Matt Patenaude’s Open Letter to Mozilla

Link

Matt Patenaude, developer of Bowtie and Bluebird, regarding Firefox and Ogg Theora support:

“Mozilla’s decision to use Ogg Theora and Vorbis for video and audio (respectively) is certainly admirable: personally, I would love an open codec to gain widespread industry notoriety and usage. The fact is, however, the production industry has already standardized on H.264. Nowadays, H.264 is perhaps the most common codec for Internet-distributed video, with the exception of Flash, much of which is encoded in H.264 anyway.

Content producers love H.264 because it works with their existing workflow tools, and there’s widespread hardware-level support for H.264 on a number of devices, including the iPhone and Android-based phones. The benefits brought by a switch to Ogg Theora — if any even exist — are vastly outweighed (for most content producers) by the time and effort required to make such a switch, and quite frankly, most producers don’t want to be serving up both H.264- and Ogg-encoded content.”

Could you say he’s wrong? You can’t deny H.264 has become pretty much a standard, and Firefox is still missing from the list of compatible browsers.

I think this time would be quite fair to follow the trend.