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There's a flip side to this issue that adds a layer of complexity. Right now video content owners are encoding video (at a fairly significant cost) to (general
by mikeryan 17y ago
There's a flip side to this issue that adds a layer of complexity.
Right now video content owners are encoding video (at a fairly significant cost) to (generally) H264 for streaming media. This includes a wide variety of platforms - not just the web, mobile, internet connected TVs and the new over the top boxes like Roku all support H264 so it has already become a defacto standard for encoding.
Having to re-encode an existing media library to something else like Theora would be a significant cost to content providers with large library archives of content.
- FooBarWidget 17y agoWhy does anybody need to recode anything? Youtube didn't had to recode all its H263 video to H264 when they switched. You can have both at the same time and only encode newer things in new codecs. I don't understand why most of the tech community thinks that it's a black-and-white situation. I don't believe that any video site will have the guts to force everything to be H.264 HTML5 video - did you forget that 70% of the visitors, those using IE, cannot watch HTML5 video regardless of the codec? No, if they support HTML5 they'll ensure that they have a Flash fallback and things will work fine on Firefox and Opera even if H.264 is the codec.
- dsturnbull 17y agoYeah that's the point. HTML5 + h264 by default, Flash + h264 for legacy browsers (like Firefox).
- blasdel 17y agoYou're right that they need Flash fallback anyway for <IE9, <Safari4, and <Chrome3 — but you're ignoring that it's not a big deal to just do it for Firefox and Opera too. They already have "Works better in Chrome" banners on Youtube for windows users. Nobody is going to lossily transcode to Theora — they'll just use Flash like they have to already.