Sun, 24 Jan 2010
H.264, Firefox and the <video> element
Recently some Mozilla developers (1, 2) have been trying to justify the lack of support of the HTML 5 <video> element in Firefox for the system-provided codecs (e.g. GStreamer, DirectShow and so on).
While I fully agree that patented codecs like H.264 are very bad for the Internet, it is not clear to me how watching H.264 video with the proprietary Flash plugin would help promoting unencumbered codecs more than watching H.264 video without using non-free software.
Beware: if your position is that there is no need to watch H.264 Youtube videos then please refrain from wasting your and my time with a reply, because you are missing the point (and probably many others as well).