This is rather significant. I think there's a strong chance that VP7 & 8 will get outsourced for canvas use, thus circumventing every patent argument about codecs. It will be especially amusing to watch Apple get taken out at the knees for citing patent issues surrounding OGG Theora even as it backs the absurdly expensive H.264.
More interestingly, a broadly-adopted canvas codec might have implications for the future of desktop encoding which -- for the most part -- still uses the MPEG4 advanced simple profile a la DiVX or XViD.
Does anyone else here think that the whole video tag thing isn't going to work out well? I think Kevin Rose put it best when he pointed out that with flash and silverlight you can prepend your videos with unskippable ads thus allowing you to monetize your video content. Also, with flash or silverlight it's a lot easier to separate ads from content allowing you to switch up the ads without having to re-encode the video. I think this is the biggest hurdle that the HTML5 video standard is going to have to overcome before sites such as Revision3 and other internet TV sites will adopt it.
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
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More interestingly, a broadly-adopted canvas codec might have implications for the future of desktop encoding which -- for the most part -- still uses the MPEG4 advanced simple profile a la DiVX or XViD.