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The Future of Web Video, Part 1

Feb 16, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

HTML5? Someday. Ogg? Probably not.

I admit that the nexus is a bit tenuous, but if you're an Apple Final Cut Pro producer, you're undoubtedly producing for the Web. Over the past few months, you've been hearing that Flash is going away, H.264 is going away, and soon you'll have to produce all your video in an open-source video codec called Ogg Theora (of all things). Well I'm here to tell you why that won't happen, so you can push away all those scary, vicious rumors and go back to what you do all day.

This is a two-part article. Part 1 will take a look at HTML5 and what it can and can't do, and part 2 will focus on the future of Ogg Theora.

Starting from the beginning

Let me start from the beginning. Until about a year ago, most video playback in a browser occurred via a plug-in—usually Adobe Flash, but also Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, and Microsoft Silverlight. What's new about HTML5 is that it implements a video tag directly in the HTML code on the web page, so no external plug-in is required to play the video. However, instead of relying upon a plug-in to decode the video, the browser would have to ship with the codec necessary to decode the video.

In a perfect world, there would be one video codec, it would be free, and all the browser vendors could simply include the decode component with their browsers. We could all encode to that one format and the video would play in every browser, no plug-ins required.

As we all know, the world isn't perfect. As HTML5 stands today, there is support for multiple codecs, including Ogg Theora, H.264, MPEG-4, and Dirac. H.264 and MPEG-4 are encumbered by patents, and a browser vendor would have to pay up to $5 million to include H.264 playback in its browser. In contrast, Ogg and Dirac are generally considered to be free of patents, though many acknowledge that "submarine" patents may exist (patiently waiting below the surface) to pop up and claim royalties once its use becomes more mainstream (more on this below). So there is no single codec that will play on every browser without a plug-in.

Which browser supports HTML5 and which codec? Figure 1 shows the browser market share. Currently, though Microsoft has publicly come out in favor of the video tag, it doesn't ship any codec with Internet Explorer and continues to rely solely upon the Flash and Silverlight plug-ins. Mozilla Firefox supports HTML5 and includes Ogg Theora, but not H.264. Apple Safari includes H.264, but not Ogg. Google Chrome is the only browser that includes both codecs.

On its face, Microsoft's intransigence, combined with its market share, would seem the death knell for the HTML5 video tag. One potential workaround is Google Chrome Frame, a plug-in that delivers HTML5-type capabilities to IE, but I tried it on two computers and succeeded only in crashing YouTube's HTML5 trial page every time I tried to load it. Two computers do not an exhaustive trial make, but if you Google "Chrome Frame crashing," you'll get more than 780,000 hits, so at least one or two other folks met the same fate. Besides, I'm not sure how many actual users will grok the zeitgeist of loading one plug-in (Chrome Frame) to avoid having to load another (Flash, Silverlight, or QuickTime).

Fear not, however; there's a better solution. Specifically, you can create code with alternate tags that will serve the video to all relevant browsers. For example, Camen Design has a Video for Everybody site with code that will first try Ogg Theora playback via the video tag on browsers that support it, then QuickTime playback if HTML5 fails, and then Flash. Other sites have implemented the video tag for both H.264 (for Chrome/Safari) and Ogg video (Firefox or Chrome, which will play the file listed first if both are available), with fallback to Flash if the browser doesn't support HTML5.

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
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