Ryan Paul, via Ars Technica, highlights Mozilla’s $100,000 donation to its collaborative initiative with the Wikimedia Foundation to improve open standards-based technology for video on the web. Excerpt:
Open Web standards have evolved considerably over the years and browser compatibility is better than ever, but one important area where standards are just starting to catch up is support for streaming video. Proprietary browser plugins are used extensively across the web to play video from popular sites. This creates serious lock-in risk and gives proprietary software vendors like Adobe a lot of control over the medium.
… Mozilla and the Wikimedia Foundation have launched an initiative to help improve the quality of open, standards-based video technology.
Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation a $100,000 grant intended to fund development of the Ogg container format and the Theora and Vorbis media codecs. These open media codecs are thought to be unencumbered by software patents, which means that they can be freely implemented and used without having to pay royalties or licensing fees to patent holders. This differentiates Ogg Theora from many other formats that are widely used today.
The Ogg development improvements will be coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. The organization uses Ogg for virtually all of its rich media, which makes it one of the largest open media format adopters on the Internet. In a statement published at the organization’s Web site, Wikimedia deputy director Erik Möller expressed his support for the initiative and explained that open formats are needed to ensure the availability of free content in unrestricted formats.
