More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) [LWN.net]

More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Posted Jan 15, 2011 18:11 UTC (Sat) by JEDIDIAH (guest, #14504)
In reply to: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) by fsphil
Parent article: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Nonsense. Before Flash was dominant, this wasn't the case. Widely used non-proprietary standards are a given on any platform. As long as you don't have the sort of nonsense like we had with Apple and Sorenson, you can be pretty confident that well defined standards will be widely available.

On the other hand, casting h264 in stone creates an entry barrier for everyone. It's not just about how there's a licensing quagmire with h264 but the fact that it is a format that pretty much requires specialized hardware acceleration.

Also, Flash is mainly about obscuring access to the underlying file. This is an area where HTML5 doesn't even really help anyways.

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More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Posted Jan 17, 2011 5:44 UTC (Mon) by JEDIDIAH (guest, #14504) [Link]

No. The only thing that sucked about the way things were done before was all of the proprietary nonsense from the likes of Adobe and Apple. None of that seems set to change since HTML5 doesn't even address the critical issues when it comes to web video anyway.

Publishers want to obfuscate content in a manner that makes it more difficult to deal with with generic tools (as opposed to "special plugins"). Any decent non-crippled video tools would have no problems with dealing with the sort of "chaos" you seem so fearful of.

It's the intentionally crippled and limited platforms that would have the most problems. This is a problem artificially created by the same people that created the earlier mess with exclusive single vendor proprietary codecs and the special plugins needed to deal with them.

This ultimately seems to be primarily about catering to the most restrictive and abusive system vendors in the industry.

More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Posted Jan 18, 2011 0:09 UTC (Tue) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]

Nice rant, but not really relevant to what I had to say.

HTML5 addresses both the user and developer need to have a standardized video format for the web.

System codecs are NOT the answer because they give no guarantees to the content provider or the system user. There is nothing standardized about system codecs

HTML5 + WebM is the best answer. Of course, if HTML5 becomes split between HTML5/h264 and HTML5/WebM, then yes, we may as well be using system codecs

Bingo!

Posted Jan 18, 2011 0:27 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It's the intentionally crippled and limited platforms that would have the most problems.

Yup. Things like TV sets, mobile phones, etc. You know, the devices which are actually used to watch video by non-geeks. Where hardware support is paramount because it makes tangible difference on your battery life or your monthly energy bill.

This is a problem artificially created by the same people that created the earlier mess with exclusive single vendor proprietary codecs and the special plugins needed to deal with them.

Sorry, but no. When you present a "non-crippled" platform which can play and encode HDTV video in realtime using less then one watt of power - we can start talking about "openness" and "pluggable codecs". Till then it's not an option. Because simple fact of life is: today there are more users of web-enabled mobiles then there are users of personal computers. Tomorrow (or, mre likely, in the next 2-3 years) these devices will start showing video - and what they'll support in hardware will be used on the Web.