I think this article is spot-on. No major content provider is going to re-encode their whole library in to a codec they could be sued for. They will stick with H.264 which they will deliver directly to iOS apps and via Flash to web browsers. The only beneficiary of this move will be Adobe (or more specifically Flash).
I would just add that perhaps future content-wars is also playing a role here. Google needs Flash to survive to deliver copy-protected content on YouTube, something they can't do with HTML5, and which may be their ultimate goal for that service. Apple may see YouTube as a potential future competitor to iTunes Store, so is attacking Flash to undermine this potential of YouTube. Seen in that light, this move by Google may be intended to support Adobe, and WebM is just a pawn.
You can repeat it as many times as you want, but H.264 is NOT an open standard. It contains patented technologies, which means it isn't "open", no matter how many times Appleinsider says it is.
Ogg Theora, however is 100% open, and is now supported by both Mozilla and Chrome. Since Google owns YouTube, I assume YouTube will switch to Ogg very shortly.
That leaves Safari with H264, which is not exactly a dominant player in the browser market right now. The iPhone is no longer the dominant smartphone platform, either, so Android should also push more folks into using Ogg.
While I understand Apple placed it's bets on H264 (understandable since they are an MPEG LA licensor), I think it'll be forced to include Ogg support once YouTube makes the switch - I think the iPhone needs YouTube more than YouTube needs the iPhone at this point.
Does anybody else remember when Appleinsider used to pay at least passing lip service to the fact that most stories have to viewpoints? Lately every article can be summed up with 2 simple points:
1. Apple is Correct/Perfect/Amazing/The Future/Putting the Customer First
2. Not Apple (Google, MS, Consumer Reports, etc) is WRONG/FLAWED/STUPID/SO LAST YEAR/ONLY INTERESTED IN MONEY.
What cave have you been living in? You actually think that dribble is true? Android is NOT what all are the players are copying.
If Google did the right thing and relinquished control of the WebM to a standards body I would be supportive but they haven't because they want to control WebM just like with Android.
Google likes to use the term 'open' because it appeals to people with a particular wordview. If you look at another way, Google is simply exploiting the open source community, getting them to work for free, and adding to Google controlled and exploited products like Android/WebM.
"Do no Evil', really??
Shouldn't it be more like: " Externalise costs and risks to third parties to protect advertising monopoly cash-cow".
I would still have a hard time supporting a move backwards in quality of video produced - couldn't agree more with the rest of your post.
This will be interesting to watch. I wonder how much longer Apple is going to sit on the sidelines before they launch a search engine and a video site.
At the end of the day, the main beneficiaries of open-source are academics (who get paid regardless, and would rather see their work progressed than make 2-billion dollars)
As a non-academic and programmer myself let me tell you that I *vastly* prefer open source software. Your claim is utterly absurd: the Internet as we know it wouldn't exist without open source software and open standards (Sendmail, Apache httpd, pretty much all scripting languages, the BSDs where the TCP/IP stack got invented, etc). You *do* know that Mac OS X is underpinned by open source software, right ? And Apple and all its users are "academic", right ?
Quote:
and armchair coders looking to steel other people's work (how much open source code ends up in closed commercial binaries without due referencing)?
Wait, wut ?! Because some unscrupulous people copy and paste open source code without obeying the license into closed commercial software open source is bogus ? And it's the fault even of those "thieving" open source programmers giving software away with reasonable licensing conditions ("either attribute" or "if you use this, you should share too") ?!
Quote:
Good professional coders deserve to get paid, so they can afford to live.
As a programmer by profession, I wholeheartedly agree.
Quote:
I'm absolutely sick of people claiming open-source to be some kind of noble gift to mankind.
