The Mozilla Foundation is putting its weight behind an effort to create an open video format on the Web. It is doing this by giving $100,000 in grant money, to be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, towards the development and support of Theora, an open-source video codec. More importantly, it is also building support into the Firefox Web browser for both Theora and Vorbis, an open source audio codec.

Many other video codecs and encoders require licensing fees or come with restrictions. Mozilla hopes to change this over time. Although I suspect the Theora video codec is inferior to other technologies, as long as it can improve over time, it could eventually become a serious contender to MPEG-4 or Windows Media Video (WMV).