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Carpe diem, GoogleCarpe diem, GooglePosted Mar 14, 2012 22:13 UTC (Wed) by boog (subscriber, #30882)Parent article: Idealism vs. pragmatism: Mozilla debates supporting H.264 video playback (ars technica)
It really is a shame that Google have not followed through on their promise to drop H.264 from chrome. Chrome, Firefox and Opera together would definitely sway the market. Unfortunately, Google don't even seem to be able to take a decision on this, let alone the right one. Asleep at the wheel (of the driverless car?).
The opportunity is now and will soon be gone forever.
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Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 14, 2012 22:36 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
Google isn't the company it was even 3 years ago:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why...
Those who fight Facebook become Facebook. (The rest treat it like "AOL: The Next Generation" and are content to wait it out.)
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 14, 2012 23:12 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
Dropping it from Chrome wouldn't have helped anyway. If they could drop it from Youtube point blank, it could send a serious kick to Apple and Microsoft, who so far refused to implement WebM in various flavors of Safari and IE. That kind of move really could deal a blow to H.264. But Google got no guts to do it now.
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 15, 2012 0:23 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well so far I have not really ran into a youtube video that I couldn't actually download in Webm format. I suppose there is older stuff or premium content I won't be able to do that, but so far I haven't ran into it.
While Google is far from perfect and there is no reason to trust them beyond how far you can throw a data center, it's hard to fault them. After all they not only created and open sourced a format that is competitive with H.264 for the web they provided a very nice browser platform that brought it to 17+% of the world market. Along with Mozilla's effort that means that if you are encoding a webm video for the web you know that the majority of people can actually view it, which in my eyes is a huge win.
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 15, 2012 5:43 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
What I meant is not just provide all the content in WebM on Youtube, but to remove all H.264 content from there. Only this kind of drastic move could tip the balance.
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 15, 2012 6:26 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
You don't make money through advertising by limiting your userbase. Google is just driven by business decisions.
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 15, 2012 16:59 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
It's a game of chicken. If Google were to announce that WebM would be required for YouTube in (say) three months time, would MS and Apple blink first and add support to their software? If they did, then everyone would still be able to access YouTube.
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 15, 2012 20:53 UTC (Thu) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
Yes, and so far Google didn't have courage for it.
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 15, 2012 6:24 UTC (Thu) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
They did not drop it for the same reason Mozilla wants to add it now. It would render there browser less functional then the competition. And user do not care about why they can't see specific content. So in order to not loose and keep gaining markedshare they had to keep it.
Carpe diem, Google Posted Mar 15, 2012 23:09 UTC (Thu) by wmf (guest, #33791) [Link]
> Chrome, Firefox and Opera together would definitely sway the market.
Actually no. The market would then keep using H.264 with Flash.
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