933664 - Video codec documentation needs a rewrite

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: API: HTML, defect)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Supported_media_formats has multiple problems.

 * Since this is documentation for Web authors, to the extent patent problems are covered, they should be primarily covered from the perspective of Web authors. That is, the document should probably warn about H.264 and MP3 having use fee claims in some cases. (Unclear to me if it's a good idea to summarize what those cases are instead of just linking to the claims.)

  - The use fees claimed for H.264 are given in http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf . (Use fees are claimed for video subscription when the service has over 100000 subscribers and for per-title paid access to videos that exceed 12 minutes in length.)

  - The use fees claimed for MP3 are given in http://mp3licensing.com/help/index.html#4 . (Use fees are claimed for commercial streaming/distribution of MP3 content unless the annual gross revenue is less than $100 000.)

 * Since Firefox now uses platform decoders for the encumbered formats, the page should  portray the case where H.264, AAC and MP3 work in Firefox as the normal case and note exceptions (instead of doing it the other way around).

 * The page should clearly separate support for MP3 in the .mp3 sense (works in Safari)  and support for MP3 in the MP4 container (does not work in Safari as of Mountain Lion; I don't have a computer running Mavericks at hand right now).

 * New developments that involve supporting new codecs in the WebM should be taken into account now that Google has defected from the position that WebM always means VP8 and Vorbis.

 * The data in the compat tables should be verified by systematic testing.

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.