Open Standards - Credit: developer.mozilla.org
Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation $100,000 to fund the development of the Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis.
Mozilla is integrating support for the Ogg format directly into Firefox 3.1, so the next version of the popular open source web browser will be able to play Ogg media without requiring any plugins or external software. The Ogg format will be supported through Firefox’s implementation of the HTML 5 video element, which allows video to be seamlessly interwoven with conventional HTML content and manipulated through the DOM. Mozilla has recently demonstrated the video element feature being used for streaming video. Opera is also integrating standards-based video support into its browser and has a working implementation of Ogg for HTML 5.
Although the technology is starting to fall into place, it will take time for the standard to be supported broadly enough to encourage adoption by sites that stream rich media. The lack of DRM support inherent in the open implementation will also likely impede adoption by major commercial content creators. Standards-based solutions may never manage to displace Flash, but the first big steps need to be taken for this to even be a possibility.
Yay for free codecs.