-
Today I discovered
-via
-digi.no that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement,
-yesterday
-announced plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 <video> 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
-"H.264 â Not The Kind Of
-Free That Matters". 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
-OSnews.
-A good read. :)
-
-
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
-Ogg Theora and
-WebM
-(Dirac 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 an
-updated summary of the current browser support.
-
-
Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep
-promoting H.264, and John Gruber
-presents
-the mind set of these people quite well. His rhetorical questions
-provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions
-presenting
-the issues with H.264. Both are worth a read.
-
-
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
-todays
-blog post, 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.
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided
-more
-background and information on the move it a blog post yesterday.
-