Why is there no common HTML5 video codec standard for all browsers?

Question

I am developing an HTML5 player on Windows, but I have some real difficulties to make a real cross-browser and platform HTML5 video player:

1. It seems that Firefox and safari have different format support on their video tag, .ogg for Firefox, mp4 based for Safari.

2. Meanwhile Firefox supports the .ogg format without further plugins, Apple Safari needs the Quicktime plug-in for playing mp4 video in the tag video. This doesn't sound good.

Apple hates Flash for its CPU consumption and extra plug-in, but for itself requires a Quicktime plug-in for playing video on HTML5. Why don't these browsers use a standard?

Answer 1

Quite simple.

Video is historically a minefield with regards to patents. People from the opensource world do not have the money to pay MPEG-LA consortium which controls H264. On the other hand, the codec proposed by Google and implemented by Firefox and Opera is felt as risky by company such as Apple, Nokia, or Microsoft. The issue is still not yet solved, but there is progress on discussions.

There was a very good summarizing post about it. I will try to find it again.

• A good article on how to use the video element in your document
• An excellent summary article about the issues

Answer 2

Actually, the HTML5 standards body was going to standardize on OGG (with the ability to use other codecs, as previous HTML versions would have said).

Most of the major players who already had a license with MPEG-4 said "screw you guys, we've already paid for a site license (and are part of the MPEG-4 consortium) so we're going to screw over the standards body".