This is a follow-up to Video, Mobile, and the Open Web. As promised there, OS-based H.264 support for the HTML5 <video> element has already landed in Gecko, and it just released this week in Firefox Beta for Android. Firefox OS (B2G to the early adopters!) also supports H.264 from the HTML5 <video> element.

The challenge remains working through OS decoders on the various desktop OSes. Here’s where we are (thanks to roc, cdouble, and cpearce):

Bug 794282, to enable GStreamer in official Linux builds.

Bug 799315, to use Windows Media Foundation on Vista and newer Windows releases. This would provide H.264/AAC/MP3 support.

Tracking bug 799318 for the above two and the missing Mac OS X bug, plus the Windows XP solution described next.

The idea for Windows XP is to use Flash. According to roc, “we believe it may be possible to use Flash unmodified. Modern Flash has APIs to let us inject compressed data to the media engine without going through their networking layer, and we can recover rendered video frames.”

So, hard work still to-do ahead of us, but nothing that we can’t overcome (knock on wood).

We are taking the fight for unencumbered formats to the next battlefront, WebRTC, also as promised. More on that front later.

As always, the dev-media list (mailman “subscribe” protocol; also a Google Group) is a fine place to discuss any of this.

/be