Video in the Web
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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Philippe le Hegaret
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- Published:
The W3C Members are now invited to formally review a proposal for a W3C Activity on Video in the Web. Feel free to pitch in as well.
Three charters are proposed:
It is expected that this activity will be significantly revised in the near future to implement additional steps mentioned at the workshop:
- Codecs and containers
- Best practices for video and audio content
Although we have a draft charter for a Best Practices Group, we are still actively investigating the video codecs situation and therefore would like to work on them further before starting a formal review. We decided to request review of a smaller proposal rather than wait further.
I can't reiterate enough the importance of video codecs for the Web, so it's definitively a big lack in the current proposal. We're still looking at this and trying to come up with a path forward. There is not a single week where I don't devote some amount of time on that one.
By the way, I tried to address all the comments sent to public-video-comments@w3.org. If you don't think that one of them was addressed properly or at all, please accept my apologizes and make sure to send me a note pointing them out. I haven't thoroughly tracked all the comments so it's possible that I missed some of them, even if I addressed all the others in the same message. And if I happened not to follow your recommendation, you'll get at least an answer from me at the minimum.
I'm still pretty disturbed on why Theora has been completely dropped out of negotiations on use in video for the Web. Quality is similar to Xvid at similar encoding rates and file size, so quality is not a concern. And neither is performance: Theora was made with lower-end hardware in mind, so the portable market should seize it, not shun it.
Then people say there may be a problem with an unlikely but possible submarine patent in Theora, and if this is a concern why has nobody done a patent search yet? Is the W3C telling the world that its members cannot help pool enough money for a patent search? Or is all this nothing but a distraction to the fact corporations like Apple want to milk their patents on the unnecessarily complex MPEG-4?
I don't get it. Even software implementations are already there and available on BSD-like licenses which benefit mostly the corporations who wouldn't need to spend unnecessary money to create their own implementations, unless of course they would like to optimize them for specific platforms and, if that would be the case, God bless them.
Is it then a concern about content? There's already quite a large amount of content here thanks to the efforts of enthusiatic users, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Free Software communities, etc. And more will follow.
Jack
P.S: You hereby have permission to post the above publically and wherever else you may want to.
I am also concerned with the lack of addressing of the free codec issue. The w3c really should be leading a public patent search effort for the theora codec. Mozilla is waffling on shipping theora mainly because of patent concerns. Hopefully Mozilla will do the right thing... But w3c really needs to step up and do the right thing as well if the properties of the open web are going to transition to audio/video content.