Serve html5-video (ogg/mp4), flash, QT, and WMP with only two video encodes

"OGG file for Firefox 3.5, and one MP4 file for everything else (Flash / Safari / iPhone)." I think this illustrates the problem with FF's choice of codecs-- you could do this all with one encode!

Also, the iPhone's supported h.264 profile lacks major features that other platforms (ie Flash) support. Serving one encode downsampled to the iPhone's limited profile is serving to the lowest common denominator. Serving a smaller iPhone-only copy and a second copy with B-frames and more efficient encoding would not only be smaller but would look a lot better too!

Does anyone know if there's any plans to support <video> for other codecs?

I don't see how the WMP fallback works, given that XP and Vista don't include Ogg or MP4. Maybe the author thinks it works because he has a codec pack installed.

And this is why practically everyone uses Flash regardless of the problems it has: 98% of users have it installed and you can use a single encode for everyone. Even better, that single encode is the best possible encode you can get, since Flash supports practically unrestricted H.264 playback.

HTML5 is going to be a compatibility nightmare. Of course, this has nothing to do with W3C, but rather the fact that nobody involved can make any agreement on what the standardized format should be, so there just isn't any (and not enough browser vendors have the cajones to do what Google is doing and bundle ffmpeg).

This is exciting, but in Safari 4 I saw no video. Using OSX 10.4 Intel.

Man that's ugly. I thought the idea was to make this stuff simple?