Who said so ? It vastly simplifies my work to have access to the source code of libraries. As an example: our persistence layer was suddenly throwing exceptions on production machines. It baffled us. Because our ORM software was open source I could look under the hood, place breakpoints and find out what was going wrong exactly (as we couldn't figure it out based on the exception messages alone). Thanks to that openness we managed to fix the problem within a day (and send of a patch for the ORM software too so that other people wouldn't get bitten by the same bug). Next to said open source ORM software we also use a closed source application server. Getting support for that is dreadful: multiple phone calls to some call center in Bangalore and sometimes weeks before someone competent has the time to look over the issue report and provide some suggestions.
It's the same as working on a car: if the car maker supplies you with all the manuals and design documents you have a fighting chance of servicing or tweaking the car yourself instead of having to drive to a "licensed" garage for even the smallest of things.
You clearly aren't a programmer who understands the benefits of open source software. But you're an end-user; understand this: the message board we're arguing on, the database holding the records and the operating system are all open source (check uptime.netcraft.com). The standards for getting this text to you are all open (http, sql, ascii). Are we wrong to benefit from this ?
Quote:
Commercial companies only offer up open-source when it suits their own commercial interests, or they've written off the asset.
Err, right. Have you looked at Red Hat recently ? They only do fully open source software ? Or the multitude of relatively small businesses that provide support for open source software (Percona, EnterpriseDB) ? Or open source startups like SpringSource that got bought for hundreds of millions of dollars ? Evil commie hipsters, hmm ? Open source plays a *very* important role in the software business and has had so for at least two decades now.
By the way, you're also completely wrong about what the issue here is though. It's not about open source, it's about open standards and about patents. Especially that last item is a whole can of worms to open and about which I have several opinions, but I'm not going to bore you with it now, just a few quick notes: I mostly oppose patents (I think it's a bit of a mafia-style "protection money" you have to pay up for software (like x264) that the patent holders haven't even created themselves !). If musical constructs would have been patentable, we would for instance probably never have heard masterpieces from Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms. The US patent system does the opposite of what it purports to do: enable innovation.
Ultimately, Google's efforts to derail H.264 are unlikely to have a significant impact on H.264, but may cause uncertainty that could slow the adoption of HTML5, resulting in H.264 video being delivered instead via Flash on the web, integrated within iOS apps, or served as straight HTML5 H.264 videos that won't play on Chrome, Chrome OS and Android without an H.264 plugin. The primary casualty of those outcomes would be Google itself.
I agree with the paragraph quoted above... Moreover, Google needs to stop making mistakes. They need to stop purchasing things without thinking them through very well. They need to stop releasing bull shit products that cost them and their partners money. They need to stop giving engineers full control of products delivery and then look surprise when the products fail miserably. These mistakes will start to sting both Google and its partners after a while.
google should try and settle their differences by negotiating better licensing, lower royalties, whatever. Not by these increasingly microsoftian moves.
Ogg Theora, however is 100% open, and is now supported by both Mozilla and Chrome. Since Google owns YouTube, I assume YouTube will switch to Ogg very shortly.
That leaves Safari with H264, which is not exactly a dominant player in the browser market right now. The iPhone is no longer the dominant smartphone platform, either, so Android should also push more folks into using Ogg.
While I understand Apple placed it's bets on H264 (understandable since they are an MPEG LA licensor), I think it'll be forced to include Ogg support once YouTube makes the switch - I think the iPhone needs YouTube more than YouTube needs the iPhone at this point
You're really missing the big picture here, focussing too much on the 'open' and 'free' mantra's Google is pulling out all the time to make you believe the world can be divided nicely into two camps: the open and free saints of technology like Google, and the evil, greedy companies like Apple, that want to make you pay up for nothing. Meanwhile Google is so far in e.g. Adobe's pockets that 'hypocrit' doesn't even cover the way Google is acting sufficiently. Pure FUD and anticompetitive abuse of technology other people created more aptly describes Googles MO since they started expanding beyond web search.
