Position Paper for the W3C Video On The Web Workshop
software December 12th, 2007We believe that an open Web requires open formats, including codecs that anyone can implement and freely distribute. Therefore we favour codecs with an open source reference implementation and royalty-free patent licensing so any implementor, whether their product is closed or open source, can freely distribute their product. We believe the open source Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis codecs meet these requirements and we intend to distribute these codecs in Firefox.
With regards to video/audio codecs we believe it is important to have a ‘baseline’ codec that all implementors support. Without this it becomes difficult for content providers to provide video in a format suitable for playback across all platforms.
We therefore encourage support for Theora and Vorbis as baseline codecs. We do not object to supporting other codecs that may be available to the user, and intend to do so in Firefox at some point in the future.
