- <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>
-
-<p>Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
-<a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html">more
-background and information on the move</a> it a blog post yesterday.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-