Opera Supports Google Decision To Drop H.264

An anonymous reader follows up to yesterday's Google announcement that they would drop H.264 support from Chrome. "Thomas Ford, Senior Communications Manager, Opera, told Muktware, 'Actually, Opera has never supported H.264. We have always chosen to support open formats like Ogg Theora and WebM. In fact, Opera was the first company to propose the tag, and when we did, we did it with Ogg. Simply put, we welcome Google's decision to rely on open codecs for HTML5 video.'"

Comments

Re:I wish..

[BitZtream]

I was going to add support for H.264 encoding and decoding to one of my projects, but I simply can't afford the license fees or to charge the users for each copy.

You could always provide a simple way to plugin to an existing h.264 library that the user already has a license for, then you don't have to worry about licensing or patents, you just have to pick some h.264 implementation to write a wrapper/plugin for.

Of course, if you designed your software properly, you already support allowing users to select the codec they want to use through some sort of api, hopefully the platform native API.

Basically, you're coming up with shitty excuses for why your software doesn't provide a feature.

Just be honest, you don't support h.264 because it doesn't fit into the agenda you're trying to push with your software.

Developers are to blame when they use such piss poor excuses as yours.

Both of my primary OSes support h.264 across every video application I use ... because they use the native OS API for video encoding/decoding and I have a license to use h.264, regardless of what the h264 status is in the software install. I have no legal or financial concerns.

None of the developers of the software I use have to worry about my license to use h264

Your excuse just shows you're not a very experienced developer, not an actual reason that you can't use h.264 with your application.

Also, turns out ... reinventing the wheel is another one of those things that experience will teach is you almost invariably a bad idea unless you're willing to loose a lot of money in research and design to get it up to par with whats already available, ESPECIALLY when doing it on multiple platforms/OSes.