{"id":17671,"date":"2011-01-12T10:49:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T08:49:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-01-12T10:49:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-12T08:49:00","slug":"google-drops-h-264-support-from-chrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/17671-google-drops-h-264-support-from-chrome.html","title":{"rendered":"Google drops H.264 support from Chrome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google announced on the Chromium blog yesterday that Google Chrome, the search giant&#8217;s web browser, would be <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.chromium.org\/2011\/01\/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html\" target=\"_blank\">dropping support for the H.264 video standard<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A struggle between free and non-free video standards is underway, using browsers as the battlefield.<\/p>\n<p>The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is currently working on an updated specification for HTML, the markup language browsers interpret to display web pages. HTML5, while still under development, is being implemented in part in modern web browsers.<\/p>\n<p>One of the parts being implemented is the &#8220;video&#8221;&nbsp;element which allows video content to be embedded in a page without using a third-party container like Adobe Flash or another media player plugin.<\/p>\n<p>Microsoft&#8217;s Internet Explorer and Apple&#8217;s Safari browsers supported the H.264 video encoding standard, asserting that it was technically superior. Firefox and Opera pledged their support of WebM and Theora, standards that are not only open but were royalty free at the time.<\/p>\n<p>The MPEG LA, the consortium that manages the intellectual property rights of standards such as H.264, then announced in August last year that <a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/14762-H264-forever-royalty-free-for-Internet-video.html\" target=\"_blank\">H.264 would be royalty free forever<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This may sound like it solved the problem, but it seems to have only convoluted the issue.<\/p>\n<p>For one, the <a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/14905-Web-Video---Not-free.html\" target=\"_blank\">MPEG LA only made H.264 royalty free for internet video that is free to end users<\/a>. The royalties remain for everything else including players and encoding\/decoding (codec) software.<\/p>\n<p>This ambiguity caused the MPEG LA&#8217;s announcement to attract criticism from both Mozilla and Opera.<\/p>\n<p>Until now Google seemed content to support all the relevant standards in its Chrome browser, although its open source browser project also supported only the free video standards.<\/p>\n<p>As of yesterday however, the online powerhouse has officially taken sides in the video standards war.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies,&rdquo; Mike Jazayeri, a product manager at Google wrote in the Chromium blog.<\/p>\n<p>According to Jazayeri the changes will happen &ldquo;in the next couple of months&rdquo; to give those using the &#8220;video&#8221; tag time to make changes to their websites.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/vb\/showthread.php\/301653-Google-drops-Chrome-support-for-H.264\" target=\"_self\" title=\"Google drops H.264 support from Chrome\"><strong>Google drops H.264 support from Chrome<\/strong><\/a> &lt;&lt; Comments andviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chrome, Google&#039;s web browser, will stop supporting the popular H.264 video format in the coming months<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}