Google Chooses WebM Over H.264 In HTML5

[Andy Dixon]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20028361-265.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20' target='_blank'>http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-2...g=2547-1_3-0-20</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant. It was hard to miss the response that accompanied Google's announcement earlier this week that it no longer planned to support the H.264 codec for the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in order to focus on the WebM technology. Depending on what you read, Google is either evil, brilliant, hypocritical, cunning, principled, or confused in dropping support for H.264, a widely used technology for encoding and decoding video files so they are playable on PCs and mobile devices."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/wpt/auto/1295189175.usr11334.jpg" style="border: 0;" /></p><p>This is a brave move by Google, choosing to use WebM in its Chrome browser rather than H.264 which the other browsers are planning to use. Googles reasons are based on the fact that H.264 is controlled by a group of companies called MPEG-LA which pool the patents on these codecs and the license them to people who need to use it.&nbsp; Google are obviously wanting to move away from using a licensed technology in it's browser for an open source one that it controls. Google&nbsp;acquired the WebM codec when it bought On2 Technologies in 2009, and has released WebM to the open source community.&nbsp; It's a brave move by Google considering how popular and well used the H.264 codec is out there, and it will be interesting to see whether companies will switch to using WebM instead.</p>

[Kacey Green]

I've had more time to think about it and I agree with their points, h.264 isn't open it's proprietary.

Where they went wrong is by pulling support from Chrome, what they should have done instead was release their plugins for the other browsers and switch YouTube to their new codec, lead by example, then if the market follows, phase out h.264 from the browser.

[rogben]

H.264 is no more proprietary than MP3, and every bit as much an integral part of the media landscape. Almost every video camera available to consumers and prosumers (as well as many professional rigs) records h.264, and virtually every media playback device on the market includes an h.264 decoder to ensure that HD playback is smooth. Meanwhile, virtually nothing produces or consumes WebM, and never will... pros already fuss over h.264 compression artifacts, and WebM is a demonstrably inferior codec. Not to mention the fact that most of the big consumer electronics companies are stakeholders in MPEG-LA, and thus have nothing to gain by undermining their own work.

Make no mistake, this move has zero to do with being "open" or helping innovation... this is an effort to maintain the place of Flash (y'know, the proprietary technology that Google bakes into every copy of Chrome it distributes) in the web ecosystem, and thus preserve Android's sole competitive advantage in the mobile marketplace.

On the upside, Google long ago abandoned "don't be evil", and this kind of stunt helps get the word out to more people. The more they do stuff like this, the quicker we'll all start to recoil from selling our identities to the Googles and Facebooks of the world in exchange for their free toys.

[Kacey Green]

no argument here that h.264 is better, more supported, and enabled in hardware acceleration and consumer devices, just that it isn't open

creating and consuming html and xml requires no money changing hands, h.264 sometimes has a fee, and is not open and free because of that,

their big mistake in this PR mess was dropping support in Chrome and not flash, while also not supporting their pet project with YouTube