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Opera Supports Google Decision To Drop H.264

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the rally-behind-the-big-dog dept.

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.'"

4 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by cpu6502 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec and television is using this codec and cable is using this codec and DVRs are using this codec and Blurays are using this codec...... but the internet did not. The web would be the odd man out.

    --
    My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    1. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by tixxit · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Really? I'd think a good codec would have a longer useful life. I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs and BDs today and is 15 years old (BD requires h.264 support as well, though). I think you have the law of diminishing returns. How much better can we really do than h.264? It took a while to get audio right, but once it got 'good enough' (mp3), any minor improvements weren't enough to overcome the inertia mp3s had already gained. Same with JPEGs and PNGs. After a certain point, the minor improvements just aren't enough to win over the inertia gained by the previous codec. In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.

    2. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Steauengeglase · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It isn't the odd man out, it is simply ahead of the curve.

      This is why almost every net appliance failed and cellphones have the lifespan of butterflies. They can exist in that curve or slightly behind it, but they can't keep up.

  2. Re:I wish.. by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wish software developers would stop playing politics with software and just deliver products that work

    what part of the word 'politics' didn't you understand?

    ::sigh:: I write free software, for free. While I try to "just deliver products that work" by ensuring cross platform compilations work, and adding features users request, I am not always CAPABLE of complying due to patents.

    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.

    So, I'm faced with -- use external libs which is not exactly "just works" if you don't have the lib installed, eh?

    For the video conference feature I chose to write my own codec to avoid all these "politics", sure, it's re-inventing the wheel, but screw it, I want my product to just work...

    As it turns out, H.264 and other codecs have patented such obvious solutions that my "clean room, from scratch, never have looked at any other codec source" code infringes upon H.264 patents...

    It would be great to just say, "Hey, I wrote all this code myself, it just works, everyone can use it for free", unfortunately, patents prevent me from doing so.

    Don't blame the developers. The users aren't willing to foot the legal bills and chance getting sued by Apple, MPEG-LA, etc, neither am I. Software Patent's Suck!