How about a more relevant analogy to Flash? It has the same insecurities and platform-dependence plus being encumbered by the same patents (and more!), but Mozilla took exactly the opposite approach!<p>Since 2004, Mozilla has had baked-in support for automatically installing Flash on the first encounter if the plugin is not found. A nice little yellow infobar pops down (a brilliant UI innovation), prompting you to install it with a few clicks, even without root access on both Windows and Linux.<p>They've also recently implemented automatic update checking for Flash. Since it's their biggest security hole, they throw up a big nasty "update now" warning on launch if you're using a known-vulnerable version. Mozilla even initially distributed the Flash binaries under license themselves via addons.mozilla.org -- I'm not sure if they still do so.<p>Flash is shitty, nonredistributable, closed-source, restricted-platform, proprietary, and patent-encumbered but they're willing to go to great lengths to help their users use it. Why not do the same thing for ffmpeg, which is merely patent-encumbered?
I don't see how the web browser is the right place for codecs to live. I have multiple web browsers and multiple media players installed. Do I need six copies of every codec?
If they make a compromise, they should drop Flash and support H.264. I would prefer THAT choice. Flash is buggy, slow, unsecure, proprietary from a single vendor. H.264 is much more useful, has a standard, multiple implementations (hardware and software)...