I think that's correct. The current draft specifies that an implementation (browser) may support any video codec or no codec at all (e.g. lynx). There's a lot going into the determination of which codec to use if more than one might be appropriate. As wmf mentioned about - DRM and dynamic streaming, I'm wondering the same but I think that can be handled by appropriate codecs. (Which may be just moving the plug-in issue to be one involving codecs, but let's hope popular browsers will ship with sufficiently useful ones.)

The whatwg draft is really quite interesting...

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video-and...