Chris Blizzard reports from this week’s Mozilla Summit: Firefox will natively support the Ogg Theora video format!

The Ogg Theora format is a codec (like .mp3 or .mp4), but it’s different than most. The majority of codecs make software developers liable for expensive royalty fees when their programs can create or play back the patented media format. Ogg Theora is completely patent and royalty free.

Anyone using Firefox will be able stream Ogg Theora video without downloading or installing any extra software. Mozilla will never be liable to pay patent licensing fees for the codec. Website creators will be able to embed Ogg Theora videos using simple html

We will likely see this in the next release of Firefox.

This is incredibly exciting news and may be the defining stroke that eventually cracks the closed codec oligopoly. The open codec movement and transition will take time to mature, but we’ll be advocating all the more strongly for these open formats!

Note: Miro currently supports Ogg Theora video

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 8:27 pm. Both comments and pings are currently closed.