We look at how to add HTML 5 video to your website
Theora
Free software proponents have advocated the open Theora video format (with its matching Vorbis audio codec), which requires no licencing fees at all and has implementations immediately ready to use. But Theora has been criticised on a number of grounds: It isn't as technologically advanced as other codecs; there isn't much material encoded in the format, so current video would have to be recoded; and Theora's patent status could be subjected to future legal challenges (something Steve Jobs has hinted at).
VP8
A more evolved version of the Theora codec family (they share common ancestors), VP8 was developed by On2 Technologies, which also created one of Flash's video codecs. Google has since purchased On2 outright, and while Google now owns the patent for VP8, it's allowing unrestricted use of the codec without licensing fees under the banner of 'the WebM Project'. (WebM is Google's name for VP8 video plus Vorbis audio.)
This makes VP8 sound like a sure thing, but there are two problems. The first is that there are serious questions about how polished the spec is - a factor that has serious implications for, say, hardware devices that shoot video directly in VP8. If VP8 is going to be in flux, then cameras that shoot video in VP8 would need to be firmware-upgradable (and have updates published by their makers) to use newer, better performing versions of the codec.
Another problem is VP8's quality and compression efficiency compared to H.264. One analysis, by Jason Garrett-Glaser, a developer on the FFmpeg project, has put the quality of VP8 on a par with H.264's 'baseline' spec - in other words, good but not great, and with H.264 way out in front in certain respects. He also believes that VP8's spec relies way too much on the snippets of code provided by Google. Most specifications for a standard (like the < video > tag itself) are drafted and discussed in depth before a single line of code is written; in Garrett-Glaser's view, the only real VP8 spec we have right now is the code, a cart-before-the-horse situation.
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