The much hyped video tag has been dropped from HTML 5 standards specification due to lack of agreement between major browser vendors. While Opera and Firefox were enthusiastic about the implementation of the video tag, Apple was vehemently against it.
The proposed video tag (<video> </video>) envisioned to free Videos from their dependence on plugins. Any video enclosed between video tag would be played as a native element (e.g. images) by the browser. The only pre-condition being that the videos must be encoded in a chosen format. The frontrunner was royalty-free Ogg Theora codec with the patented H.264 codec being the other contender.
Opera was the first to actively promote the video tag. They released an experimental build that supported the video tag as far back as April, 2007. Recently (and more famously) Mozilla Firefox also included support for Video tag in Firefox 3.5. Google Chrome also included video support and bundled Ogg Theora as well as H.264.
Apple on the other hand refused to implement Ogg Theora due to lack of a hardware decoder. Hadware Decoder ensures reduced stress on the CPU and can make a big difference on mobile devices like the iPhone. Ofcourse there is also a clear case of conflict of interest. If Ogg Theora is accepted and the <video /> codec becomes a standard then Apple stands to loose as Quicktime video format would loose its importance.
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