On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Gregory Maxwell&lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think the most neutral thing would be to suggest the top two or three browsers for the platform that support the functionality, in order of market share. If the browser has negligible (<1%?) market share on the platform, or only supports <video> in beta or development builds, it can be left off. Maybe you could also put Safari second even on Mac, since it requires an extra install and doesn't work perfectly. But I think it's misleading to act as though Safari isn't a good option, when it's the default system browser and probably works better in various other ways than Mac Firefox (I've definitely heard that this was the case before Firefox 3.0). If the message made it clear that the recommendation was opinionated, and not just advising the viewer on how best to view the video, it would be less of an issue to exclude browsers for not being open-source or whatever. Like "We recommend you use X, which will allow you to view this video better" instead of "X will allow you to view this video better".

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:27 PM, David Gerard&lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: With XiphQT, why not? Maybe not ideal, but surely "good". They haven't prevented it from being an option. As far as I know, Safari is the only <video>-implementing browser with pluggable codec support. I haven't bothered doing any research, so I could be wrong -- maybe Chrome or Opera support pluggable codecs -- but Firefox definitely does not let you use codecs other than Theora, unless I'm badly mistaken. The upshot is that Safari is certainly the second-best stable browser to view Theora <video> on. No one from Apple has ever said that. They are not willing to ship support for Theora directly themselves, that's all. And they may be willing to reconsider: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-July/002415.html Nothing Apple has done has suggested to me that they've acted dishonestly. Everything I've seen is consistent with them perceiving not enough benefit from supporting Theora to justify taking a nontrivial (although not necessarily large) legal risk. Of course, their actions also might be consistent with more sinister hypotheses, but let's not assume bad faith here, shall we? Regardless, if the message is phrased purely as advice on how to get videos working better, what it says should *not* follow any motives other than that.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 6:12 PM, David Gerard&lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Well *we* do. As a side effect of installing XiphQT a mime type is registered. This is completely independent of the video tag. So we'll detect this and use it anyways. I believe we're the only users of video whom have ever done this. It's not obvious, and I doubt we'd be doing it were it not for the fact that that detection method was previously used for detecting pre-video availability of XiphQT. (FWIW, that behaviour is now fixed in their development builds) Regardless, I think we've finished the technical part of this decision— the details are a matter of organization concern now, not technology.

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 6:12 PM, David Gerard&lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: First of all, Apple is not "fouling up the entire standard". They employ one of its two co-editors, their developers contribute to it very actively, and they ship an implementation that's as advanced as anybody's. This is *one* specific feature that they've said they won't implement at the present time (but they may reconsider at any time). Mozilla has vetoed features as well, as Ian Hickson has pointed out. Mozilla refused to implement SQL, so that was removed from the standard, just as mention of Theora was. Second of all, I don't have a serious problem with Wikimedia only advocating the use of open-source software, say. But if it does, it *must* be phrased in a way that makes it clear that it's an advertisement of a product we want the user to use, not a neutral assessment of what the best technology is for viewing the page. Anything else is deliberately misleading, and that's unacceptable. On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Gregory Maxwell&lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yep, definitely.

2009/7/9 Platonides &lt;Platonides(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: What do we do for iPhone users? They do not have Theora support because Apple has actively decided it will not support it; we can either appear to be defective, or we can correctly assign responsibility. I assume Apple is not ashamed of their decision to exclude Theora. - d.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Platonides&lt;Platonides(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: "Native support" is gibberish to most users. You need to say something comprehensible if you want anyone to pay attention. Like "to get better video playback" instead of "to get native support". Assuming that native support really is noticeably better. Maybe we could only suggest it if we detect that the playback is stuttering, or suggest it more prominently if we detect that. I assume Cortado can detect that. Are there noticeable advantages to native playback other than better performance?

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 6:20 PM, David Gerard&lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 10 of which your browser pretending to be crashed in many cases.

This is really a foundation / wikimedia community question. ... I will do a short email to foundation-l summarizing the technical discussion. Not that foundation-l has historically been the best way to build consensus but maybe someone else can summarize that discussion and give us a ball-park of the "community voice" on the matter allowing the foundation to move forward with something. Meanwhile I will try and make sure the new player is good and ready to be integrated ;) --michael Aryeh Gregor wrote: