151–160 of 168 posts
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>Dropping support for h.264 means slower adoption of How's that better for the open standards? 20% of the browser market was never going to adopt H.264. That's a fifth of the market cut out from using entirely. How in the world is that possibly good for web standards? >The most infuriating part of this is, that FSF and Google are so busy with their own agenda, that they forget users. That majority of the market has t…
20% of the browser market was never going to adopt H.264. That's a fifth of the market cut out from using entirely. 20% and dropping... Should we also stop the train in its tracks because IE6 does not support it?
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"Further, H.264 was a complete non-starter for Mozilla, and Firefox holds nearly 20% of the market. Using H.264 for HTML5 would have guaranteed market segmentation and hurt the chances of a truly open future" Except Internet Explorer will continue to be the highest-marketshare browser for the foreseeable future, and IE9 won't ship with VP8 (though you can install a codec for it, I doubt regular people will). It does…
>Maybe Microsoft can be convinced to ship VP8/WebM in IE. I certainly wouldn't discount it. MS made the H.264 decision well before Google announced WebM. It wouldn't shock me to see them cut a deal with Google if for no other reason than to put Apple at a competitive disadvantage.
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It is not only about APIs, but also about control. Microsoft can always rely, that IE9 will supports whatever formats they want it to support. They know, that it will play H.264, because they ship H.264 with Vista and 7 and IE9 supports only Vista and 7. Apple can also always rely, that Safari will display formats they want it to display. They know, that Safari will play H.264, because Quicktime ships with H.264 and…
The handling of a is outsourced to the OS.
That is not the case for browser vendor without their OS. They cannot achieve the same effect.
Or in summary: if you support a free Web, you support WebM and FSF's call for killing H.264. If you don't care, then H.264 seems just fine.
If we switch to WebM, we have one less "patent encumbered" in there (maybe). I'm not impressed with the "free Web" argument.
Someday it will be replaced, but it will take a technically better standard. WebM is not technically better. Take a time machine and send WebM back about 10 years, and it has a shot. Without a time machine, it is too late.
The problem Google and the FSF face is that very few really care about having everything be free in the FSF's sense of free. Heck, even among Linux users, who you'd expect would be the most receptive of wanting everything to be free, very few run the truly free distributions, with no non-free modules or drivers. The vast majority are not even on Linux. They are on Windows and Mac, and so have no qualms about using non-free stuff.
To convince people they need to switch to something that is technically inferior, they need to be shown a problem that actually affects them. H.264 being subject to patent licensing in those countries that recognize software or codec patents is not a problem that can be shown to affect most web users or most web video producers, at least in a way they care about. The royalty free license for distributing free video on the web, and the high thresholds before license fees kick in for video producers, ensure that the vast majority of us never do anything that requires coughing up any money, and that takes the problem off most people's radar.
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How do you expect this number to change?
With time. The point is that both HTML5 and mobile web are in their infancy. Browser desktop share is now and it seems foolish to ignore 20% of the market in favor of a segment that accounts for 3% of traffic.
H.264 is the standard for video compression. Period. It is what almost all professional hardware and software supports. It's how video is distributed on disc, via cable, via satellite, and via digital broadcast. It's what consumer hardware supports. Someday it will be replaced, but it will take a technically better standard. WebM is not technically better. Take a time machine and send WebM back about 10 years, and it…
So like it or not, those freedom freaks are entitled to have a say to how things should work. They are too big part of an ecosystem to be ignored.
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> Flash isn't going away in the short term anyway I disagree completely. One of the things I love about my iDevices is that they don't support Flash. Some consider this a problem. I consider it a feature . For me personally, very few times is this frustrating and most of those are when sites use Flash-wrapped video with no HTML5 fallback, which is still relatively common (but decreasingly so). I wish I could use Chro…
> One of the things I love about my iDevices is that they don't support Flash. You know, they make real computers that don't support flash too.
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Yes, YouTube would have to switch to WebM -- ie no support for serving any other codec -- for that to be true. Which is effectively turning off YouTube for every browser and device on the web today. Are they going to do that? No chance. Some day, maybe, but they're not going to lead the way. And while YouTube is still additionally serving h.264, there's still no pressure for everybody else to change.
There is a strategy in the middle however for google/youtube to make people want to migrate to browsers and devices that supports webm/vp8: all they have to do is to continue serving both webm and h264 versions, but make the h264 version a worst experience. For example: make all h264 encoded clips on youtube become grayscale while mantainig the vp8 ones high quality and in color. People would not be prevented from wa…