

IE9 will support VP8 and H.264 video - zaatar
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx

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johns
"when the user has installed a VP8 codec" is an interesting caveat they made
sure to mention twice. Is the user going to have to download something
additional? If they have another browser installed with VP8 support does that
install it in a way that IE will use it? If it doesn't ship with the browser,
its nice that they will support it, but it's not as big a deal as shipping
with support built-in.

~~~
rbanffy
Does it mean that IE8 would be unable to play a given video even with the
proper codec installed?!

This is absolutely insane.

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tvon
> _In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as
> VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows._

In other words it will work just as well as any other codec that requires
support to be installed?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Just last week they announced that IE would _only_ support the H.264 codec.
They didn't get into details but it was clear that even if you had e.g. Theora
installed they wouldn't use it for HTML5 video tags.

This appears to be a partial reversal of that so that VP8 will be whitelisted
and played as long as it's installed, but other random codecs won't. Which is
probably a sensible security precaution.

~~~
rbanffy
> Which is probably a sensible security precaution.

Why not sandbox the video codec? It's not like it needs to even read more than
a single given file. Heck. It's not like it even needs to read a file - it
only needs a data-stream from where to read compressed frames and a callback
pointer so that it can give them to whatever displays them.

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stuntmouse
"As we said at MIX recently, when it comes to HTML5, we’re all in." Canvas
too?

~~~
endtime
As soon as I read that sentence, I wondered the same. Sadly, no news yet, at
least according to
[http://www.osnews.com/story/23229/IE9_HTML5_Video_Will_Be_H2...](http://www.osnews.com/story/23229/IE9_HTML5_Video_Will_Be_H264_Only).

>HTML5’s features are rather broad so whilst no word on HTML5 Canvas has been
mentioned yet, Microsoft did commit to HTML5 Audio and Video which were
demonstrated at their developer’s conference MIX10.

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brolewis
There was an article earlier on HN
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361442>) that talked about there still
being patent concerns with the new codec and so it seems like Microsoft may
wanting to avoid being named in any potential suits by requiring the end user
to install the codec rather than providing it by default.

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enomar
What are the implications of "when the user has installed a VP8 codec on
Windows"? Does this mean users will have to install the codec for VP8 videos
to be playable in IE? If so, that seems like a half-measure...

~~~
tzs
The implication is that Microsoft realizes that some people, believe it or
not, might want to use VP8 in a context other than web video, and so the
proper place for the codec is installed as part of the system, where it can be
used by all video playback software, instead of built into the browser where
it is only useful for web video.

~~~
zweben
If that's what they want to do, they could still have the IE9 installer
install the codec system-wide, but it doesn't sound like that's what they
intend to do.

------
zaatar
The IEBlog (and all other MSDN blogs) is down for maintenance and cannot take
comments, which is why the post is on Windows Blog. People can voice feedback
via the comments on the blog post should they choose to :)

~~~
jf
Thanks for posting this to HN Ravi!

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ghshephard
Obviously a desire to avoid being sued for patent infringement. But, with
google shipping VP8 as part of chrome, wouldn't any patent holders go after
them as well? Doesn't google provide some form of air cover for other browser
makers that might want to include VP8 in their browser?

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dschobel
Am I crazy or is the absence of a single mention of Google in that post
completely conspicuous?

~~~
henrikschroder
It's standard for any communication from Microsoft to never name their
competitors if they can avoid it.

------
kogir
My sneaking suspicion is that the video element in IE 9 will happily play any
video for which a codec is installed. It'll of course guarantee H.264 since
the codec ships with all supported versions of Windows, but there's no real
reason for it to refuse to play a video it has a codec for.

~~~
wmf
MS has said that IE 9 has a codec whitelist so it will _not_ use any random
codec you have installed.
[http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/html5-video-
in...](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/html5-video-in-internet-
explorer-9-h264-and-h264-alone.ars)

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modeless
If it requires an install it will be irrelevant because Flash will support VP8
and is already installed.

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kennu
Both Adobe and Microsoft seem to be talking about VP8 only, not the full WebM
stack including Vorbis audio and Matroska containers.

It smells like they are leaving room for their own media streaming formats and
servers, and only nominally claiming some kind of support for VP8 without
audio or file/streaming support. WebM needs all three to be an open platform
for creating, streaming and consuming video content.

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yatsyk
> In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as
> VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

Idea for next blog post:

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support canvas, svg, css3 when the user has
installed a Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer.

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hapless
This says that they'll support VP8 as an installed codec, but this doesn't
tell us much about WebM. What about the container format, Matroksa? Vorbis
audio support?

~~~
wmf
They'll have to support all three or it won't work. I'm guessing that Google
is actually writing the code so all MS has to do is add Google's Media
Foundation components to the IE 9 whitelist.

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rbanffy
They'll say anything to grab some headlines away from Google today.

So predictable...

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Calamitous
Will it also support "HTML"? Maybe even "CSS"?

