The video element colud allow us to include a video or movie without the need of a plugin such as Adobe Flash, which seems to be the de facto standard nowadays. But one of the main problems for a massive implementation is the lack of an agreement for a common video codec on all browsers.

The two most popular candidates seem to be Ogg Theora (open source) and H.264 (proprietary) but…

• Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora because of the lack of hardware support and patent issues.
• Google implemented both options in Chrome but, due to licensing issues, cannot allow the use of the H.264 codec to third-party applications and stated that they believe Ogg Theora’s quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube.
• Opera won’t implement H.264 because of the license costs.
• Mozilla stands in the same place as Opera, due to the costs to downstream distributors.
• Microsoft has not yet commented about the issue.

So, what could be the future of the video implementation? Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, sees to possible solutions:

1. Ogg Theora encoders continue to improve. Off-the-shelf hardware Ogg Theora decoder chips become available. Google ships support for the codec for long enough without getting sued that Apple’s concern regarding submarine patents is reduced. => Theora becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

2. The remaining H.264 baseline patents owned by companies who are not willing to license them royalty-free expire, leading to H.264 support being available without license fees. => H.264 becomes the de facto codec for the Web.

It seems that, for now, there’s no chance for a standard solution. For the time being, we can see some beta implementations of the video tag in sites like Dailymotion or Youtube, each with their own approach to the subject.