[eb]

No, that's incorrect.

It's related to the format of the video rather than browser sniffing. Firefox only supports Ogg Theora for HTML5 video, but the video on the page is MP4/H.264. Dive Into HTML5 has more detail: http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#what-works

[rudd]

I'm pretty sure it is using some form of browser detection. In Safari I get a <video> element, and in Firefox, I get an <object> with an <embed>.

[omouse]

Wouldn't it be nice if it let me use VLC which supports damn-near everything?

[blasdel]

Mozilla is fundamentally opposed to decency on ideological grounds.

They really should just do a generalized version of what Safari does -- call out to Quicktime / DirectShow / GStreamer, but they'll never do that, because it would invalidate their efforts to shove OGG down people's throats.

Barring that, they should do what Chrome does -- link in a normal copy of ffmpeg that's built without most of the codecs by default.

Instead, they link directly with liboggplay. You'd have to significantly fork Gecko in order to support anything but Vorbis and Theora in OGG containers. It reminds me of the way Stallman designed GCC's internal representations to be impossible to interface with externally.

If you're going to wank about respecting patents and copyright licenses, let them be enforced by the legal system -- don't do it by writing obnoxious code.