[ Thanks to Steven J.
Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]
“A few hundred words from Google Product Manager Mike
Jazayeri announcing that Google would be supporting WebM and Ogg
Theroa instead of the H.264 video codec in Google Chrome for the
HTML5 video tag has lead to enormous controversy in browser and
video circles. Now, Google has explained in more detail what’s its
trying to do, and ends up defining the sides in the HTML5 video
fight.“In his latest post, Jazayeri said that the prior “announcement
was solely related to the HTML “Video” tag, which is part of the
emerging set of standards commonly referred to as “HTML5.” We
believe there is great promise in the tag and want to see it
succeed. As it stands, the organizations involved in defining the
HTML video standard are at an impasse. There is no agreement on
which video codec should be the baseline standard. Firefox and
Opera support the open WebM and Ogg Theora codecs and will not
support H.264 due to its licensing requirements; Safari and IE9
support H.264. With this status quo, all publishers and developers
using the tag will be forced to support multiple formats.””