The MPEG Licensing Authority has announced that it will indefinitely extend royalty-free Internet broadcasting licensing of its H.264 video codec to end users, erasing a key advantage of Google's WebM rival and cementing Apple's preferred H.264 as the video format for modern HTML5 video on the web.
Open source browser company Mozilla initially pushed Ogg Vobis for audio and Ogg Theora for video with the argument that H.264 license fee may be introduced after 2010 after the "free for end users" license was set to expire.
Google this year released WebM video codec (based on VP8 codec bought from On2), believed to be a better alternative to Ogg and also have the same royalty-free license. (There are believes that WebM may contain technologies patented by MPEG-4 stakeholders.)
Due to the tight relationship of Mozilla and Google, Mozilla is pushing WebM codec without a doubt.
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