Mozilla today announced $100,000 grant to wikimedia foundation in supprot of theora project which develops an open source video codec. If you want to know what open video means and why it matters, please read chris blizzard’s post. You can also read techcrunch post on this topic.
I think there is a lot that can be done to make video more open and easy to integrate into the web infrastrucrure. This is one effort in that direction. Open video projects such as theora want to eliminate the need for codec licensing fees required for formats such as mpeg-4 or wmv. They offer free video codecs. Mozilla is also building native suppot for theora codec into the firefox browser so it can automatically recognise and play video files encoded in theora format.