If it works, it is obsolete...

Posted Aug 11, 2008 7:46 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Firefox to support Theora video by hthoma
Parent article: Firefox to support Theora video

(Take MPEG-2 video as example. This was finalized in 1995 and is still in widespread use.)

In fact, one could say MPEG-2 has just started its life as the mainstream video coding... In Finland, the analogue TV transmission were cut off only about a year ago, in favour of the the DVB system, which uses MPEG-2. In most other European countries analogue TV is still in use.

Naturally all techies now say we now have a totally obsolete digital TV system which soon must be replaced with a modern system using MPEG-4 and HDTV. Theoretically true, but by the time the system and all users have been upgraded again, MPEG-4 will certainly be itself obsolete...

The situation is somewhat different in the computer world. You can always download the latest and greatest codecs, but even this may be annoying sometimes.

Not to mention the loss of easy access to material in older formats when codec support for it is dropped in favour of the latest and greatest. (eg. try decoding Indeo4-compressed AVI files on a current system (Linux or Windows, does not matter - possible, but requires a codec hunt).