Open Source Video
trog has written about the lack of open standards in video. To be honest I would be happy enough if everyone switched to h264 and browsers had native support for that format.
The Ogg suite is a nice idea, but unfortunately I think is dead in the water – this field is so encumbered by patents its very hard to make a competitive product. Funnily enough with essentially all pirated HD material distributed in h264, the standard is starting to take hold in many hardware players too.
The only tricky bit for h264 is mobile devices; iPhone will play such video (though only at very specific encoding settings) and most other phones can’t decode it at all. Still, if we can’t solve this issue on the desktop what hope do we have of an industry wide standard?