Los Angeles - Mozilla, developers of the Firefox Web browser and other open source software projects, announced that it has made a $100,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation, earmarked for the development of open source video technology.

Third party developers will be able to apply for funds to work on a free, open source video encoding platform called Theora.

"We believe that Theora is the best path available today for truly open, truly free video on the internet," Mozilla's Melissa Shapiro wrote in a blog post.

"We also believe that it can be improved in video quality, in performance, and in quality of implementation, and Mozilla is proud to be supporting the development of Theora software with a $100,000 (USD) grant."

"We believe that it's vital to the health of the web for people to approach video on the web the same way they do images: without needing proprietary plugins or paying license fees for restricted codecs, and with the ability to fully integrate into the rest of the page," added, Mike Shaver, VP of engineering for Mozilla.

Related Links:
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2009/01/26/in-support-of-open-video/

http://snipurl.com/atxzz (VentureBeat)

http://theora.org