At the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, held earlier this month in Portland, Oregon, Scott Davis, head of the HTML5 consulting company Thirsty Head, that the Web may never settle on a single codec. Just as the Web supports a variety of image formats -- such as JPEG, GIF, and PNG -- so too will it host multiple video formats. Website developers will just have to add a few additional lines to their page code to deliver the correct format based on the browser being used.

"This is the solution that will allow you play HTML5 video on every browser," Davis said of writing the extra code. "You write it once, you template it away and never think about it."

WebRTC developers plan to discuss the issue further at IETF 84, held this week in Vancouver.

The IDG News Service