"when the user has installed a VP8 codec" is an interesting caveat they made sure to mention twice. Is the user going to have to download something additional? If they have another browser installed with VP8 support does that install it in a way that IE will use it? If it doesn't ship with the browser, its nice that they will support it, but it's not as big a deal as shipping with support built-in.
Microsoft shoves so many automatic updates in Windows as-is... they ought to just shove a codec down that pipeline too. Unless they still want H.264 to win...
Is it possible to detect which codecs are installed using javascript? Having to throw up a "You need to install this thingie from over here" is bad, but a lot better than just getting a default "something is broken with the file you're trying to play" message" a'la Windows Media Player.
>HTML5’s features are rather broad so whilst no word on HTML5 Canvas has been mentioned yet, Microsoft did commit to HTML5 Audio and Video which were demonstrated at their developer’s conference MIX10.
Just last week they announced that IE would only support the H.264 codec. They didn't get into details but it was clear that even if you had e.g. Theora installed they wouldn't use it for HTML5 video tags.
This appears to be a partial reversal of that so that VP8 will be whitelisted and played as long as it's installed, but other random codecs won't. Which is probably a sensible security precaution.
> Which is probably a sensible security precaution.
Why not sandbox the video codec? It's not like it needs to even read more than a single given file. Heck. It's not like it even needs to read a file - it only needs a data-stream from where to read compressed frames and a callback pointer so that it can give them to whatever displays them.
Previously you had to use Windows Media Player, Quicktime, etc. specifically to play back videos in IE. Now you will be able to use <video> and IE will look for video codecs (instead of browser plugins) to decode that video for you. A significant improvement.
I was under the impression that any codec supported by the system (Quicktime or Windows Media Player) could be embedded/played, e.g. that while Apple wouldn't support Theora by default, it would work if you had the Theora codec installed for QT. Not sure where I got that from, it could well be very wrong.
But still, if the user has to download something to support it, how is that better (or different) for the user than a plugin?
Most Windows 7 users have it in the base Windows install - no need to download a codec. But the MediaPlayer-less versions of Windows that the EU mandated MS produced don't ship with H.264.
There was an article earlier on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361442) that talked about there still being patent concerns with the new codec and so it seems like Microsoft may wanting to avoid being named in any potential suits by requiring the end user to install the codec rather than providing it by default.
What are the implications of "when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows"? Does this mean users will have to install the codec for VP8 videos to be playable in IE? If so, that seems like a half-measure...
The implication is that Microsoft realizes that some people, believe it or not, might want to use VP8 in a context other than web video, and so the proper place for the codec is installed as part of the system, where it can be used by all video playback software, instead of built into the browser where it is only useful for web video.
If that's what they want to do, they could still have the IE9 installer install the codec system-wide, but it doesn't sound like that's what they intend to do.
The IEBlog (and all other MSDN blogs) is down for maintenance and cannot take comments, which is why the post is on Windows Blog. People can voice feedback via the comments on the blog post should they choose to :)
Obviously a desire to avoid being sued for patent infringement. But, with google shipping VP8 as part of chrome, wouldn't any patent holders go after them as well? Doesn't google provide some form of air cover for other browser makers that might want to include VP8 in their browser?
My sneaking suspicion is that the video element in IE 9 will happily play any video for which a codec is installed. It'll of course guarantee H.264 since the codec ships with all supported versions of Windows, but there's no real reason for it to refuse to play a video it has a codec for.
Both Adobe and Microsoft seem to be talking about VP8 only, not the full WebM stack including Vorbis audio and Matroska containers.
It smells like they are leaving room for their own media streaming formats and servers, and only nominally claiming some kind of support for VP8 without audio or file/streaming support. WebM needs all three to be an open platform for creating, streaming and consuming video content.
This says that they'll support VP8 as an installed codec, but this doesn't tell us much about WebM. What about the container format, Matroksa? Vorbis audio support?
They'll have to support all three or it won't work. I'm guessing that Google is actually writing the code so all MS has to do is add Google's Media Foundation components to the IE 9 whitelist.
