This is quite simply terrible news. Perhaps one of the greatest additions to HTML 5 was the open source video. Due to companies being unable to agree on which formats to use (cough Apple cough) as well as other companies which make no displayable effort to include this feature at all (cough Microsoft cough), they decided to do without it.

Part of the issue is Apple wanted to use H.264 (a superb video codec), which unfortunately requires expensive licensing which open source projects (like Mozilla) likely can't afford. Google (being wealthy beyond our dreams) ships their browser with Ogg Theora support as well as H.264 support.

To be fair, Apple isn't the only one who doesn't like Ogg Theora very much. Google wanted H.264 for the better quality per bitrate (which is great for its monster site YouTube); one common area of debate is that Ogg Theora isn't quite ready for such tasks, and as such, wouldn't be the best choice for the company.

Looks like a whole bunch of crap to me. Read the original article over at ZDNet Asia.