HTML5 Video Codec Debate

Written on January 26th, 2010 at 17:09 pm by chia

HTML5 is new web standard that is gaining popularity and will add many new features to your web experience. The next version of HTML i.e HTML5 will include several new tags for embedding video, audio, and other graphical content(<video>, <audio>, etc). Recently youtube announced that it is now supporting its new HTML5 video. With new HTML5 video player you will not need Adobe flash player to view it, videos will load faster.

However youtube feels that there is some limitation in HTML5 version of video players. It doesn't support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video.

Vimeo rushed to announce a beta version of their player based on their site that claims HTML5 support as well.

These players from google and Vimeo requires proprietary H.264 codec to be able to view them which is a serious problem. These codecs aren’t compatible with the royalty-free web standards that the rest of the web is built on.

If you think this isn't a issue that is worth worrying, you should read this excellent article by Christopher Blizzard on HTML5 videos and H.264 format.

Here are some Excerpts

Learning from GIF and MP3

Most of us don't remember back in 1999 when web was a lot smaller compared to today when Unisys decided to start to enforce their GIF-related patents. GIF was already widely used on the web as a fundamental web technology.

Unisys was asking website owners $5000-$7500 for using GIF format on their site. This isn't any issue today becaues these patents have expired. Its scary to think of a world where you have to pay $5000 to just use images on your site.

We are looking at the same situation of H.264.

Remember, this is still very early in H.264’s history so the licensing is very friendly, just like it used to be for MP3. The companies who own the IP in these large patent pools aren’t in this for the fun of it – this is what they do. They patent and they enforce and then enjoy the royalties. If they are in a position to charge more, they will. We can expect that if we allow H.264 to become a fundamental web technology then we’ll see license requirements get more onerous and more expensive over time, with little recourse.

So What Next?

Many still believe that H.264 will not be google final choice. They have already acquired video compression technology Company On2. It has technology that is superior to H.264. So its likely that Google will be using a codec that's superior to H.264 in bandwidth usage and as well have web-friendly licensing with it. We should look at alternative to H.264, Theora and Vorbis fit every part of this.

One of the biggest benefit of HTML5 video player is that it frees you from proprietiery flash players or Microsoft's Silverlight. Now you can add a small line of code to run video.