Ogg Theora vs. H.264

I really don’t care who “wins” the “standard” for html5 video, they both have their upsides.

Ogg has the clear advantage of being an open format. Even if Gruber has a valid point comparing it to GIF.

H.264 has the overwhelming advantage of market penetration. I don’t know one video recored that uses Ogg as a format but I know a ton that use H.264.

But, it’s not only about production of the video, you can alway convert it…right? Not exactly.

After trying very hard to get firefox to work with a video I converted this weekend, I must say ff is broken and it’s all because of undetermined spec that limits it’s own ability to play video that Chrome will play perfectly fine;

even worse the same video file would play within FF if dragged straight into the window.

So, while I can export my video to H.264 from a handful of easy to use applications on any OS I have to use the command line to convert an Ogg file. After that, I find the bigest supporter for Ogg can’t play the video that Chrome ( which supports both formats )

does

.

Basically, if FF is going to support OGG and not support H.264 they better get their shit together. Because, it’s not possible for Mozilla to make a better case against H.264 without Ogg being simple to use — that includes fixing their browser.