</description>
</item>
+ <item>
+ <title>Chrome plan to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt;</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Chrome_plan_to_drop_H_264_support_for_HTML5__lt_video_gt_.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 12 Jan 2011 22:10:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>Today I discovered
+<a href="http://www.digi.no/860070/google-dropper-h264-stotten-i-chrome">via
+digi.no</a> that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
+<a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html">yesterday
+announced</a> plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 &lt;video&gt; in
+the browser. The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely
+open" codec technology. If you believe H.264 was free for everyone
+to use, I recommend having a look at the essay
+"<a href="http://webmink.com/essays/h-264/">H.264 – Not The Kind Of
+Free That Matters</a>". It is not free of cost for creators of video
+tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the
+terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from
+licensing the patents needed for H.264. Some background information
+on the Google announcement is available from
+<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24243/Google_To_Drop_H264_Support_from_Chrome">OSnews</a>.
+A good read. :)</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to
+promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on
+the Internet. This can only be done by publishing using free and open
+standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support
+for these free and open standards. At the moment there seem to be two
+camps in the web browser world when it come to video support. Some
+browsers support H.264, and others support
+<a href="http://www.theora.org/">Ogg Theora</a> and
+<a href="http://www.webmproject.org/">WebM</a>
+(<a href="http://www.diracvideo.org/">Dirac</a> is not really an option
+yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet
+and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for
+H.264 to not reach all potential viewers.
+Wikipedia keep <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video">an
+updated summary</a> of the current browser support.</p>
+
+<p>Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
+promoting H.264, and John Gruber
+<a href="http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions">presents
+the mind set</a> of these people quite well. His rhetorical questions
+provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
+<a href="http://www.osnews.com/story/24245/10_Questions_for_John_Gruber_Regarding_H_264_WebM">presenting
+the issues with H.264</a>. Both are worth a read.</p>
+
+<p>Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free,
+they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin. This
+argument was covered by Simon Phipps in
+<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/01/google-and-h264---far-from-hypocritical/index.htm">todays
+blog post</a>, which I find to put the issue in context. To me it
+make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the
+browser while still allowing plugins.</p>
+
+<p>I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest,
+is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy
+feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse. A lot of TV
+broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot
+of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they
+could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web
+publishing. Suddenly this belief is shaken.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting question is why Google is doing this. While the
+presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only
+present the argument if the change make sense from a business
+perspective. One reason might be that they are currently negotiating
+with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the
+feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and
+Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google.
+Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having
+to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a
+video format not requiring royalties at all. A third reason might be
+that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the
+Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome.
+I guess time will tell.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
</channel>
</rss>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff