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A comment on Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical.

Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by ZeroGravitas on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @10:31AM (#2096421)
It's interesting that Apple-centric folks think H.264 is popular because of them, when in reality the major, basically only, reason it's used on the web is because of Adobe Flash, which of course they have all been trained to hate. This leads to many strange opinions, including the one discussed here.

So globally, in a couple of months when Google turns off H.264 in Chrome the HTML5 support for H.264 will stand at 5% (yes, that's not a typo) including all mobile browsing i.e. iOS which contributes less than a percent. Even in the US where Apple is strongest it only reaches 10%. Meanwhile in Europe WebM in HTML5 after Firefox 4 is released will be up at 60% (50% worldwide, 40% US).

So with numbers like 60% vs 5% why isn't WebM going to totally wipe the floor with H.264? How can people be complaining about Google ruining things and causing them so much extra work by taking away their 10% of the measly 15% share that H.264 has now? Short answer: Flash.

Flash currently delivers H.264 to 98% of the web. They've promised but not yet released VP8 support and can rapidly get it to a good 85% of the web within a year of release. What Google does with Chrome is really irrelevant in the face of that. It's more about sending a message. A message that roughly says "H.264 in HTML5 cannot work without Flash as a fallback or shiv, so a strategy to promote WebM via pushing people to Flash in the short-term is no less (or more) ridiculous". Apple's position is only tenable because of the actions of their two arch-frenemies: Adobe and, to a much lesser extent but growing as IE9 comes online, Microsoft and either or both may just see this as a chance to stick it to Apple and steal some glory for themselves.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by annon on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @12:12PM (#2096824)
H.264 is already a part of every content producers workflow. It has very mature encoder support and it supported by every encoder that matters.

WebM's encoders that are available are very slow, and not supported or has very flaky support of most apps people are using out there.

What's going to happen, is chrome users are going to be served H.264 in a flash wrapper.

This move is not going to help kill flash, it's going to help extend it's life. If you think about it, it is not in googles best interest as an advertising company to kill flash. They'll have more trouble with content protection and are unable to overlay ads in fullscreen mode.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by radley on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @12:56PM (#2096988)
Actually, Apple does deserve some credit. H.264 is a standard in the video industry, along with Final Cut Pro (which revolutionized digital video production).

Flash adopted H.264 later.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by pohl on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @12:02PM (#2096782)
when in reality the major, basically only, reason it's used on the web is because of Adobe Flash

Could you elaborate on this or provide a citation? I thought Flash video was almost exclusively a proprietary variant of the H.263 (yes, that's not a typo) standard until the most recent release of Flash.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by ZeroGravitas on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @03:30PM (#2097524)
Originally "flash video" was Sorenson Spark/H.263, in 2005 they added On2's VP6 which was their high quality option until they added H.264 a couple of years later. Each step improved quality but mostly by adding decode complexity so as computers have got faster people have migrated to the heavier-weight codecs.

I would imagine that today all but legacy content served via Flash on the web is a standard H.264 file that can be easily repurposed for serving via HTML5 to Safari and newer iDevices (older ones only supported the lower profiles).

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Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by knowtheory on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @12:30PM (#2096884)
The other thing to remember about Flash though, is that they achieve something like 97% penetration very quickly. There are very few devices sitting out there w/ flash9 or earlier.

See this: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...

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Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by pohl on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @12:48PM (#2096951)
Exactly, which raises the question of why Adobe would bother transitioning a market that they completely dominated from one codec to another if they weren't feeling the pressure of H.264 from the mobile space (ZG's assertion appears to be that mobile in general — or, at least, iOS in particular — exerted no such pressure).
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Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by ZeroGravitas on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @03:38PM (#2097572)
I think Adobe rarely gets accused of having their finger on the pulse of the mobile market around the year 2007. Instead H.264 was just an obvious choice, they would probably have gone with it in 2005 if the licensing situation was better, they certainly got abuse from some quarters for not doing so at that time.

My contention was that serving H.264 became feasible the day Flash started supporting it. The day before VP6 was a better choice because everyone had it installed and could therefore actually watch your video. The same is true now of H.264, it may be a wonderful codec and used in Blu-Ray and blah, blah, blah but the reason you can put it on a website and have 98% of people watch it is because it's supported by Flash. Sure Apple can force you to install Quicktime to watch their keynote, Microsoft can do the same with Silverlight, everyone else uses what's already out there on basically every machine, which is, and has been for a while, Flash.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Google and H.264 - Far From Hypocritical by radley on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @04:33PM (#2097826)
Adobe makes their money on tools, not Flash. If there's going to be a new market, they'll jump on it. They said so many times. Currently they're working on a wysiwyg HTML5 editor, Flash to HTML5 converter, etc.
[ Parent | on HN ]