Chrome/Opera h.264 debacle
This comment on Slashdot essentially encapsulates my feelings on the subject:
"It doesn't get around it. Unless you live somewhere enlightened enough to not allow software patents, it probably isn't legal to use without a license for the patented tech.
Besides which, even if you do live somewhere with software patents then the liklihood is you already have an H264 licence with your OS. It's certainly the case for Windows & OS X users. In fact they have an entire media framework ready and at the disposal of any browser to invoke for content it doesn't handle natively.
The whole situation is absurd. If Firefox / Opera / Chrome don't support H264 out of the box for legal / patent reasons then fine, don't ship it out of the box. Instead open up the video api so it's extensible. Better yet, invoke whatever media framework is on the OS and let that decide if the content is playable or not.
Not providing any convenient way to support other video formats is just stupid. It won't drive people to the open standards, instead it will drive them the other way, using Flash plugins and other hacks to workaround the issue."
"It doesn't get around it. Unless you live somewhere enlightened enough to not allow software patents, it probably isn't legal to use without a license for the patented tech.
Besides which, even if you do live somewhere with software patents then the liklihood is you already have an H264 licence with your OS. It's certainly the case for Windows & OS X users. In fact they have an entire media framework ready and at the disposal of any browser to invoke for content it doesn't handle natively.
The whole situation is absurd. If Firefox / Opera / Chrome don't support H264 out of the box for legal / patent reasons then fine, don't ship it out of the box. Instead open up the video api so it's extensible. Better yet, invoke whatever media framework is on the OS and let that decide if the content is playable or not.
Not providing any convenient way to support other video formats is just stupid. It won't drive people to the open standards, instead it will drive them the other way, using Flash plugins and other hacks to workaround the issue."