnd speaking of security, when is Opera going to see a Firefox like auto-update process?