This act should leave no doubt in anyone's mind that Google is in fact THE NEW EVIL. They are the whores of technology trying to dominate the world and force us all into their parasitic advertising model under the guise of "free and open". Let's all stop using their products! The value of "free" is zero, and that is what this company is, one big zero. What hypocrites to say they want completely open and free standards, but then they use / support the proprietary Flash crapware. And now want to force us all to have to buy new devices to support their "open" standards? Google, you suck!
This decision obviously favors google, but I didn't see DED mention this: Web content is royalty free, but not the encoders or decoders.
Nice of Google to release webm, and if anyone wants to sue, just get it over with. No one is suing over Vorbis and a big company, Sandisk uses it, and it isn't as if they can't extract money over a lawsuit.
Of course if Google wants to, YouTube can go web m overnight, as it already is converting to it now on their html5 access view. It can't kill apple to support it, since it is free, and it is hardware supported.
Bullshit - why should apple support a truly inferior codec when they also won't support clearly inferior crapware like flash?
Apple drops Flash support and pushes H.264. Apple is one of the patent holders. Google now drops H.264 and has their own codec. The consumer continues to suffer. H.264 is a very nice codec and HTML5 is much better than Flash. Apple was right in pushing for the demise of Flash. Google is simply wanting everyone to play in their sandbox and not anyone else's. I, for one, will not be using Google Chrome.
This is a major move from Google that puts them squarely into the mid-90s MS camp.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rec9140
Most of you are missing the point.
Patents, trademarks, copyrights, IP, it ALL has to go... GO AWAY FOR GOOD!
What a great world it would be that nothing you create could ever be protected under law¡ That I could write a book or make a movie or invent something and never be able to profit from it, to make a living by it and have no recourse to keep others from stealing it¡
With MPEGLA not charging royalties for the use of H264, I see no reason why Google would want to drop support for it....of course, other than being evil and trying to compete with Apple, which they simply can't in this instant.
So then why snub flash? Because it is the past, not open, etc? At least for video we have a replacement; there isn't anything I can use to view homestarrunner.com on an iOS device, is there?
Just bundling flash with the browser to make sure it is always up to date was done for security reasons. It is very much apparent that Google wants to go to HTML5.
But if we are to be cynical with google, then that means to be fair, apple doesn't want flash on their iphone because it allows running games, apps and other stuff outside their walled garden, and they do not want that at all.
This thread is relatively civil. You should look on ars and see how bad it is.
You are delusional and spreading gross misinformation. Apple doesn't support flash on mobile devices SOLELY because of performance issues. IT IS CRAP, ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE. There are plenty of sources for content on Apple iOS devices other than apple. You can buy music from any source as an example, and there are plenty of sources for video as well such as Netflix. They are ALL ABOUT AN EXCEPTIONAL / THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE. And consumers obviously agree as they have been voting with their pocketbooks by the 10's of millions every single quarter.
Note that these aren?t exclusive. Flash uses H.264 as a codec. All Apple isn?t doing is supporting the Flash plugin in iOS for obvious reasons and H.264 was supported in the Mac OS and HW well before that.
It does seem that the overwhelming response to this decision is negative, bordering on disbelief. I can't help but suspect this announcement is not intended to be followed-through on, but is perhaps a bluff to force a resolution to the h.264 issues with browsers.
If Google push ahead with this, they will find zero enthusiasm for WebM. Like a poster has already said, people just want something that works well and reliably. H.264 works. It's been adopted by major film studios etc. to boot; it's here, it's accepted, it's used by the pros who matter and, crucially, it works on all mobile devices right now.
Every user of Chrome has at least one other browser on their system. If they find themselves constantly being told they are missing a plug-in when they encounter H.264, they'll just switch browsers. They knew how to switch to Chrome, they know how to switch back again... If they start reading 'This site is does not support Google Chrome, please use another browser', and they will see that written by a lot web developers, then Chrome will garner a bad reputation fast.
As for Flash, I really will cheer the day Adobe discontinues it. I loathe it. As someone has said, Apple didn't decide not to support Flash in 2007, THERE WAS NO MOBILE FLASH TO SUPPORT. I regularly browse the BBC website on my MacBook Pro with some serious power under the hood and Flash crashes perhaps 60% of the time when running videos in their default wrapper. It works fine with iPlayer to be fair (which I just read is based on H.264, maybe that's why it's more stable? My iPhone can run iPlayer content...), but it's always the Flash plug-in that crashes. I can honestly say it's far and away the piece of software that crashes most on my mac and yes, Adobe, that's your responsibility, you're the authors of the software!
Steve Jobs has labelled Adobe 'lazy', and I tend to agree. It took three years to come up with a version of Flash that Apple could even take a look at using on iOS, and it looks pretty poor so far on Android. With HTML5, Flash isn't needed any longer, it is as simple as that. Sure, developers need to learn new tools but that's part of life in the software business.
The tick-box "yeah, we support Flash on our tablet/phone" marketing we're seeing really irks me. No mention is made of poor performance, of battery consumption, or of the fact that Flash's very existence is bad for every user of the internet.
You are delusional and spreading gross misinformation. Apple doesn't support flash on mobile devices SOLELY because of performance issues. IT IS CRAP, ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE. There are plenty of sources for content on Apple iOS devices other than apple. You can buy music from any source as an example, and there are plenty of sources for video as well such as Netflix. They are ALL ABOUT AN EXCEPTIONAL / THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE. And consumers obviously agree as they have been voting with their pocketbooks by the 10's of millions every single quarter.
Well, I wouldn't say "ALL ABOUT". That's Steve Jobs line. Jobs is an exceptional visionary that I admire a lot. He does want an exceptional user experience, but it's his vision of a user experience. That might not be the same as my desires for a user experience. Jobs himself called Flash a CPU hog that was responsible for more Safari crashes than anything else. iOS devices have a difficult time dealing with Flash. Jailbreak apps such as Frash demonstrate the difficulties with Flash and iOS. So it is a great deal about performance issues. And those performance issues directly relate to user experience. But that aside, the app store is a nice little money maker. The elimination of online Flash games from iOS devices is a nice little bonus for Apple (and developers) who can now sell their games in the app store. While this is not (IMO) the primary reason for the elimination of Flash from iOS devices, I'm confident that it was part of a discussion when the decision was made.
You are delusional and spreading gross misinformation. Apple doesn't support flash on mobile devices SOLELY because of performance issues. IT IS CRAP, ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE. There are plenty of sources for content on Apple iOS devices other than apple. You can buy music from any source as an example, and there are plenty of sources for video as well such as Netflix. They are ALL ABOUT AN EXCEPTIONAL / THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE. And consumers obviously agree as they have been voting with their pocketbooks by the 10's of millions every single quarter.
You failed to see the point - everyone has their technical reasons and business (read: cynical or selfish) reasons to support one or the other. Apple is part of the MPEG-LA, so they obviously has their own financial reasons for supporting MPEG4-AVC/H.264. Google paid $106 million for On2, so it isn't as if they will just let it sit there for nothing either.
To be blind to each others reasons and only point out one or the other is just being an ignorant fanboy.
"...it does nothing of benefit for Apple (to whom licensing fees are not an issue)..."
My question... who are his sources at Apple? Mr. Jobs himself has talked about paying licensing royalty for Blu-Ray.
"Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. I don't mean from the consumer point of view. It's great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex," Jobs said. "We're waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives."
I read DED not for the 'news reporting' but for his analysis of Apple's internal thinking
Google has announced the intention to remove support for H.264 video playback from its Crome browser to "enable open innovation," yet still apparently plans to promote Adobe Flash.
Ah. So the most important point of the entire situation is that they are hypocrites. OK.
"...it does nothing of benefit for Apple (to whom licensing fees are not an issue)..."
My question... who are his sources at Apple? Mr. Jobs himself has talked about paying licensing royalty for Blu-Ray.
"Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. I don't mean from the consumer point of view. It's great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex," Jobs said. "We're waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives."
I read DED not for the 'news reporting' but for his analysis of Apple's internal thinking
Probably more to blu ray than just h.264 patents, as you also deal with DTS and Dolby's stuff.
Really, he is right; it doesn't help apple at all. But it wouldn't kill them either. Apple could use vorbis audio but won't risk it.
Except that whole thing again with them being part of MPEG-LA.
Aside from perhaps not being patent encumbered, nothing.
It isn't that much worse than h.264 either. Nor are we going to sit at old 600mhz ARM cpus either.
Well, Flash video is usually a Flash wrapper around H.264 content nowadays. So Adobe is on the H.264 bandwagon too, they just want you to only access it through them, not directly. The part of Flash that sucks is the wrapper and scripting/animation layers, it also used to be the lack of hardware acceleration although that seems to be mostly fixed now.
My very subversive guess is that because of the Flash as a wrapper around H.264 content setup, Chrome WILL STILL DO H.264 DECODING!!! But ONLY inside Flash wrappers. And if that's the case something is very self serving about the Chrome announcement.
Comments
The bit you missed:
PUBLISHED: January 24, 2010
Since then the motion picture experts group have take all end user charging out. Forever.
We know. But they have NOT stopped charging for encoders or decoders, and that's where the browser issue comes in.
This decision obviously favors google, but I didn't see DED mention this: Web content is royalty free, but not the encoders or decoders.
Nice of Google to release webm, and if anyone wants to sue, just get it over with. No one is suing over Vorbis and a big company, Sandisk uses it, and it isn't as if they can't extract money over a lawsuit.
Of course if Google wants to, YouTube can go web m overnight, as it already is converting to it now on their html5 access view. It can't kill apple to support it, since it is free, and it is hardware supported.
Bullshit - why should apple support a truly inferior codec when they also won't support clearly inferior crapware like flash?
Most of you are missing the point.
Patents, trademarks, copyrights, IP, it ALL has to go... GO AWAY FOR GOOD!
What a great world it would be that nothing you create could ever be protected under law¡ That I could write a book or make a movie or invent something and never be able to profit from it, to make a living by it and have no recourse to keep others from stealing it¡
How can it be anti-competitive when Google gives the codec away for free? That makes as much sense as apple being anti-competitive for snubbing flash.
The same way IE was free and tied to windows, but still anticompetitive
Do no evil, my a**.
Wonder if they would be bold enough to drop h.264 support on YouTube?
Not sure if you've noticed yet, but Youtube is already blocking some videos on iOS.
So then why snub flash? Because it is the past, not open, etc? At least for video we have a replacement; there isn't anything I can use to view homestarrunner.com on an iOS device, is there?
Just bundling flash with the browser to make sure it is always up to date was done for security reasons. It is very much apparent that Google wants to go to HTML5.
But if we are to be cynical with google, then that means to be fair, apple doesn't want flash on their iphone because it allows running games, apps and other stuff outside their walled garden, and they do not want that at all.
This thread is relatively civil. You should look on ars and see how bad it is.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/n...r#comments-bar
You are delusional and spreading gross misinformation. Apple doesn't support flash on mobile devices SOLELY because of performance issues. IT IS CRAP, ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE. There are plenty of sources for content on Apple iOS devices other than apple. You can buy music from any source as an example, and there are plenty of sources for video as well such as Netflix. They are ALL ABOUT AN EXCEPTIONAL / THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE. And consumers obviously agree as they have been voting with their pocketbooks by the 10's of millions every single quarter.
Apple drops Flash support and pushes H.264.
Note that these aren?t exclusive. Flash uses H.264 as a codec. All Apple isn?t doing is supporting the Flash plugin in iOS for obvious reasons and H.264 was supported in the Mac OS and HW well before that.
If Google push ahead with this, they will find zero enthusiasm for WebM. Like a poster has already said, people just want something that works well and reliably. H.264 works. It's been adopted by major film studios etc. to boot; it's here, it's accepted, it's used by the pros who matter and, crucially, it works on all mobile devices right now.
Every user of Chrome has at least one other browser on their system. If they find themselves constantly being told they are missing a plug-in when they encounter H.264, they'll just switch browsers. They knew how to switch to Chrome, they know how to switch back again... If they start reading 'This site is does not support Google Chrome, please use another browser', and they will see that written by a lot web developers, then Chrome will garner a bad reputation fast.
As for Flash, I really will cheer the day Adobe discontinues it. I loathe it. As someone has said, Apple didn't decide not to support Flash in 2007, THERE WAS NO MOBILE FLASH TO SUPPORT. I regularly browse the BBC website on my MacBook Pro with some serious power under the hood and Flash crashes perhaps 60% of the time when running videos in their default wrapper. It works fine with iPlayer to be fair (which I just read is based on H.264, maybe that's why it's more stable? My iPhone can run iPlayer content...), but it's always the Flash plug-in that crashes. I can honestly say it's far and away the piece of software that crashes most on my mac and yes, Adobe, that's your responsibility, you're the authors of the software!
Steve Jobs has labelled Adobe 'lazy', and I tend to agree. It took three years to come up with a version of Flash that Apple could even take a look at using on iOS, and it looks pretty poor so far on Android. With HTML5, Flash isn't needed any longer, it is as simple as that. Sure, developers need to learn new tools but that's part of life in the software business.
The tick-box "yeah, we support Flash on our tablet/phone" marketing we're seeing really irks me. No mention is made of poor performance, of battery consumption, or of the fact that Flash's very existence is bad for every user of the internet.
Bullshit - why should apple support a truly inferior codec when they also won't support clearly inferior crapware like flash?
Aside from perhaps not being patent encumbered, nothing.
It isn't that much worse than h.264 either. Nor are we going to sit at old 600mhz ARM cpus either.
You are delusional and spreading gross misinformation. Apple doesn't support flash on mobile devices SOLELY because of performance issues. IT IS CRAP, ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE. There are plenty of sources for content on Apple iOS devices other than apple. You can buy music from any source as an example, and there are plenty of sources for video as well such as Netflix. They are ALL ABOUT AN EXCEPTIONAL / THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE. And consumers obviously agree as they have been voting with their pocketbooks by the 10's of millions every single quarter.
Well, I wouldn't say "ALL ABOUT". That's Steve Jobs line. Jobs is an exceptional visionary that I admire a lot. He does want an exceptional user experience, but it's his vision of a user experience. That might not be the same as my desires for a user experience. Jobs himself called Flash a CPU hog that was responsible for more Safari crashes than anything else. iOS devices have a difficult time dealing with Flash. Jailbreak apps such as Frash demonstrate the difficulties with Flash and iOS. So it is a great deal about performance issues. And those performance issues directly relate to user experience. But that aside, the app store is a nice little money maker. The elimination of online Flash games from iOS devices is a nice little bonus for Apple (and developers) who can now sell their games in the app store. While this is not (IMO) the primary reason for the elimination of Flash from iOS devices, I'm confident that it was part of a discussion when the decision was made.
You are delusional and spreading gross misinformation. Apple doesn't support flash on mobile devices SOLELY because of performance issues. IT IS CRAP, ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE. There are plenty of sources for content on Apple iOS devices other than apple. You can buy music from any source as an example, and there are plenty of sources for video as well such as Netflix. They are ALL ABOUT AN EXCEPTIONAL / THE BEST USER EXPERIENCE. And consumers obviously agree as they have been voting with their pocketbooks by the 10's of millions every single quarter.
You failed to see the point - everyone has their technical reasons and business (read: cynical or selfish) reasons to support one or the other. Apple is part of the MPEG-LA, so they obviously has their own financial reasons for supporting MPEG4-AVC/H.264. Google paid $106 million for On2, so it isn't as if they will just let it sit there for nothing either.
To be blind to each others reasons and only point out one or the other is just being an ignorant fanboy.
"...it does nothing of benefit for Apple (to whom licensing fees are not an issue)..."
My question... who are his sources at Apple? Mr. Jobs himself has talked about paying licensing royalty for Blu-Ray.
"Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. I don't mean from the consumer point of view. It's great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex," Jobs said. "We're waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives."
I read DED not for the 'news reporting' but for his analysis of Apple's internal thinking
Google has announced the intention to remove support for H.264 video playback from its Crome browser to "enable open innovation," yet still apparently plans to promote Adobe Flash.
Ah. So the most important point of the entire situation is that they are hypocrites. OK.
DED claims
"...it does nothing of benefit for Apple (to whom licensing fees are not an issue)..."
My question... who are his sources at Apple? Mr. Jobs himself has talked about paying licensing royalty for Blu-Ray.
"Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. I don't mean from the consumer point of view. It's great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex," Jobs said. "We're waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives."
I read DED not for the 'news reporting' but for his analysis of Apple's internal thinking
Probably more to blu ray than just h.264 patents, as you also deal with DTS and Dolby's stuff.
Really, he is right; it doesn't help apple at all. But it wouldn't kill them either. Apple could use vorbis audio but won't risk it.
Except that whole thing again with them being part of MPEG-LA.
Aside from perhaps not being patent encumbered, nothing.
It isn't that much worse than h.264 either. Nor are we going to sit at old 600mhz ARM cpus either.
Well, Flash video is usually a Flash wrapper around H.264 content nowadays. So Adobe is on the H.264 bandwagon too, they just want you to only access it through them, not directly. The part of Flash that sucks is the wrapper and scripting/animation layers, it also used to be the lack of hardware acceleration although that seems to be mostly fixed now.
My very subversive guess is that because of the Flash as a wrapper around H.264 content setup, Chrome WILL STILL DO H.264 DECODING!!! But ONLY inside Flash wrappers. And if that's the case something is very self serving about the Chrome announcement.
Probably more to blu ray than just h.264 patents, as you also deal with DTS and Dolby's stuff.
Really, he is right; it doesn't help apple at all. But it wouldn't kill them either. Apple could use vorbis audio but won't risk it.
Except that whole thing again with them being part of MPEG-LA.
Vorbis is unimpressive and working with it on Linux for a decade where I have all these codecs, I'll take h.264 and aac.
This developer has a brain on his shoulders with an eye for leveraging his efforts to satisfy all parties.
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/584