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> for h.264 they did stand up and lost. You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. A technological split between traditional media companies and web
by bscphil 6y ago
> for h.264 they did stand up and lost.
You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. A technological split between traditional media companies and web companies has developed: the former are continuing to pursue MPEG-LA endorsed codecs that enable their industry to keep a stranglehold on the market (i.e. H.264, HEVC, VVC), while the latter have moved to alternatives: a lot of hardware comes with VP9 decoding support already, and there's an enormous push (with nearly 100% buy-in) to make AV1 the web's next default video codec.
This means that the web is moving towards media streaming on mostly royalty-free codecs, which was exactly the goal Mozilla originally had.
- themacguffinman 6y ago> You might argue they lost the battle but won the war. The tide of the war is turning, little thanks to them IMO. VP9 was a Google initiative and they were already interested in royalty free codecs because of YouTube. Chrome didn't have to lose the H264 battle to get to work on VP9 and other royalty free technologies. Mozilla didn't do anyone any favors by losing the battle of H264 on its own. It has only made them weaker for future battles.