Explains the General Manager of IE

May 3, 2010 16:51 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft’s announcement that Internet Explorer 9 will support the H.264 exclusively as the codec for HTML5 has stirred up consistent interest in the few days since it was shared with the public. Sufficiently consistent for Dean Hachamovitch, IE GM, to provide a follow-up. The Redmond company is not permanently turning its back on additional codecs when it comes down to IE embracing HTML5, however, for the time being and what will be the immediate future, H.264 will remain the software giant’s sole pick.

“The biggest obstacle to supporting more than H.264 today is the uncertainty,” Hachamovitch stated. “When there’s industry consensus and confidence that the uncertainties are resolved, we’ll be open to considering other codecs. Until then, we’ll continue with our current plans to deliver great HTML5 video in IE9 with certainty for consumers and developers.”

IE’s GM underlined that, when it came down to codecs, the discussion was never just about the actual technology. Adopting Theora video compression alongside H.264 for IE9 poses intellectual property rights problems from Microsoft’s perspective that the company cannot simply ignore. One aspect that Hachamovitch underlines is that open source is not necessarily synonymous with free, especially not in relation to intellectual property rights.

“Many people seem to assume that availability of source code under an open source license implies that there are no additional costs, or that the code has properly secured necessary intellectual property rights from all rightful owners. Our experience and the experience of others indicate otherwise, and the web standards groups have discussed this issue as well. For other codecs, it’s not clear today how the rights will be determined for commercial scenarios and what the costs will be. By virtue of existing commercial use in a wide variety of products implemented by a large number of companies, H.264 minimizes uncertainty for consumers and developers,” he stated.

At the same time, Hachamovitch dismissed speculation that Microsoft was opting to support H.264 exclusively because of the royalties it received from the codec’s usage. The software giant is in fact pouring twice as much financial resources into H.264 than it is receiving through MPEG-LA.

At the same time, Microsoft will continue to remain committed to pushing MPEG’s promise that video content can be created in the H.264 format and distributed and played over the Internet without any obligations on Windows and similarly licensed platforms for non-commercial purposes. An illustrative example in this regard is that much of the web-based H.264 video today is royalty-free.

“We are aware that this commitment is set to expire in 2016, but fully expect to commit to supporting the extension of this license and associated terms beyond that date. In general, distributing encoders or decoders or offering sophisticated pay-for-video requires a license from MPEG-LA. Third-party applications that simply make calls to the H.264 code in Windows (and which do not incorporate any H.264 code directly) are covered by Microsoft’s license of H.264,” Hachamovitch added.

IE’s GM revealed that Microsoft considered H.264 the best video codec for HTML5 available for IE users, with strong hardware support, and the sheer breadth of implementation among the decisive factors, along with industry momentum, video quality, usage scale, tools and content authoring systems availability, and industry momentum. At the same time, in the Redmond company’s view, H.264 (managed by MPEG-LA) offers the certainty and clarity when it comes down to legal rights over patented technology.

Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.