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Google To Drop Support For H.264 In Chrome

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the shot-in-the-air dept.

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."

2 of 765 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great! Less choice! by DJRumpy · · Score: 1, Troll

    Pragmatism my ass. They are shipping WebM because they own it. It's a new standards war that Google wants to win. Not because it's 'free', but because it has Google's name on it. To claim this yet continue to ship proprietary flash support in the same browser just looks bad, and makes the entire premise hypocritical.

    It's bullshit.

  2. Re:Pretty soon... by c0lo · · Score: 0, Troll

    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.

    First, to gain a monopolistic advantage, you actually need a monopoly, and Chrome - unlike Windows or IE - is far from it.

    Oh yeah? Even not a monopoly, YouTube seems to be significant enough.
    Wanna bet Google is going to drift away from h264 encoding in the near future?

    --
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