IE9 preview ties the fight between H.264 and Ogg Theora

Written on March 18th, 2010 at 00:59 am by chia

With the ongoing fight about the codec technology to be used for the built-in video feature of HTML5, the decision of Microsoft for IE9 was looked upon as the major decider to bridge this major technology divide. But in IE9's preview this Tuesday, their decision to adopt H.264 technology proved to be heart breaker for Ogg Theora and open-source fan camp. Although this is not the final decision, but it is still a major chance that Microsoft can go with the proprietary H.264.

In case your memory needs a little refreshment, HTML5 introduced the <video> tag to provide built in video capability in browser and to get rid of the browser crasher flash softwares. Even though a browser updated to work with HTML5 still needs a codec technology like opensource and free Ogg Theora or proprietary H.264 to play the videos. Firefox and Opera decided to go with Ogg Theora, Safar wouldn't play anything other than H.264 encoded videos and the Grand Google Chrome is happy to support both of them. So, the score till now was in favour of Ogg Theora, 3-2. But IE9's decision to adopt H.264 has tied the whole scenario.

But this decision of Microsoft was anticipated. Just think, why would they not want to go with H.264. Consider the following points.

Microsoft owns many patents in this technology, which is licensed on behalf of Microsoft and several other patent holders by a group called the MPEG LA.
And common, who loves proprietary stuff? M$.
H.264 by most accounts provides better quality than Ogg Theora.
Windows 7 has included support for H.264.

Finally, after all the improvements done in HTML5 for a better web, it seems that the inbuilt video technology brought by <video> tag might take some time to be widely accepted because of this unanswered question, "which codec?".