74 Chapter 4—Video and Audio
Figure 4.2 Schematic representation of a video container formatOne bone of contention during the creation of the HTML5 specification was the
definition of allowed audio and video codecs. These debates were caused on one
hand by commercial interests of companies holding patents for certain coding
processes and on the other by the desire to choose a capable and high-quality
format. More precisely, the camp was divided into a group that supported the
patent-protected video codec H.264 and another group (led by the Mozilla team)
calling for the open-source format Ogg Theora. When Ian Hickson realized that
this conflict could endanger the important video element, he decided to take
the definition of the format out of the specification. It is now up to the browser
manufacturers to decide which formats they support and for which formats they
are willing to pay license fees.
Although Mozilla fought vehemently to avoid repeating the same mistake that
was made in the case of the image format GIF for which CompuServe later de-
manded license fees, H.264 seemed to be the favorite in the race for the new,
online video format. But Google did not want to passively await the misery of
potential patent infringements and decided to take care of the problem. By pur-
chasing the video specialist On2 Technologies, which had already developed im-
portant video formats, Google came to own the as yet unpublished codec VP8.
During the Google developer conference, Google-IO 2010, the software giant fi-
nally let the cat out of the bag: The new project WebM, based on the video codec
VP8 and the audio format Ogg Vorbis, was published as an open-source project
on the Internet at http://www.webmproject.org, and was soon after implement-
ed in Firefox and Opera.
In early 2011, Google even went one step further, announcing that support for
the H.264 codec would be removed from future versions of its Chrome browser.
The justification for this surprising step was that Google wants to enable open