Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonist
The wide adoption of the proprietary H.264 video codec pushed by Apple, and now MS, will kill open source browsers.
The only hope for open source browsers and open video on the web, is the possibility that Google opens VP8, which it acquired for $125 million recently.
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You're going overboard with this. VP8 shares a common ancestor with Ogg Theora, and would likely face similar patent issues. It's not a magic bullet. And while MPEG-LA could conceivably do an about-face in 2015 and decide to demand exorbitant license fees from free and open-source projects for h.264, they've shown no inclination to do so thus far. There's no real upside for them to - they wouldn't be able to collect much from a bunch of projects that immediately went belly-up because they couldn't afford the fees, and they'd spark a PR nightmare to boot.
I would feel better if there were an open, patent-clear, highly-optimized codec available that everyone agreed on, but there isn't. Like I said before, h.264 seems like the best of a bad lot.