Despite wild speculation from that IBM guy, there’s no reason to believe YouTube will go WebM only. If you go with the Ars explaination (which makes a lot more sense than the IBM guy’s), there’s no reason for Google to stop supporting H.264 (in addition to WebM) on YouTube.
Yeah, assuming that iOS continues to support H264 only (it will) and that future Android phones support WebM in hardware (not at all a foregone conclusion), the chances are that YouTube will end up using <video> with both WebM- and H264-encoded sources and Flash as a fallback for browsers that support neither.
More broadly speaking, I wonder if Google have just effectively killed WebM. By which I mean that Flash can be used to deliver H264 content - content providers thus just have to encode once and use Flash as a fallback for platforms that can’t play H264-encoded HTML5 <video>. It could very well turn out that all Google have done is ensure that Flash doesn’t go anywhere any time soon given, particularly for Chrome and Android’s browser.
Eventually, in order to consolidate their infrastructure overhead, Google will need to transcode the entire YouTube library into a smaller subset of formats, and since they have to go through the painful effort of doing this anyway, they might as well do it with open formats that they control in which they are beholden to no-one.
This is basically the answer.
The question as to whether Flash will be removed… the answer is obviously no, it won’t be… because it’s currently used on like 80% of all the sites on the internet. Only Jobs is foolish enough to try and end Flash support.
Also, it’s worth noting that prior to this decision by Google, you basically had two teams in this realm… Mozilla and Opera supporting Ogg Theora, and Apple and Google supporting h.264. Now you basically have the entire HTML5 world, with the exception of Apple, moving away from h.264.
Yeah, I’ll miss Chrome’s speed & stability (vs Firefox), but I already visit websites which don’t get along well with it. If Google goes through with this and it breaks things as badly as everyone seems to expect it will break things, it’s hasta la vista to Chrome.
That makes no sense at all. How does removing H.264 support from Chrome make it easier or harder to shift YouTube to VP8? What Google needs is for all the other browsers to add support for VP8.
It’s not going to break anything. It just means that Chrome will use Flash to play video on some sites which would have used the HTML5 <video> element instead.
I thought Firefox and Opera already had support for VP8.
Yeah, Safari, IE9 and the Android browser are the only HTML5-capable browsers that don’t support WebM. Given that Apple (and Microsoft?) are members of the MPEG-LA consortium, I can’t see that changing any time soon for Safari or IE9. Android is an odd one because it’s nominally a Google product but actually it’s sort of multi-vendor. Are Sony and Samsung - also members of the consortium that developed H264 - going to ditch their own codec in favour of WebM?
Serious question: how hard is it to have any given browser support both? What’s the profit motive in not supporting WebM?
My understanding is that if you license H.264 then what you’re basically buying is that someone else accepts responsibility in the case of a lawsuit. So, sure, someone could come up with a “submarine” patent but the end users of the tech would all have an out.
The difference with WebM is that if you use it, and it turns out to infringe on a patent, you don’t have anyone else to accept liability for you. Also, WebM, is far more risky at this point. I suspect that if you talked to a lawyer about H.264 that one of big points they’d bring up is that the money is already there, has been there a long time, and if someone was going to sue they would have already done it.
Firefox does not yet support VP8. (Firefox 4 will, but it’s still in beta.)
IE supports VP8 through a codec plugin. Microsoft isn’t going to support it directly unless they have no choice, because they don’t want to expose themselves to the risk of a patent lawsuit. (Google says VP8 is safe…but they aren’t willing to guarantee it, and Microsoft is one heck of a juicy target for patent trolls.)
Safari doesn’t support VP8 at all. There are a number of possible reasons for this: Apple may want to push H.264, since they’re a member of MPEG LA, the organization that licenses the various patents applying to it. They may want to push H.264, since (ignoring licensing questions) it’s a better technology. They may just not see any reason to put the effort into supporting a new codec. Or they may just not have gotten around to it yet–remember, not even Firefox has VP8 support.
None of the mobile platforms support hardware accelerated VP8, including Android.
This article has a nice chart summarizing the support for H.264, WebM/VP8, and Ogg/Theora.
Currently, you need to provide an H.264 version of your content unless you’re willing to write off all mobile users, all Safari users, all IE 8 and earlier users, and all IE 9 users who aren’t willing to install a plugin. Google removing H.264 support from Chrome isn’t going to change this.
Currently, providing a VP8 version of your content does not gain you any additional users, so long as you’re willing to use Flash for playback in some browsers. Google removing H.264 support from Chrome isn’t going to change this, either.
I don’t believe MPEG LA offers indemnity on patent suits, although I could be wrong about that.
Change the world for the better how? Don’t confuse open with free. They’re attacking the open standard (as in openly created and standards-body approved) h.264 and attempting to replace it with a previously-proprietary alternative they purchased and released themselves. It isn’t doing anyone (except Adobe, Google, and Mozilla) any favors, and it set the replacement of proprietary Flash video with HTML5 video back years.
Google released it with a non-revokeable patent disclosure thing, so it’s pretty much free AND open at this point.
I find it highly unlikely that WebM doesn’t infringe on existing patents.
Yeah, actually I’m not sure. I’d read a few things that implied this but, upon further reading, I can’t confirm it and it seems likely that you’re correct.
Still, from my experience talking to lawyers about this sort of thing, I’d guess that they’d argue that the lifespan and the community around the H.264 provides a certain amount of protection.
Did you read a Register opinion piece stating that? Or perhaps a Reddit comment?
I believe that Google has patents for it, but irrevocably released them.
I can’t find the source for it right now, but IIRC there’s significant opinion that it actually infringes upon h.264 in some places.
That’s absolute nonsense. Firefox still has twice the browser market share of Chrome, and it doesn’t support H.264 either. There’s no way Chrome ends up destroying the utility of the video tag if Firefox didn’t already do so.