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Microsoft Tips the Scale In Favor of HTML 5
aabelro writes "Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, has announced that IE9 will use only the H.264 standard to play HTML 5 video. Microsoft seems to have become very committed to HTML 5, while Flash loses even more ground. The announcement came the same day Steve Jobs detailed why Apple does not accept Flash on iPhone and iPad."
using the youtube flash player?
html5 != no flash
html5 is just a version of html which supports a video tag just like an image tag. it also supports the object tag. which means flash works in html5.
the only case where flash isn't going to work is where the operating system or browser does not have a flash plug in.
safari only supports h.264 in the html5 video tag as well. yet, youtube works just fine in it.
mozilla only supports ogg in the html5 video tag. yet, youtube works just fine in it.
Did you just not read the post you replied to, or what?
You can still use Flash as long as there will be a Flash plugin for IE9. There's no reason to think there won't be - so go ahead, just use the object tag as you have been.
The only scale this might tip is the Theora vs h.264 thing as MS announced that as far as the video tag goes, they will only accept h.264 datastreams . Unless this in itself can be extended using plugins, this means a great majority of people who browse the web will be limited to viewing those h.264 datastreams. The significance (closes vs open, etc.) is probably lost on those people, though... so why would Microsoft care to support a second non-industry-backed datastream if there's no push for them to do so.
Dude, you do know that JPEG, GIF, and MP3 are all patent-owned standards too, right?
The patents on GIF have expired. Baseline JPEG (which is what browsers support) is royalty-free. Closed formats are the exception on the web, not the rule.
That is to say, HTML5 is a way to embed video into web pages, along with controls. HTML5 doesn't say anything about the video codec that should be used, similar to how the IMG tag doesn't say what kinds of image formats are supported. Further, the videos that are loaded will almost certainly be in some container format, like Ogg, MP4, AVI, etc.. - not in raw codec data form.
If the underlying system has a general media decoding system, and if the browser uses that, then the browser will support any kind of media supported by that underlying system.
It's an openly specified W3 standard. As a means to embed video into webpages, HTML5 video is much better than using the object tag to suck in a proprietary blob to then suck in the video.
H.264 is openly specified in standards drawn up by the MPEG and published by ISO. There are free software implementations of H.264. H.264 rather is encumbered by patents, the licensing for many of which is administered by the MPEG-LA. The patent situation is what things difficult for distributors/users, there is no lack of standards.
Note that flash players often use H.263 and H.264 codec videos, and so have all the same patent issues for free software implementations (in addition to the problem of Flash not being fully documented, and not having any complete free implementations).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
H.264 is perfectly open-source, but patent encumbered. There's a tremendous difference. You do yourself a disservice to confuse the two.
What you're describing would be true if they supported only WMV, but absolutely false for h264.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.