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."

Comments

Re:Pretty soon...

[commodore64_love]

Thanks for the link. AND I think this is incredibly stupid of Google. Dropping H.264/MPEG4 is a bit like dropping MPEG2 or MPEG1 or MP3 support. It makes no logical sense to not support the standard codecs used by nearly everyone.

Furthermore if a certain other company tried this stunt (cough;Microsoft) with their favorite codec (drop all support except WMV) everybody would be up in arms, saying they are trying to gain a monopolistic advantage over competition. I have ZERO desire to use this WebM stuff, especially since it's been shown inferior to MPEG4/H.264. It would be like stepping back to a 32-bit processor rather than using the current & better 64 bit. Or 64000 colors instead of 16 million.