Video Revolution from W3C: Encoding Software Must Be Free
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Just as authoring software for Web page authoring is free, so should video encoding, said Philippe Le Hegaret, Architect Domain Leader at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3) headed by Tim Berners-Lee.

Video encoding, the essential process in which video is compressed and converted for the Web, is a patented process controlled by Adobe, Microsoft, ON2 and others. These companies and industry associations license software called codecs, to be used in various formats including Flash, H.264, WMV and Silverlight.

The W3C advocates a revolutionary idea: the availability a royalty-free encoding technology so anyone can create video without having to pay.

An open-source, free codec called Theora, is about to get wide visibility with its emergence on the latest versions of the Mozilla and Opera browsers, where it is in very early Alpha. PC Week reported on this earlier this week.

Theora is an early version of an On2 codec which was released by the company for the open source community. It has been developed by Xiph.

Philippe is not sure that Theora is the answer to royalty-free encoding as there are complex patent law issues, but it's an important development, he says.

In a glimpse of likely patent battles ahead, just this week, Nokia raised objections to W3C's approach to free codecs.

Phillipe was in New York today where he was a speaker at the Web Video Summit. He was on a panel about video search moderated by the Silicon Alley Insider himself Henry Blodget. Other panelists were Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake and Thomas Wilde, CEO of EveryZing.

Tomorrow at Cisco's San Jose headquarters, he will co-chair an international panel on the future of Web video with a video conference hook-up with colleagues in Cisco's Brussels office.

Who needs to sit in some fancy video conference room, when you can watch Philippe right here on the purple channel. Delighted to share this with you.

Next installment of the interview, Philippe talks about the future of video on the "semantic Web" and the organization of metadata.

-- Andy Plesser

Posted on Beet.TV on Tuesday, December 11, 2007

http://www.beet.tv/2007/12/revolution-vide.html

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Hampton said: 1 year ago

It would be great if this video was also available in Ogg Theora, since it is supported by BLIP.tv

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