IE9 will support VP8 and H.264 video
windowsteamblog.com
windowsteamblog.com
1) If the user already has a VP8 codec on the machine, it will use that.
2) One way to get the codec would be installing an IE9 plugin, similar to how you have to install a plugin for Flash.
Would be great to see some official clarification though.
This is absolutely insane.
In other words it will work just as well as any other codec that requires support to be installed?
But still, if the user has to download something to support it, how is that better (or different) for the user than a plugin?
Most Windows 7 users have it in the base Windows install - no need to download a codec. But the MediaPlayer-less versions of Windows that the EU mandated MS produced don't ship with H.264.
This appears to be a partial reversal of that so that VP8 will be whitelisted and played as long as it's installed, but other random codecs won't. Which is probably a sensible security precaution.
Why not sandbox the video codec? It's not like it needs to even read more than a single given file. Heck. It's not like it even needs to read a file - it only needs a data-stream from where to read compressed frames and a callback pointer so that it can give them to whatever displays them.
>HTML5’s features are rather broad so whilst no word on HTML5 Canvas has been mentioned yet, Microsoft did commit to HTML5 Audio and Video which were demonstrated at their developer’s conference MIX10.
It smells like they are leaving room for their own media streaming formats and servers, and only nominally claiming some kind of support for VP8 without audio or file/streaming support. WebM needs all three to be an open platform for creating, streaming and consuming video content.
Idea for next blog post:
In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support canvas, svg, css3 when the user has installed a Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer.
So predictable...