Video on the web: H.264 versus WebM and Google

WebM is inferior to H.264 but the latter stifles innovation?

Come back with your ideas when WebM has innovated itself to be better than H.264.
 
Apple removes flash - Adobe boos apple for removing their propriety 3rd party software
Google removes H.264 - Apple/MS boo google for removing propriety 3rd party software

Gotta love it.
 
Having to convert everything to put on apple products is such a time waster really, one of the reasons I ignore their products. Supporting google here :)
 
What a poor article. It does so little to highlight the real issues like how does this affect me as a consumer video user?

Some of the statements are nonsensical - Google steered well clear of including You Tube in this announcement since moving You Tube to WebM is a real pain in the butt.

This is is a war Google has already lost - the losers are HTML5, Chrome, and web video sites which are forced back into the arms of Adobe.

Why is Google going to lose? Almost every major consumer video manufacturer is already a H.264 patent owner. They pay a maximum $6.5 million per year to use H.264. That is chump change.
Google is not a content provider on You Tube - you are - using a consumer camera that encodes to H.264 and gives you H.264 direct downloads that you edit using Microsoft or Apple video editors, then load to You Tube in H.264. So you fire up your browser and You Tube is going to serve you the video in a WebM wrapper? Otherwise you need to use flash as a h.264 wrapper?

Every other video site (especially video sellers) already has most of that content in H.264.

This is more likely to lead to video sites dropping chrome users than going to the effort of re-encoding video for WebM. The alternative is to keep the video served via flash.
 
I am not sure what the issue with Flash is? I use flash daily, it works fine. Any reason to hate it other than Steve Jobs said so?
 
This was not only a poor analysis, it's old news too!

@ Marthinus, Flash is fine, I just think the future of the web is with open standards, not proprietary plug-ins.
 
Synaesthesia said:
This was not only a poor analysis, it's old news too!

@ Marthinus, Flash is fine, I just think the future of the web is with open standards, not proprietary plug-ins.
Click to expand...

Yes, so for open standards h.264 and Flash is bad, but when it comes to choosing Flash or h.264 I don't see the point, they both are propriety and they both allow me to watch videos on the web, I really don't need more. WebM will also allow me to watch videos on the web, so to me as a consumer I really don't care, as long as I can watch my videos.
 
Well Flash is still controlled by Adobe, whereas H.264 is an open standard, meaning it's not controlled by a single corporation. (anyone can use it freely). It's just not a free standard.

Flash is also a performance hog, not so much on Windows, but more on Mac/Linux. I switched to using the Quicktime video player for all my web video, with a Safari extension, and deleted Flash. The performance difference is amazing.
 
Woot! I'm glad Google have this nuke up their sleeve
 
MarthinusSwart said:
I am not sure what the issue with Flash is? I use flash daily, it works fine. Any reason to hate it other than Steve Jobs said so?
Click to expand...

The difference is that Apple said we're not supporting flash in iOS because it's old and buggy and slow and HTML5 is better.

Google is saying they don't want to support H.264 in chrome because it's not free. The excuses about 'open' is a load of junk. Almost every Google technology isn't 'open' or truely free. (Freemium pricing model)

H.264 is open, but it's not free. But that's not a problem since it has a few other attributes: it's cheap, the pricing is stable and predictable till 2015, and best of all it's a good video codec.

I don't mind paying for something that works well and is ubiquitous.
Like when I buy a new video camera or phone and R0.000001 of the cost was paid by the manufacturer to license H.264.
 
If WebM was technically superior to H.264 I would love to support it. Unfortunately it's quite inferior. That and pretty much all devices already use H.264
 
BobJones said:
The difference is that Apple said we're not supporting flash in iOS because it's old and buggy and slow and HTML5 is better.

Google is saying they don't want to support H.264 in chrome because it's not free. The excuses about 'open' is a load of junk. Almost every Google technology isn't 'open' or truely free. (Freemium pricing model)

H.264 is open, but it's not free. But that's not a problem since it has a few other attributes: it's cheap, the pricing is stable and predictable till 2015, and best of all it's a good video codec.

I don't mind paying for something that works well and is ubiquitous.
Like when I buy a new video camera or phone and R0.000001 of the cost was paid by the manufacturer to license H.264.
Click to expand...

The problem is that this locks the browser market in to a few large companies. You can have IE or Safari or Chrome, because they're backed by large companies. You can't have Opera or Mozilla or similar, because they can't afford the licensing fees to be web browsers.

And, even if Mozilla takes out a license, you can't recompile your own copy of Firefox, because then you voilate the patents. And no, Linux (or my own OS I write), or VLC (or my own media player) will never be allowed to play videos again. That's just the way things are. After all, they SHOULD be in the hands of large corporates that can afford to write software. No startups or small companies are allowed in the computer industry.
 
Valerion said:
The problem is that this locks the browser market in to a few large companies. You can have IE or Safari or Chrome, because they're backed by large companies. You can't have Opera or Mozilla or similar, because they can't afford the licensing fees to be web browsers.

And, even if Mozilla takes out a license, you can't recompile your own copy of Firefox, because then you voilate the patents. And no, Linux (or my own OS I write), or VLC (or my own media player) will never be allowed to play videos again. That's just the way things are. After all, they SHOULD be in the hands of large corporates that can afford to write software. No startups or small companies are allowed in the computer industry.
Click to expand...

So if I'm a small startup I don't have to pay for things that are not free?
 
BobJones said:
So if I'm a small startup I don't have to pay for things that are not free?
Click to expand...

You have to. However, paying millions in licensing fees does not equate a good business plan either. But if there's a low-cost or free option, wouldn't that allow the small business to have better pricing, or create more jobs?
 
Synaesthesia said:
If WebM was technically superior to H.264 I would love to support it. Unfortunately it's quite inferior. That and pretty much all devices already use H.264
Click to expand...

There have been cases where the inferior product won in the end, for example VHS, X86 or Windows.
I hope WebM is one of those cases,
the reason being its great to have a superior version of something if you're willing to pay for it, but don't let it become the standard so that others don't have a choice in whether they want to pay for it or not.
 
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