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Comment by kogir | Hacker News Reader

Why can't firefox just use the already licensed codec for H264 present on the majority of OSs if it's present? Then they'll have support for Therora and H264 on OS X and Windows, and Theora support on Linux.

Costs them nothing and is a win for most of their users.

Am I missing something obvious? I hope they're using DirectShow and Quicktime already anyway for the hardware acceleration.

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And why can't other browsers integrate an Ogg codec? It would cost them nothing. The img tag supports several formats, so why should browser developers decide which video codec web companies should use? Especially if their choice is one that costs millions per year. Mozilla is right to promote the free option for us all. They should add Matroska/Dirac/Vorbis in the future, just like they support both JPEG and PNG.

why is codec support even a browser issue? the system is supposed to manage my codecs, and the browser is supposed to use system APIs to play any and all videos i have a codec for.

i'm guessing this is because linux doesn't have a single video codec API, but everything has to explicitly link against codec libraries...

Desktop distributions do have single video codec API (gstreamer).

But browsers are unlikely to use OS-provided libraries for anything downloaded over net, if they can avoid it. If there is a exploit found in third-party code, the browsers cannot work around it and they get the blame (remember the Firefox-on-Windows shell exploit?).

The whole point is to have a video element that any browser that implements html 5 can play, regardless of the system codecs.

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