Anyway, what I wanted to comment on is the shortsighted idea you and other Google fans bring up every now and then on how Google could just make YouTube WebM only to diss iOS and H264, and how everyone except iOS users would then 'benefit' from the open format Google pushed to become the new standard. Even disregarding the cost involved in re-encoding everything, that right now nobody has hardware WebM support, and the problems WebM will inevitably run in to when it turns out it isn't so 'free of patents', the idea doesn't make sense at all. There are 27 of the biggest consumer electronics and software companies in the world in the MPEG-LA, some of which are also among Googles biggest friends, who invested heavily in products benefiting from Android and YouTube. Think Samsung, Panasonic, Philips, Toshiba, and many more. They have invested billions in products that included YouTube functionality, and none of them play back WebM. Their customers paid for these products. If Google would single-handedly pull the plug on H264 for YouTube, they would basically dig their own grave and lose all respect and credibility as a trustworthy partner for web media with some of their biggest partners in crime. The would deprecate the products their industry partners developed, screwing over industry partner customers, or forcing their partners into making extra costs retrofitting products with WebM support, in cases where that would be possible.
The H264 battle is one that Google can't win, the vested interests in H264 are huge, powerful companies are supporting it, and none of them have any reason whatsoever to change things just because Google says so. The only positive thing that could come out of this is that MPEG-LA will lift all royalties from H264, just to make Google shut up about their inferior and messy codec. All other arguments why it would be a good thing what google is doing are just a smokescreen. The article is right on the money when it says Google has no leverage here at all. After all the discussions about the h264 Chrome thing I still don't get how Google can decide something epically stupid and arrogant like this.
The history of the internet is replete with examples of businesses trying to lever their proprietary products into key infrastructure roles. Each time open source advocates have taken the long view and the internet is free today because of those decisions.
I say thank you open source advocates for being willing to take the long view over short term expediency.
You can repeat it as many times as you want, but H.264 is NOT an open standard. It contains patented technologies, which means it isn't "open", no matter how many times Appleinsider says it is.
Ogg Theora, however is 100% open, and is now supported by both Mozilla and Chrome. Since Google owns YouTube, I assume YouTube will switch to Ogg very shortly.
That leaves Safari with H264, which is not exactly a dominant player in the browser market right now. The iPhone is no longer the dominant smartphone platform, either, so Android should also push more folks into using Ogg.
While I understand Apple placed it's bets on H264 (understandable since they are an MPEG LA licensor), I think it'll be forced to include Ogg support once YouTube makes the switch - I think the iPhone needs YouTube more than YouTube needs the iPhone at this point.
Does anybody else remember when Appleinsider used to pay at least passing lip service to the fact that most stories have to viewpoints? Lately every article can be summed up with 2 simple points:
1. Apple is Correct/Perfect/Amazing/The Future/Putting the Customer First
2. Not Apple (Google, MS, Consumer Reports, etc) is WRONG/FLAWED/STUPID/SO LAST YEAR/ONLY INTERESTED IN MONEY.
Who cares if H264 is not open?? I am an end-user, and I don't. Unless they ask me to pay for it (and they are not).
I prefer to have a "closed" codec, if it's better in quality (WebM may be a good one, but it's still a H263 codec... a generation older!) and hardware support.
I am a web developer: to pay for my university I make web sites. I think the removal of H264 is just going to generate more disorder. I was hoping HTML5 could finally make our lives easier (e.g. by stating how malformed code should be interpreted, by pushing all web browsers to include new technologies...), but apparently I was wron.
The fact that the H.264 consortium won't offer an unrestricted royalty free license for encoding and decoding proves that their only interest is in getting their product wedged in as key infrastructure and then use their monopoly position to bleed users.
If the H.264 shareholders (they are just speculators, they don't actually contribute any intellectual and technical capital to H.264) want their codec to be an internet standard, then they need do only one thing: offer it free to users to encode and decode without restriction. Absent that, then they're just another business trying to suck money out of the internet.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in the replies here. Let me clear some things up:
1) WebM =/= Ogg Theora - Ogg is pretty much dead at this point and the battle now is between H.264 and WebM
2) Google have only said they are removing H.264 from Chrome, not from Android. Android hardware uses pretty much the same graphics chips as iPhone/Nokia/etc and these all have hardware acceleration for H.264 video, and no support for WebM. It is not feasible to switch to WebM on mobile with the current generation of hardware.
