Mozilla working on open video format
As if aiming to dominate the browser market wasn’t enough, Mozilla has set its sights on developing an open video format. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great initiative, as anybody whose suffered through encoding videos and finding the right codec can tell. According to Techcrunch, Mozilla will give a $100,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation for the development of Theora, an open-source video codec. It will also implement support for Theora and the lesser known Vorbis in Firefox. Let’s hope, as Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfeld believes, that Theora will truly become a serious competitor to MPEG4 and WMV.
Evangelist Christopher Blizzard explains why this is such an exciting project, focusing on the lack of openness of video formats, particularly when it comes to licences and rights. Theora could just be the codec that lets you turn elements of a video into images or docs and not worry about having to buy expensive software to produce or read the video itself. All in all, it would be a truly flexible video format. But then naturally you’d have issues of rights with the content found in the video. Could an mix with the codec and Creative Commons be a solution? Maybe it’s a step too soon, let’s first see how good the quality of Theora turns out to be and how well it spreads among users.
