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Google To Drop Support For H.264 In Chrome
Steve writes "Google just made a bold move in the HTML5 video tag battle: even though H.264 is widely used and WebM is not, the search giant has announced it will drop support for the former in Chrome. The company has not done so yet, but it has promised it will in the next couple of months. Google wants to give content publishers and developers using the HTML5 video tag an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their websites."
Google is obviously betting that WebM in Chrome and Firefox can carry enough weight to compete against H.264 in MSIE, Opera, and Safari.
Google, obviously, has enough web-surfing based data to factor into this judgement call. Whether or not Google is right on this call, one thing is certain: Google wouldn't do this unless they were fairly confident in WebM's chances against the looming patent trolls.
This, I think, is the noteworthy aspect of this bit of news. A patent troll going after WebM will now have to expect to have to deal with Google's well-funded lawyers.
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball asks some very relevant questions about this. The most interesting is: if Google is so concerned about open standards, will they also be dropping the embedded Flash player from Chrome?
Back? Have you ever tried using HTML5 video? It's completely fucking useless.
No, really, it is. OK, first off, we have the codec issue. If you want to support all browsers, you need to encode to the following formats: H.264+AAC, VP8+Vorbis, and Theora+Vorbis. You're stuck with all three if you want to hit all browsers.
Then there's the part where the HTML5 spec forbids allowing JavaScript to fullscreen the video. Which means that you're stuck with either using the lousy solution YouTube uses (blow up the video to screen size, and assume the user can figure out how to fullscreen their browser on their own), or just dropping the feature all together.
Both suck. Users are used to being able to fullscreen the video, and they do NOT want to jump through the two-step hoop just to get fullscreen video.
Of course, most browsers allow the user to fullscreen the video on the context menu. But that's still really a two-step process: right click on the video, and then click on "Full screen." And to add insult to injury, most HTML5 video toolkits manage to block this option anyway by the way they generate their UI. (Including YouTube, in fact.)
So instead, you just use H.264 and a Flash-based player. Now you hit every major browser including IE, you don't have to encode your video three fucking times, and you don't have to have continuously explain the hoops required to fullscreen the video.
But what all this also means is that by ditching H.264, Google really doesn't lose anything anyway: if you were trying to support more than just Chrome and Safari with HTML5, you were already encoding to at least Theora anyway. So all this does is mean that Chrome will now be stuck with the same crappy, blurry Theora video you already had to encode to anyway to support Firefox. Or maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get the WebM video, which while worse than H.264 at the same bitrates, is still better than Theora.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What makes this decision even more annoying is that Google are part of the H264 patent pool. They have more to lose by removing support for it.
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Except H.264 is superior to WebM.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
Or, people can just use the hardware and software they already paid for which supports H.264. There are plenty of programs which use QuickTime to encode and decode H.264 with absolutely no fear of being sued by MPEG-LA. And they get the benefit of using a superior codec, all at no additional cost.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source, but WebM objectively inferior to H.264. Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price? As it seems to me, to do so would be entirely irrational.
And if something comes out as good as Handbrake after Chrome drops h264, I will gladly use it and compliment Google on their foresight.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And with a maximal of 6 billion units, that works out to around 1.2 billion (ignoring things like having multiple units (one on the computer, one on the smart phone, one on the game system, etc)). Care to pay that for everyone?
Ie, if I put my wedding video on youtube in H.264 and it becomes popular and gets 2 million page views, I'll risk having to pay $40,000? Golly, I wonder why anyone would have a problem with that.
Unless the website hosting it has ads of any sort; then it's commercial.
Which begs the question, why isn't licensing such that Google, Firefox, etc don't have to pay? It's certainly not like MPEG LA is getting insufficient money. The simple point is, MPEG LA wants the chance to spread into the online world to make even more money. I can appreciate this. But, when you start counting the possibly millions or even billions of units to be sold in the future, that "dirt cheap" is no longer dirt cheap--why else would the per unit rate be so low, anyways?
The simple truth is, allowing H.264 to effectively tax all internet-video devices is one of those anti-free market things that will only slow down innovation and growth. It's no different than any other pervasive fee in a system.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Except H.264 is superior to WebM.
No, it's not. I've seen both in action, and they're perceptually identical. I see this argument a lot, and the people who make it are simply pulling it out of their ass.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source. <bogus claim snipped!> Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price?
What if you want to upgrade that software? And then upgrade it again? And again? That all cost $$$, and as someone who uses both FOSS and commercial software, I can tell you that the difference isn't so "reasonable." What if you are a design studio and you need 100 copies of the software? That price isn't so "reasonable" either.
It strikes me that a lot of people made the same stupid arguments you just did about Linux--especially Microsoft, which stands to have the most to lose if people switch to Linux. "You have this expensive infrastructure that you can't get rid of!" And a lot of stupid companies buy into it, too. To save the $500 thousand it would cost to switch over and maintain the environment after doing so, they spend millions over the course of three to five years.
There's a better way. I know it. Google knows it. Most laypeople don't, and Apple, as the company who sells a lot of legacy H.264 hardware software and who earns royalties from other people who make such things, has a high financial stake in doing their damned best to make sure people don't act in their own long-term financial interest or freedom.