So claims that Google will use Android to make WebM a success are pretty ludicrous. Right now, the only cross-platform desktop + mobile option is H.264, and even if Google release plugins for every browser and next-gen mobile hardware adds support for WebM, it will still be years before every non-Apple mobile device supports WebM (and Apple probably never will).
In all probability, Google have done this to avoid playing licence fees for Chrome, and to shore up Flash, which is a key technology for in-video advertising. No H.264 video containers apart from Flash support in-video ads, and if every browser implemented <video> tags that ran H.264 and killed Flash as a video container then Google would suffer as a result.
So cynically, Google is offering people a choice between a non-viable new web video standard (WebM) that won't work on any current mobile devices, or a universal video standard (H.264) that can only reliably be played via Flash on most current desktop browsers (except Safari and IE9).
I think Google is banking on H.264 winning that battle. And when it does, Google can keep using Flash for YouTube (except on Android devices, which they control anyway and can therefore already derive as much advertising as they want).
And when people complain that every video they watch online comes wrapped in Flash ads, Google can say "well, we tried to push an open alternative to Flash video, but the public rejected it".
And the icing on the cake? Adobe pays all the license fees.
I have enjoyed this site daily for a long time now but this one article got me to register finally.
I'm a die hard apple fan and always have been. MS pushed me to Apple in the beginning because I got really tired of the difficulties with MS OS or the many problems with hardware from the many manufacturers. Unlike any PC user I know, I have never had to replace a mac because of a hardware issue of any kind. They have all just worked. And so it is with experience that I appreciate apple and what they do. Google I have enjoyed for search and maps but this is a really interesting article to point out the details behind this situation. I have a better understanding now how google has gotten away with so much as of late and it's a shame that Jobs and Co. let the serpent of google into their board just to steal what terrific ideas apple had. Google is trying to recreate the past battles of MS and Apple. I thought we were finally beyond opposing operating systems. Now we're headed into three? With the money created from it's ads, why can't google just suck it up and pay the royalties. It's sickening when people try to reap profits from the hard work of others without paying. I'm a fan of innovation and quality. If there are more like this, then google will fail. Android is so broken on all platforms that it won't ever beat the iOS. If it were more like MS and Google took itself more serious then it would work consist on all devices just as MS operating systems do on all the variety of manufacturers PCs. All PCs can upgrade the OS. Most Android phones can't. I'll happily pay for an iPhone (the true original smartphone) or an iPad (the original perfect tablet). Honestly, if Google invented the Sock Monkey, then I'd buy that instead of the iSockMonkey. Google needs to pay the fees and keep advertising like it does best.
Welcome
Just one point of contention......use the enter key please, otherwise it makes your posts really hard to read.
Can be that politics is going on within MPEG-LA. Can Googles move push that group into not want licences for H.264?
Google is evil. This is worst kind of bullying the market with your size. Like Sumo wrestling. However, once a sumo wrestler meets something else then another Sumo wrestler, it will trip and fall over.
MS has lost momentum this way. Others too. If the sumo way is at the heart of Google business strategy, so will Google.
So its massive technical inferiority to H.264 (e.g. poor encode/decode performance, worse image quality at equal bitrates), lack of hardware support (= abysmal battery life for mobile devices) and poor production tools should all be ignored just because it's free?
But consumers do. Worse quality video with crappy battery life. No thanks.
Massive technical inferiority? Do you know anything about video encoding? Read some of the comparisons between the two formats, there are pros and cons in both and the fact that webm may be patent free (and if it's not it will likely be hard to force licenses for anyway) is a massive benefit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. H
Flash is a "winner" here is as much as this move by Google makes it exceptionally unlikely that HTML5 will kill flash. But your logic that it will therefore harm Apple is incorrect.
