nerach said:
Aninhumer said:
Mozilla and others are still perfectly able to use the OS's video libraries to play the video, an approach which makes much more sense from a technical point of view regardless of legal factors. Since both Win7 and OSX can play h264 out of the box, and most Linux distros have easy access to packages available which allow it, this wouldn't be a problem.
Yeah... but no !
Forcing people to do something illegal isn't a good think even if it's easy / with low-risk.
Currently people use a licensed binary h264 decoder embedded in the flash plugin to play web video.
In order to remain legal (in the US), they would have to use a licensed binary h264 plugin with firefox to play HTML5 videos.
However, with Flash, users for whom software patents are not an issue are still being forced to use a binary plugin for which there is no free software alternative (that actually works well).
With HTML5, those users are free to use their perfectly good ffmpeg decoder to play the video.
So no one is being forced to do anything illegal.
They are just being made ABLE to do something illegal.
Now obviously, you can argue that if Google just used Ogg Theora the problems would go away, but there are so many technical issues with doing so, that it will never happen.
Not least, Theora is not even remotely competitive with h264.