H.264 support coming to Firefox [LWN.net]

H.264 support coming to Firefox

Posted Mar 19, 2012 20:32 UTC (Mon) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)
In reply to: H.264 support coming to Firefox by davide.del.vento
Parent article: H.264 support coming to Firefox

> 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.

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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.