IE9 is going to support H.264 HTML5. All iOS devices support H.264 HTML5. Flash video supports H.264. As a content provider this means you can encode your video once (as H.264) and serve it up with two different wrappers: IE and iOS get the video in an HTML5 wrapper, and everything else gets the video in a Flash wrapper. Where is the incentive for the content provider to go WebM? Choose H.264 and it's easy to serve your content to everyone, choose WebM and you can't serve your content to iOS devices. It's a no-brainer.
The only content supplier that really matters here is youtube due to its monopoly on web video. It makes no difference if browsers support it or not.
Comments
I would just add that perhaps future content-wars is also playing a role here. Google needs Flash to survive to deliver copy-protected content on YouTube, something they can't do with HTML5, and which may be their ultimate goal for that service. Apple may see YouTube as a potential future competitor to iTunes Store, so is attacking Flash to undermine this potential of YouTube. Seen in that light, this move by Google may be intended to support Adobe, and WebM is just a pawn.
You can repeat it as many times as you want, but H.264 is NOT an open standard. It contains patented technologies, which means it isn't "open", no matter how many times Appleinsider says it is.
Ogg Theora, however is 100% open, and is now supported by both Mozilla and Chrome. Since Google owns YouTube, I assume YouTube will switch to Ogg very shortly.
That leaves Safari with H264, which is not exactly a dominant player in the browser market right now. The iPhone is no longer the dominant smartphone platform, either, so Android should also push more folks into using Ogg.
While I understand Apple placed it's bets on H264 (understandable since they are an MPEG LA licensor), I think it'll be forced to include Ogg support once YouTube makes the switch - I think the iPhone needs YouTube more than YouTube needs the iPhone at this point.
Does anybody else remember when Appleinsider used to pay at least passing lip service to the fact that most stories have to viewpoints? Lately every article can be summed up with 2 simple points:
1. Apple is Correct/Perfect/Amazing/The Future/Putting the Customer First
2. Not Apple (Google, MS, Consumer Reports, etc) is WRONG/FLAWED/STUPID/SO LAST YEAR/ONLY INTERESTED IN MONEY.
What cave have you been living in? You actually think that dribble is true? Android is NOT what all are the players are copying.
If Google did the right thing and relinquished control of the WebM to a standards body I would be supportive but they haven't because they want to control WebM just like with Android.
Google likes to use the term 'open' because it appeals to people with a particular wordview. If you look at another way, Google is simply exploiting the open source community, getting them to work for free, and adding to Google controlled and exploited products like Android/WebM.
"Do no Evil', really??
Shouldn't it be more like: " Externalise costs and risks to third parties to protect advertising monopoly cash-cow".
I would still have a hard time supporting a move backwards in quality of video produced - couldn't agree more with the rest of your post.
At the end of the day, the main beneficiaries of open-source are academics (who get paid regardless, and would rather see their work progressed than make 2-billion dollars)
As a non-academic and programmer myself let me tell you that I *vastly* prefer open source software. Your claim is utterly absurd: the Internet as we know it wouldn't exist without open source software and open standards (Sendmail, Apache httpd, pretty much all scripting languages, the BSDs where the TCP/IP stack got invented, etc). You *do* know that Mac OS X is underpinned by open source software, right ? And Apple and all its users are "academic", right ?
and armchair coders looking to steel other people's work (how much open source code ends up in closed commercial binaries without due referencing)?
Wait, wut ?! Because some unscrupulous people copy and paste open source code without obeying the license into closed commercial software open source is bogus ? And it's the fault even of those "thieving" open source programmers giving software away with reasonable licensing conditions ("either attribute" or "if you use this, you should share too") ?!
Good professional coders deserve to get paid, so they can afford to live.
As a programmer by profession, I wholeheartedly agree.
I'm absolutely sick of people claiming open-source to be some kind of noble gift to mankind.
Who said so ?
It's the same as working on a car: if the car maker supplies you with all the manuals and design documents you have a fighting chance of servicing or tweaking the car yourself instead of having to drive to a "licensed" garage for even the smallest of things.
