Why are so many against the proprietary Flash format but embrace the H.264 codec? Google even invested 133 million dollar to buy On2 and offer the world an alternative.
> Why are so many against the proprietary Flash format but embrace the H.264 codec?
This is the wrong question to me. A more apt comparison is to JPEG or GIF. Considering the work I just did, it's like comparing JPEG to Bitmap—of course I like JPEG better, and its licensing issues have been transparent to me as a developer and end-user.
As a developer, I dislike Flash because:
1. it's slow on my computer
2. it requires another language for client-side development,
3. it breaks how the web "works" (open in new window, back button, etc.)
4. it costs me a developer money as opposed to the browser vendor
If you look at the above list, the web going the way of H.264 has none of these problems. Personally, I'd like a single video format but wish that WebM had come along two years ago instead of causing another transition in video formats.
Secondly, Apple "picked" H.264 as a format nearly four years ago when they built the original iPhone with hardware decoding, before WebM existed and likely before some of the code for WebM was written.
Third, whatwg tried to pick one single codec in 2009. Again, this was well before WebM existed in its current state. Back then, the two options were:
1) Ogg Theora
2) H.264
Read Ian Hickson's summary of the different browser vendors' positions from 2009: http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...
As you'll note, it boiled down to "we're okay with H.264 because we can afford it and want to support something now" vs. "it's too expensive and we'll wait." Microsoft was late to the game or apathetic.
WebM was released by Google 7 months ago. Think about that! You expect a company like Apple whose business lies primarily in mobile devices that are capable of hardware decoding H.264 video to suddenly pivot and widely implement a codec released by a company that is increasingly competing with its core business and that has an unclear patent future and inferior technology.
A table of the current state of implemented tech features is not the same as knowing the history behind these decisions.