Google Chrome

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

>  Firefox 3.6 claims to support the latter (but not "both").  I
>  haven't really tried it.

>  Isn't MP4 patent encumbered?

Yes, not only is MP4 patent encumbered, but if you use the video streams
produced by H.264/MP4 "for commercial purposes" you have to pay a
royalty for those streams on a per megabyte basis also.  It gets really
complex.

I imagine that the chrome browser may go out with hardware where the
royalty has been paid on the hardware. A lot of the new CPU and video
chips have H.264 hardware decoding built in, so the royalty would have
to be paid on the hardware already.  Or Google will have a "paid up"
license for the royalty on a per-year basis and therefore can afford to
ship Chrome browsers to their heart's content, something that the
Mozilla foundation can not afford.

So after a while people will say "I can use Chrome and see it all, or I
can use Firefox and see the Theora stuff unless I do this song and dance
and download things of questionable legality, then I can see the MP4
stuff."

People who have free websites might want to consider whether they want
to encode their video streams in Theora and tell people to get a free
browser (assuming that Steve allows a Theora browser on his operating
systems) or encode their video streams in MP4 and hope that the MP4
associations keep their licensing for "free" sites the same, or encode
their stuff in both and use double the CPU time for encoding, disk
storage, and keep track of who downloads how many megabytes of what.

Not good.

md