You clearly aren't a programmer who understands the benefits of open source software. But you're an end-user; understand this: the message board we're arguing on, the database holding the records and the operating system are all open source (check uptime.netcraft.com). The standards for getting this text to you are all open (http, sql, ascii). Are we wrong to benefit from this ?
Commercial companies only offer up open-source when it suits their own commercial interests, or they've written off the asset.
Err, right.
By the way, you're also completely wrong about what the issue here is though. It's not about open source, it's about open standards and about patents. Especially that last item is a whole can of worms to open and about which I have several opinions, but I'm not going to bore you with it now, just a few quick notes: I mostly oppose patents (I think it's a bit of a mafia-style "protection money" you have to pay up for software (like x264) that the patent holders haven't even created themselves !). If musical constructs would have been patentable, we would for instance probably never have heard masterpieces from Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms. The US patent system does the opposite of what it purports to do: enable innovation.
...
Ultimately, Google's efforts to derail H.264 are unlikely to have a significant impact on H.264, but may cause uncertainty that could slow the adoption of HTML5, resulting in H.264 video being delivered instead via Flash on the web, integrated within iOS apps, or served as straight HTML5 H.264 videos that won't play on Chrome, Chrome OS and Android without an H.264 plugin. The primary casualty of those outcomes would be Google itself.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
I agree with the paragraph quoted above... Moreover, Google needs to stop making mistakes. They need to stop purchasing things without thinking them through very well. They need to stop releasing bull shit products that cost them and their partners money. They need to stop giving engineers full control of products delivery and then look surprise when the products fail miserably. These mistakes will start to sting both Google and its partners after a while.
Time will tell.
google should try and settle their differences by negotiating better licensing, lower royalties, whatever. Not by these increasingly microsoftian moves.
well said.
Ogg Theora, however is 100% open, and is now supported by both Mozilla and Chrome. Since Google owns YouTube, I assume YouTube will switch to Ogg very shortly.
That leaves Safari with H264, which is not exactly a dominant player in the browser market right now. The iPhone is no longer the dominant smartphone platform, either, so Android should also push more folks into using Ogg.
While I understand Apple placed it's bets on H264 (understandable since they are an MPEG LA licensor), I think it'll be forced to include Ogg support once YouTube makes the switch - I think the iPhone needs YouTube more than YouTube needs the iPhone at this point
You're really missing the big picture here, focussing too much on the 'open' and 'free' mantra's Google is pulling out all the time to make you believe the world can be divided nicely into two camps: the open and free saints of technology like Google, and the evil, greedy companies like Apple, that want to make you pay up for nothing. Meanwhile Google is so far in e.g. Adobe's pockets that 'hypocrit' doesn't even cover the way Google is acting sufficiently. Pure FUD and anticompetitive abuse of technology other people created more aptly describes Googles MO since they started expanding beyond web search.
Anyway, what I wanted to comment on is the shortsighted idea you and other Google fans bring up every now and then on how Google could just make YouTube WebM only to diss iOS and H264, and how everyone except iOS users would then 'benefit' from the open format Google pushed to become the new standard. Even disregarding the cost involved in re-encoding everything, that right now nobody has hardware WebM support, and the problems WebM will inevitably run in to when it turns out it isn't so 'free of patents', the idea doesn't make sense at all. There are 27 of the biggest consumer electronics and software companies in the world in the MPEG-LA, some of which are also among Googles biggest friends, who invested heavily in products benefiting from Android and YouTube. Think Samsung, Panasonic, Philips, Toshiba, and many more. They have invested billions in products that included YouTube functionality, and none of them play back WebM. Their customers paid for these products. If Google would single-handedly pull the plug on H264 for YouTube, they would basically dig their own grave and lose all respect and credibility as a trustworthy partner for web media with some of their biggest partners in crime. The would deprecate the products their industry partners developed, screwing over industry partner customers, or forcing their partners into making extra costs retrofitting products with WebM support, in cases where that would be possible.
