the end of life for flash player (HTML5)

[Gregory Maxwell]

2009/6/8 Kelly Miller <lightsolphoenix at gmail.com>:
> Thanks to Apple, that isn't going to be happening.  Apple's pushing for the
> required default video codec to be the aforementioned nonfree MPEG4/H.264
> codec, and they don't seem to care whether it can be shipped by anybody
> else.

Perhaps pedantry but for the sake of accuracy:

Some of the patent holders in the MPEG-LA patent pool (Apple and
Nokia) pushed hard for there to be no royalty-free baseline
recommended in the standard. I'm not aware of anyone, Apple included,
pushing for H.264 in the standard since the adoption of an encumbered
format as formal formal default is simply a complete non-starter.

What Apple has done is ship systems which can only play H.264 using
the video tag out of the box. You could accurately accuse Apple of
pushing for H.264 as a defacto standard, but not a "required default".

For desktop Safari usage Ogg/Theora+Vorbis support can be added by
installing the XiphQT codec package. While requiring an install was
unfortunate flash itself is an existence proof that required
installations don't make wide adoption impossible.  The apple desktops
also have decent Java support and websites can fall back to java
playback. (Theoretically Flash playback of Ogg/Theora is also possible
now; but the intersection of Flash gurus and free software developers
is nearly the empty set)