As you probably know, Youtube is owned and operated by Google Inc. Right now, the Web is slowly starting to migrate to HTML5. HTML5 is a new standard of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the official markup language of the WWW. The HTML5 standards propose certain tags to show video and audio content.
So far, Youtube has used Flash to load videos, decode them, and then show them directly to the user.
However, in HTML5, using Flash to display videos is against the standards which propose the <video> tag should be used. However, Youtube uses H.264 codec to encode their videos. With Flash, everything was fine because these videos were decoded by the Flash program and the user couldn’t see the underlying architecture. But now, the browser and the user’s system are responsible for decoding videos. That would not be a problem – but a license for H.264 codec costs millions of dollars on annual basis.
Google is developing Google Chrome and Apple is developing Safari. Both of them have billions of dollars and Google and Apple could buy a license for decoding H.264 in a browser and that wouldn’t be a real hit to the budget. However, Mozilla is a non-profit organisation. They don’t have sufficient money to buy the license, therefore, Firefox will not be able to decode Youtube videos and people will not be able to view them in Firefox browser (in HTML5). Same goes for Opera Foundation which is also a non-profit organization. At the present moment, that is not much of a problem, but for a couple of years the whole web will migrate to HTML5 and only Firefox and Opera would be still using Youtube’s HTML4.1 standard because they are unable to buy license to decode H.264 videos.
We must face that H.264 is the best codec for this kind of use, but thousands of users will have to migrate from Firefox and Opera in order to see Youtube in HTML5 (it is possible right now, as TestTube). We want an open web and we request from Youtube to use open media codecs for HTML5 videos, which are free and open-source. Those are Vorbis and Theora.
And we ask you to join the fight. Many people speculate that it’s Google’s move to popularize Google Chrome – all Windows users will be limited to Chrome for watching Youtube in HTML5. So – if you want to help us – please sign the petition for the sake of the open web.