The H264 battle is one that Google can't win, the vested interests in H264 are huge, powerful companies are supporting it, and none of them have any reason whatsoever to change things just because Google says so. The only positive thing that could come out of this is that MPEG-LA will lift all royalties from H264, just to make Google shut up about their inferior and messy codec. All other arguments why it would be a good thing what google is doing are just a smokescreen. The article is right on the money when it says Google has no leverage here at all. After all the discussions about the h264 Chrome thing I still don't get how Google can decide something epically stupid and arrogant like this.
The history of the internet is replete with examples of businesses trying to lever their proprietary products into key infrastructure roles. Each time open source advocates have taken the long view and the internet is free today because of those decisions.
I say thank you open source advocates for being willing to take the long view over short term expediency.
You can repeat it as many times as you want, but H.264 is NOT an open standard. It contains patented technologies, which means it isn't "open", no matter how many times Appleinsider says it is.
Ogg Theora, however is 100% open, and is now supported by both Mozilla and Chrome. Since Google owns YouTube, I assume YouTube will switch to Ogg very shortly.
That leaves Safari with H264, which is not exactly a dominant player in the browser market right now. The iPhone is no longer the dominant smartphone platform, either, so Android should also push more folks into using Ogg.
While I understand Apple placed it's bets on H264 (understandable since they are an MPEG LA licensor), I think it'll be forced to include Ogg support once YouTube makes the switch - I think the iPhone needs YouTube more than YouTube needs the iPhone at this point.
Does anybody else remember when Appleinsider used to pay at least passing lip service to the fact that most stories have to viewpoints? Lately every article can be summed up with 2 simple points:
1. Apple is Correct/Perfect/Amazing/The Future/Putting the Customer First
2. Not Apple (Google, MS, Consumer Reports, etc) is WRONG/FLAWED/STUPID/SO LAST YEAR/ONLY INTERESTED IN MONEY.
Who cares if H264 is not open?? I am an end-user, and I don't. Unless they ask me to pay for it (and they are not).
I prefer to have a "closed" codec, if it's better in quality (WebM may be a good one, but it's still a H263 codec... a generation older!) and hardware support.
I am a web developer: to pay for my university I make web sites. I think the removal of H264 is just going to generate more disorder. I was hoping HTML5 could finally make our lives easier (e.g. by stating how malformed code should be interpreted, by pushing all web browsers to include new technologies...), but apparently I was wron.
why does the chart on first page lists
Firefox - HTML5/H.264 - No | Yes with plugins on Windows or Mac
last time I checked the plugin was available on windows only, is there one also for mac?
Hi... You can view H.264 with Firefox on Mac because it uses the Quicktime 7.6.6 plugin for Firefox on Mac.
If the H.264 shareholders (they are just speculators, they don't actually contribute any intellectual and technical capital to H.264) want their codec to be an internet standard, then they need do only one thing: offer it free to users to encode and decode without restriction. Absent that, then they're just another business trying to suck money out of the internet.
1) WebM =/= Ogg Theora - Ogg is pretty much dead at this point and the battle now is between H.264 and WebM
2) Google have only said they are removing H.264 from Chrome, not from Android. Android hardware uses pretty much the same graphics chips as iPhone/Nokia/etc and these all have hardware acceleration for H.264 video, and no support for WebM. It is not feasible to switch to WebM on mobile with the current generation of hardware.
So claims that Google will use Android to make WebM a success are pretty ludicrous. Right now, the only cross-platform desktop + mobile option is H.264, and even if Google release plugins for every browser and next-gen mobile hardware adds support for WebM, it will still be years before every non-Apple mobile device supports WebM (and Apple probably never will).
In all probability, Google have done this to avoid playing licence fees for Chrome, and to shore up Flash, which is a key technology for in-video advertising. No H.264 video containers apart from Flash support in-video ads, and if every browser implemented <video> tags that ran H.264 and killed Flash as a video container then Google would suffer as a result.
