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Google To Push WebM With IE9, Safari Plugins
surveyork writes with this "new chapter in the browser wars: 'Google in a defense of its decision to pull H.264 from Chrome's HTML5 revealed that it will put out WebM plugins for Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. Expecting no official support from Apple or Microsoft, Google plans to develop extensions that would load its self-owned video codec. No timetable was given.' So Google gets started with their plan for world-wide WebM domination. They'll provide WebM plugins for the browsers of the H.264-only league, so in practice, all major browsers will have WebM support — one way or the other. Machiavellian move?"
you are falling into the old trap of failing to consider the indirect and long term costs.
What "indirect and long term costs" are you talking about?
as well, the market only cares about what is "good enough" at the price they want to pay ($0), not which codec scores 0.17% higher on some subjective quantification.
The market has already chosen H.264. The price is "good enough". WebM's price is a little bit less, but not enough to get people to switch over to it en masse.
H.264 is here to stay. The only thing that's uncertain is whether WebM will establish itself as a consumer standard, or join Theora in irrelevancy.
we've seen over and over that "internet-time" goes by very fast, so the market inertia is only worth 6 months-3 years at best.
"Internet time" is more about new things than throwing out the old. Jpeg is a good example of this. Supposedly better standards have come out, including PNG and JPEG-2000. But good old jpeg is here to stay. Even if every digital camera moved over to a new format, computers would have to support jpeg pretty much forever, because people aren't going to convert all their digital photos.
"can't win: don't even try" attitudes never changed the world and didn't get these startups to where they are today.
WebM won't change the world. It's neither revolutionary nor evolutionary. The only thing going for it for people and organizations not named "Google" is it's a little bit cheaper. If your name is "Google", you also get the benefit of owning the rights to the codec.
what I don't get why the fuck do people keep modding up your bullshit opinions in these threads? I mean you're entitled to them of course; nothing personal but there's nothing highly insightful or new in them (nor mine), just the usual back-and-forth slashfroth. and yet they keep on popping up.
The get modded up because people think they deserve it. They also get modded down because other people think they deserve that.
My opinion is that WebM is too late, and is not compelling enough to be worth all the annoyance it (and Google's decision to drop H.264 from Chrome) will bring. The rest of what I write is just the facts. My opinion is based on the real-world, consumer-centric interpretation of the facts. The majority opinion here on Slashdot is based on the idealistic geek-centric point of view, with a large heap of Free Software ideology thrown in for good measure.
Time and again the consumer point of view has triumphed the geek-centric view. There's no reason to expect this to change, ever.