[ietf-types] Video media-types insufficient?

[Paul Libbrecht <[e-mail]>]

hello dear Media-types' expert,

the other day, I played with the nifty new video element of HTML5 which seems to be fairly well implemented. This element allows a list of sources together with their media-type so that the browser can find the "video format" that it can play.
This element is perfectly following the idea of a media-type's characterization of an exploitable format.

However, this characterization is insufficient: the same media-type for videos can be encode data in multiple codecs and these are not encoded in media-types:

I met this while using the video/mp4 media-type and realized that our default encoding, the mpeg4 codec, did not play in iPad.
So I used the same video element, with a src of media-type pointing to an mp4 file that uses the h264 codec. This one plays on iPad.

To me, this is a clear failure of the media-type video/mp4: it does not express sufficiently the playability on a device.

Is this something well known?
Are there maybe media-type parameters that could help?
Are newer video media-types better on this respect?

thanks in advance

Paul