So cynically, Google is offering people a choice between a non-viable new web video standard (WebM) that won't work on any current mobile devices, or a universal video standard (H.264) that can only reliably be played via Flash on most current desktop browsers (except Safari and IE9).
I think Google is banking on H.264 winning that battle. And when it does, Google can keep using Flash for YouTube (except on Android devices, which they control anyway and can therefore already derive as much advertising as they want).
And when people complain that every video they watch online comes wrapped in Flash ads, Google can say "well, we tried to push an open alternative to Flash video, but the public rejected it".
And the icing on the cake? Adobe pays all the license fees.
Who cares if H264 is not open?? I am an end-user, and I don't. Unless they ask me to pay for it (and they are not).
How pathetic, you're happy to create a commercial monopolist because it makes life easier for you today, don't worry about tomorrow.
I have enjoyed this site daily for a long time now but this one article got me to register finally.
I'm a die hard apple fan and always have been. MS pushed me to Apple in the beginning because I got really tired of the difficulties with MS OS or the many problems with hardware from the many manufacturers. Unlike any PC user I know, I have never had to replace a mac because of a hardware issue of any kind. They have all just worked. And so it is with experience that I appreciate apple and what they do. Google I have enjoyed for search and maps but this is a really interesting article to point out the details behind this situation. I have a better understanding now how google has gotten away with so much as of late and it's a shame that Jobs and Co. let the serpent of google into their board just to steal what terrific ideas apple had. Google is trying to recreate the past battles of MS and Apple. I thought we were finally beyond opposing operating systems. Now we're headed into three? With the money created from it's ads, why can't google just suck it up and pay the royalties. It's sickening when people try to reap profits from the hard work of others without paying. I'm a fan of innovation and quality. If there are more like this, then google will fail. Android is so broken on all platforms that it won't ever beat the iOS. If it were more like MS and Google took itself more serious then it would work consist on all devices just as MS operating systems do on all the variety of manufacturers PCs. All PCs can upgrade the OS. Most Android phones can't. I'll happily pay for an iPhone (the true original smartphone) or an iPad (the original perfect tablet). Honestly, if Google invented the Sock Monkey, then I'd buy that instead of the iSockMonkey. Google needs to pay the fees and keep advertising like it does best.
Welcome
Just one point of contention......use the enter key please, otherwise it makes your posts really hard to read.
other than that minor gripe.... again welcome
Google is evil. This is worst kind of bullying the market with your size. Like Sumo wrestling. However, once a sumo wrestler meets something else then another Sumo wrestler, it will trip and fall over.
MS has lost momentum this way. Others too. If the sumo way is at the heart of Google business strategy, so will Google.
So its massive technical inferiority to H.264 (e.g. poor encode/decode performance, worse image quality at equal bitrates), lack of hardware support (= abysmal battery life for mobile devices) and poor production tools should all be ignored just because it's free?
But consumers do. Worse quality video with crappy battery life. No thanks.
Massive technical inferiority? Do you know anything about video encoding? Read some of the comparisons between the two formats, there are pros and cons in both and the fact that webm may be patent free (and if it's not it will likely be hard to force licenses for anyway) is a massive benefit.
Flash is a "winner" here is as much as this move by Google makes it exceptionally unlikely that HTML5 will kill flash. But your logic that it will therefore harm Apple is incorrect.
IE9 is going to support H.264 HTML5. All iOS devices support H.264 HTML5. Flash video supports H.264. As a content provider this means you can encode your video once (as H.264) and serve it up with two different wrappers: IE and iOS get the video in an HTML5 wrapper, and everything else gets the video in a Flash wrapper. Where is the incentive for the content provider to go WebM? Choose H.264 and it's easy to serve your content to everyone, choose WebM and you can't serve your content to iOS devices. It's a no-brainer.
The only content supplier that really matters here is youtube due to its monopoly on web video. It makes no difference if browsers support it or not.