Firefox 3.5: what's in a number

[ Thanks to greenitguru for this link. ]

"Although there's a lot of good stuff in there, for me the key one is the support for HTML5 and elements. As well as giving Firefox some amazing capabilities in terms of embedding and manipulating videos, these new features are important for another aspect: their support of the Vorbis codec for Ogg audio, and the Theora codec for video.

"Here's what theora.org says:

"Theora is a free and open video compression format from the Xiph.org Foundation. Like all our multimedia technology it can be used to distribute film and video online and on disc without the licensing and royalty fees or vendor lock-in associated with other formats.

"As readers of this blog will be aware, all the other video (and audio) formats generally used, even by open source systems, are patent-encumbered. Theora and Vorbis offer the first free alternatives to them that are good enough to be used by the general public without anyone noticing (trade-offs between quality and freedom don't go down too well in that neck of the woods)."

Complete Story

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