surfacing from exam hell briefly

(1) Thanks to everyone who voted for me for the board; I hope I’ll be able to accomplish what I’ve set out to do.

(2) fairly good summary of the html5/ogg situation, from Mozilla’s rep to the HTML5 video workshop. At the end, he says:

If you are passionate about the use of Ogg Theora and <video> one of the best things you can do is start using it.

Do compelling demos. Release video in Theora format. It may be easy to use a service that provides video for you in exchange for giving them certain rights but if you want your format to succeed, then increased usage is the way.

He’s right, of course. (ahem.)

I have nothing much else to add to his post right now, except to add the (perhaps informative) detail that the risk from submarine patents in a new video codec is not small, or hypothetical. Microsoft is currently on the hook for one billion (with a b) dollars for an mp3 patent violation. You don’t have to like software patents to understand why increasing that risk makes Nokia and Apple nervous. Hopefully w3c can work through the issue in a way that works for everyone.

(Comments off because there are a lot of trolls around this issue and with exams I have no time to moderate.)