Live data from Hacker News

Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

blog.chromium.org

181–190 of 358 posts

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FUD. All the Tegra 2 stuff at CES was hardware accelerated and the Motorola Atrix even played video @1080p over the hdmi port

It's valid when it ships.

The Atrix runs Android 2.2 (Froyo) which shipped last May. I was just talking about CES because we've been bombarded the past week

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#183
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when has Apple supported open standards simply because it makes sense to do so? Apple almost invariably chooses closed over open.

Comment of the year right here, folks. +4 already too. Thank heavens its a throwaway, how embarrassing.

It's not exactly insightful but it does have some merit. Apple's approach is an odd mix of open and closed. You could describe it as 'strategically open'... (of course - this applies to Google too to a slightly lesser degree).

No company supports open-source if it directly conflicts with their perceived interests. Some companies just take a wider view than others.

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#184
post #133
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People should really blame MS and Apple for only supporting their own video codec here. H.264 is not Apple's codec, nor is it Microsoft's. Both of them have to license it, just like any random company off the street would. Apple does own one or two of the several hundred patents involved, so might get a very slight discount on their license. > I am fully behind the decision of Mozilla, Opera, Google and others to s…

> WebM is probably patent encumbered. Classic FUD.

Read [this](http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377). VP8 is basically a slightly worse version of baseline H.264.

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#185
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other would kill the browser immediately. Firefox doesn't bundle Flash either, and that hasn't killed it.

I guess I was assuming that the request was to remove flash entirely and prohibit its addition through plugins. If the question is bundle versus don't bundle, my answer is confusion at the difference in end result. It's not an apples to apples comparison because not bundling H.264 is essentially the same as making it entirely unavailable.

With Chrome(ium) you can just replace the copy of the libavcodec dll/so, and it magically supports whatever codecs the new one is built with.

For Firefox, you'd have to fork it along with Gecko and XULRunner.

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#186
post #69
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"de facto standard" is a meaningless, self-contradictory phrase that really boils down to saying "But this is the way we've always done it!" Standards are not de facto. Standards are things created by standards bodies. The word has an actual meaning. Trying to twist it to mean "the way we do stuff now" (as your argument for h.264 does) or "the way I want to do stuff" (as many arguments for HTML5 (which doesn't have a…

Whatever bro. WebM isn't and will never be a browser standard so I'm not sure what you're getting at. None of the codecs will as stated in the HTML5 Specification . If you don't think de facto standards are important then you are clueless about the history of the internet and technology in general.

In fairness, bro, I never mentioned WebM in the post you are replying to, nor did I suggest that "de facto standards" are irrelevant. I merely disagreed with your use of the phrase "de facto standard" in and of itself.

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#187
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264 You kind of buried this but this is the true deal breaker. There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders. And Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9).

> There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders. The very article states that there are hardware WebM decoders, not only that but Google is licensing the technology for free as in zero dollars: http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...

Licensing isn't the (only) issue for asics. Hardware decoders are only reasonably priced if they're being produced at scale. If I'm a device manufacturer and I have a choice between getting h.264 for free because it's on the SoC I'm using and paying multiple dollars (!) for a WebM decoder, not to mention wasting valuable board space and paying for it to be soldered on, which do you think I'll choose?

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#189
I think this is bad for HTML 5 video in the short run, but I do not care about it anymore, I wished that everyone supported Theora, and then switched to Dirac in the future, but Apple and Google made me give up of my hopes.

However in the long run I think this will be an example of 'worse is better' happening, I think WebM will win over H.264. If that is bad or no that's depend on how do you see Apple and Google, if you believe this post contain a good message or if you believe Gruber but not both, for me both are just false in their pretense of openness, which is why I supported Theora in the first place.

Theora vs. H.264 was the first big fight that I remember in HN were the majority of comments were just bullshit for me (just like this thread), although there were really good ones from both sides, I also commented in the matter, back then I said that codecs would grow in irrelevance, I belive that H.264, as a patent covered standard, will lose in the future because its licensing terms are not clear and a license for its use can be pretty expensive to people trying to win some money from web video, specially those that have no money initially to spend in royalties (like startups, open source and non commercial projects), my example back them was a cloudy video editor, maybe something that is impractical today, but that I do expect becoming at least practical for simple uses in 2 to 3 years from now.

For this type of user paying for royalties in the beginning just does not make any sense and is stressful for their financial situation, this if they want to win money with their project, it's even more complicated for open source projects, for the case that people want to win some money from their company or project a good comparison would be the college student that take loans, trying to make some potential money in the future while spending money that he does not have in the present.

I think that WebM will have the preference of this public if they are not aiming Apple products. For me this will happen just because MPEG LA was incompetent enough and did not knew how to deal with the situation, opening the standard to small business, not charging users and business that only stream the using codec, things like that that the consortium never clarified (they never defined the "broadcast market" from which they plan to charge royalties from).

More could be said about why I think H.264 will be a thing of the past in the following years, but them my comment would be too big.

Re: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

#190
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other would kill the browser immediately. Firefox doesn't bundle Flash either, and that hasn't killed it.

Firefox has got some kind of auto-installer for Flash (and notifies you if it needs updated, for security reasons). They got accused of the same hypocrisy when they announced a royalty-free codec only strategy. They had some good responses, that I can't find right now but boiled down to "WebM is a fight we can win, removing or banning Flash is suicide".

Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years — if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges. Theoretically that plugin repository mechanism is crossplatform, and on some Linux platforms it can install a mplayer plugin, but it's purpose-designed for Flash and I'm not sure there are any other plugins for Windows in the repo that Mozilla hosts.

When they first implemented it, they also got a special license from Adobe to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days.

They've also baked in a special Flash updater too — if your Flash plugin has known security vulnerabilities Firefox will prompt you to automatically update it: http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-up...

Post reply on HN