Comment 32 for bug 579685

Excellent question Tom. The short answer is that HTML5 is not relevant to this bug.

While there are many aspects to HTML5, the one you are probably thinking about is the new <video> element. This enables video to be directly embedded in a web page and played back by any web browser which supports the HTML5 <video> element, without the need for a third party player plugin such as Flash or Quicktime or Totem. See https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTML/Element/Video and http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/html5-video-fallbacks-markup/ for more information. That's basically it, but there is a bit more to it - the web browser has to support the codec that the video is encoded in (something which is discussed in the second link in the previous sentence). This is where Google's new WebM format comes in - it is a strict subset of the popular Matroska (.mkv) format and uses Google's new VP8 video codec and the ogg vorbis audio codec. YouTube has had a HTML5 beta option available for a while now - they launched it prior to the announcement of WebM and have recently added WebM support. You can read more (and then try it out if you wish) at http://www.youtube.com/html5

Firefox 3.6 only supports HTML5 video in the Ogg Theora format. The latest Firefox nightly builds (available from http://nightly.mozilla.org/webm/ ) also support HTML5 video in the WebM format.

However the video in the web page that this bug is concerned with is not using the HTML5 <video> element.