The HTML 5 controversy, Ogg Theora vs H.264

HTML 5 is finally upon us.  The new standard for building websites has been in development for several years.  With the new version developers and users alike are seeing many new features, but the one that is getting the most attention is embedded video.  With HTML 5, embedded video will be played directly by your browser without the need for external plugins like Adobe Flash Player or Microsoft Silverlight.  You will be able to use the new HTML 5 <video> tag to define a video such as in the example below.

<video src="movie.ogg" width="320" height="240" controls="controls">
Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

As an Internet geek this is very exciting news, however, this feature is inciting a great deal of controversy.  The main debate has been deciding which video format will be the standard.  Unfortunately, the HTML 5 group is split among two, Ogg Theora and H.264.

The competitors

Ogg Theora is an open source format developed by the Xiph.org Foundation and as you can imagine it is preferred among the open source community because it can be freely distributed.  In addition, supporters of Ogg Theora claim that the video format is unencumbered by patents and offers better compression which makes it better suited to serve as a standard. 

H.264 was developed by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) along with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).  H.264 is a higher performing codec and has been widely used in the industry by some well-known companies such as YouTube and Apple.  The technology has also been used in Blu-ray Discs and a variety of television services.  Supporters of this format agree that its widespread support in the industry and quality make it the leader.

Supporters and arguments

The main supporters of Ogg Theora are the open source communities and applications which include Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Dailymotion and others.  These companies argue that the H.264 format will be too expensive to license and regardless of what others say the format could have its share of patent issues.

H.264 supporters such as Apple and Microsoft have different reasons as why they support the standard.  Apple has been a huge proponent of H.264 from the start since all of their software and hardware support it.  Plus, Apple claims Ogg Theora is riddled with patent issues and if the format became a standard many patent lawsuits could arise.

Who will win?

This debate has seen some unexpected changes and there could be more on the way.  Microsoft initially was a supporter for an open standard but for reasons unknown to many they have finally announced that Internet Explorer 9 will have support for the H.264 format.  This has left the open source community with a bad opinion of the industry giant and even more debates.  Apple has been on the H.264 side from the start and since Ogg Theora lacks the support for hardware based encoding, used in Apple’s mobile applications, they are unlikely to change their minds.  As Ogg Theora supporters, Mozilla Firefox and Opera like (change to “prefer”) open source and they don’t seem to be feeling any pressure to change their minds either. 

As a casual user you may think that H.264 will be winner but many argue that only a true open solution such as Ogg Theora fits the HTML standard, not a solution that requires licensing fees and is encumbered by patents.

This debate has become very tiresome and all developers want to see is a standard that allows for easier development.  Yes, open source is great and free, usually, but the support is sometimes non-existent.  So far this appears to be a losing battle for the open source community because of the wide spread support for H.264.  Even Flash has been using H.264 encoding for several years.  So, in a world where money and majority rule it seems H.264 will rise as the victor but for now let’s continue to debate.