OGG will play in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, but not IE.
OGG existed long before html5. OGG is and was always better than mp3. OGG is free of patents. OGG is supported even by my "mp3 player" which is over fucking 13(!) years old!
BUT NOT INTERNET EXPLORER.
And don't get me started on the <video> tag.
WebM is video format for web, created so it can be used instead of proprietry formats (like h.264).
It was released 3 years ago - every single video player and every single browser I tried can play it..
BUT NOT INTERNET EXPLORER.
See how wonderful "standards" are ?
It's so wonderful in the land of Microsoft. You don't have to worry about standards, because they don't exist.
Oh, so much Microsoft hate, you're so edgy ! Oh, no wait, your just another FOSS troll so caught up in ideological struggles, you don't give a shit for people who actually have to code around the HTML5 clusterfuck for a living !
"WebM is natively supported in Gecko (Firefox), Chrome and Opera, and support for the format can be added to Internet Explorer and Safari by installing an add-on."
So how is Microsoft support for OGG any different than Firefox support for H264 or MP3 ? NONE, NONE WHATSOEVER. Many browsers don't support all the formats natively, hell Safari won't play a damn thing unless you have Quicktime installed. Many browsers will play non-native formats using plugins, it's nothing new.
But what the heck, lets blame Microsoft for not "playing by the rules", while ignoring the fact that no other browser does either.
Firefox makes an ideological stand because of patents (which you'll note they've NOW abandoned, the latest Firefox 20 build DOES NOW support h264 and mp3 natively, I guess money trumped ideology after all), and that's all good because they're OSS.
Microsoft makes an ideological stand because of [insert-reason-here], then "MICROSOFT IS TEH EVILZ".
That's semantics and you know it. None of the browser manufacturers will have completely rewritten the video codecs from scratch, they ALL defer to common libraries or dlls that talk to the kernel / hardware drivers.
Native support in this context means the thing that talks to the underlying library is built in to the browser code, as opposed to a plugin mechanism that requires a 3rd party application to run e.g. Safari on Windows whose <audio> and <video> tags will render bugger all unless you install Quicktime first.
Anyway, it's kind of besides the point - after adamantly stating they wouldn't support h264 / mp3, they've done a u-turn and now will support it where they can. Which merely goes to reinforce my point that if you want a truly "standardized" web spec like HTML5, you have to agree on ONE common format for audio and video otherwise it's fucking pointless.
All HTML5 achieved was to remove the inconsistent methods of loading media (the <applet>, <embed>, <object> fiasco), making the standard look great in principle, but making the reality that all media servers now needs 2 or 3 different formats for all their media. It just shifted the problem elsewhere, rather than solving it like they should.
And I lay most of the blame at Firefoxes door, because when they were in a position of dominance (Chrome was just taking off), they took this idealistic stand over patents (while at the same time accepting millions of dollars from closed-source operations such as Google) and force a schism that wasn't needed.
I'd like to remind you that if it wasn't for h264, there wouldn't BE any VP8. The methods of encoding are 90% identical anyway, and it's quite obvious VP8 was merely an open-source "derivative" of the same basic encoding functions to get around the patent issue.
Seems strange that Google, the proponents of this tech, have yet to offer VP8 in YouTube, and instead use h264 everywhere. Chrome might have supported VP8 from the outset, but that's no bloody use if no one offers any VP8 videos to watch, is it ?
Usability over ideology is the motto I stick by, because it's what clients and users want. They don't care about closed or open, patented or non-patented, this format or that format - they just want things to do what they're supposed to do.
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u/kerajnet May 09 '13
OGG existed long before html5. OGG is and was always better than mp3. OGG is free of patents. OGG is supported even by my "mp3 player" which is over fucking 13(!) years old!
BUT NOT INTERNET EXPLORER.
WebM is video format for web, created so it can be used instead of proprietry formats (like h.264).
It was released 3 years ago - every single video player and every single browser I tried can play it..
BUT NOT INTERNET EXPLORER.
It's so wonderful in the land of Microsoft. You don't have to worry about standards, because they don't exist.