HTML Video Codec Support in Chrome
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager
Apple has long been blasted for shipping mobile web devices without Flash support, despite the fact that the first mobile Flash implementation wasn't published by Adobe until three years after iPhone's first introduction.
Apple's publicly stated reason was the technological deficiency of Flash, and as a Mac user, I can attest to its historically horrid performance, battery drain and single-minded determination to slow, freeze, or most frequently crash my browser.
The unspoken reason was, of course, Apple's desire to control its products end-to-end, but that shouldn't be understood as a desire to own every aspect of them. Apple has a history of embracing open, or at least not-singularly-owned standards, often pioneering their mainstream use. USB, Firewire, and AAC (the successor to MP3) come to mind. It's no surprise that they chose the codec H.264 as the preferred means of web video distribution.
H.264 is a de facto web standard, supported by many more computers and devices even than Flash. It's protected by a strong pool of patents, licensed cheaply to software vendors and entirely free for consumers. It's proven efficient and has hardware acceleration built into numerous video cards and even mobile devices.
Google's alternative, the WebM codec they introduced some months ago, enjoys none of these benefits. No hardware support, extremely limited installed base, and a high vulnerability to submarine patents.
This means that if you use WebM to create video and at a later date a secret evil patent-holder successfully makes a case in court that WebM infringes on their intellectual property, it is legally possible (though practically unlikely) that you will share financial liability for your use of the infringint tech.
When Apple went H.264-only it was already a well-established technology and the ensuing years have seen a rapid transition to the codec in web video. This was fcilitated by the fact that Flash can actually play H.264 video, so after a video site has converted its content to H.264 it makes little difference to them whether a visitor accesses the video using the Flash plugin or a more modern, open solution like HTML5. Now, however, Google wants them to keep a second copy of those videos available, in WebM format, so that either codec can be delivered through either solution... weird.
Google's bold move to promote their 'open' codec by suppressing an established, 'nearly-open' codec like H.264 is a fair one. It suits their ideology to a T and they have every right to develop their products as they see fit.
But complaining that H.264 isn't open enough, and still shipping Chrome with the totally closed, totally proprietary, absolutely un-open Flash plug-in? Come on.
Stay classy, Google.
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