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H.264 support coming to FirefoxH.264 support coming to FirefoxPosted Mar 19, 2012 19:28 UTC (Mon) by davide.del.vento (guest, #59196)In reply to: H.264 support coming to Firefox by kripkenstein Parent article: H.264 support coming to Firefox
> WebM is in a hopeless position compared to H.264.
> It had some promise, but none of the planned moves > by Google or Adobe that were meant to promote it > actually happened.
Exactly how WebM is hopeless? IIRC, most of the video on the web are coming out of youtube and they are available as webm. HW support for it is coming, but of course hw is slow, so some more time is needed.
Last, but not least, it's sad to see firefox too putting mobile ahead of everything else (after KDE and GNOME doing so). As a heavy desktop person, who doesn't have or care for a smartphone, this is very annoying.
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H.264 support coming to Firefox Posted Mar 19, 2012 19:49 UTC (Mon) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]
Agreed. The argument is that H.264 is dominant.
Ok, how did that happen. Apple.
But there are far more Androids sold than iStuff.
So really it's down to google. They followed Apple, didn't do what they said they would with WebM.
The open web loses.
Google could transcode Youtube to WebM, drop H.264 in Chrome (no a big deal - still have the flash fallback), and start pushing Android handset makers to support HW WebM. Surely it would be cheaper for the handset maker too.
H.264 support coming to Firefox Posted Mar 19, 2012 22:09 UTC (Mon) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
Yes, the real problem is that Google gave up on WebM. I have no idea why it did. It had a viable strategy, in part with Adobe, but never followed through. So H.264 wins, sadly for all of us.
H.264 support coming to Firefox Posted Mar 19, 2012 20:32 UTC (Mon) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> Exactly how WebM is hopeless? IIRC, most of the video on the web are coming out of youtube and they are available as webm.
As one of the TFAs noted, only ad-free content on YouTube is WebM. But almost everything popular has ads (sometimes because nefarious organizations claim copyright to works they don't own, there was a sad case of this with birdsong a few weeks back in the news).
> HW support for it is coming, but of course hw is slow, so some more time is needed.
It has been several years, and still no shipping hardware. We can continue to hope for that, but the company that holds the keys to utilizing that hardware is Google, who controls YouTube and Android. But Google has not even removed H.264 from Chrome on desktop which it promised. So Google's commitment to WebM hardware is uncertain at best.
> Last, but not least, it's sad to see firefox too putting mobile ahead of everything else (after KDE and GNOME doing so). As a heavy desktop person, who doesn't have or care for a smartphone, this is very annoying.
Agreed, I'm a heavy desktop person without a smartphone too. Proud owner of a (almost always off) dumbphone. We are relics of an earlier age, though, if you look at the numbers ;) so it isn't surprising KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Apple are all focusing on mobile these days.
H.264 support coming to Firefox Posted Mar 20, 2012 19:08 UTC (Tue) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]
I wouldn't say that either GNOME or KDE focus on mobile.
Both communities take steps to widen their portfolio towards mobile, e.g. by making UI and application cores less interdependent and thus allowing mobile UIs to use the same core.
I would bet that a majority of contributors do not even own a device that would make a viable host for the application they are working on.
If mobile were a priority for more than a handful of developers we would see way larger availability of GNOME and KDE apps in mobile app stores.
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