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Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to. Yes, meaning dropping sup

by gcp 15y ago

Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to. Yes, meaning dropping support for H.264. Firefox did this, Chrome did not (I'm not sure what Opera does?). What's the conclusion? Google doesn't particularly care to shift the market in favor of their own format, or thinks it will burn its other fingers too much in doing so. Meanwhile, H.264 is used everywhere, including for Firefox users, who get to enjoy it over the now-deprecated Flash. Do you see a problem looming here for "supporting the open web"? I'd hope and assume that Mozilla's decision making would be a bit more related to their mission to support an open web than to petty recriminations for percieved slights. Does WebP advance an open web? Let's see, is there some actual standard describing it, or do you have to blindly lump in a big chunk of Google code to support it? (That's a real question)

ZeroGravitas 15y ago
I actually meant WebP when I said they could move the market on their own. I think that WebM has a slightly harder hill to climb and would require Microsoft, Apple or Adobe to get fully on board, but that WebP adoption would also help ever so slightly in that regard too. (Opera, who originally proposed the video tag, with a suggestion to use Theora as the only viable video format at the time with licensing compatible with the web, didn't drop H.264 because they never supported it. I mentioned them in this context because they already support and use WebP in their bandwidth-saving page-transcoding features which are particularly useful in mobile devices on 3G networks. This solves the chicken and egg problem and gives browsers, like e.g. Amazon's Silk, a reason to support WebP even if no-one uses it yet.) edit: and to answer your last question, WebP was up until recently a subset of WebM, which can be decoded by at least two other independent implementations I know of (FFMPEG and one in Java). Standards settings bodies have been corrupted by politics and are no match for multiple, independently produced, open source codebases.
justinschuh 15y ago
You're implying a controversy here that simply does not exist. Firefox never had support for h.264 to drop in the first place, because the licensing model is (justifiably) unacceptable to Mozilla. And Google is still entirely committed to WebM. It's just that dropping dropping h.264 from Chrome requires quite a bit of coordination to ensure that the vast majority of content remains accessible--particularly with regards to Google properties.

by gcp 15y ago

ZeroGravitas 15y ago

I actually meant WebP when I said they could move the market on their own. I think that WebM has a slightly harder hill to climb and would require Microsoft, Apple or Adobe to get fully on board, but that WebP adoption would also help ever so slightly in that regard too. (Opera, who originally proposed the video tag, with a suggestion to use Theora as the only viable video format at the time with licensing compatible with the web, didn't drop H.264 because they never supported it. I mentioned them in this context because they already support and use WebP in their bandwidth-saving page-transcoding features which are particularly useful in mobile devices on 3G networks. This solves the chicken and egg problem and gives browsers, like e.g. Amazon's Silk, a reason to support WebP even if no-one uses it yet.) edit: and to answer your last question, WebP was up until recently a subset of WebM, which can be decoded by at least two other independent implementations I know of (FFMPEG and one in Java). Standards settings bodies have been corrupted by politics and are no match for multiple, independently produced, open source codebases.

justinschuh 15y ago

You're implying a controversy here that simply does not exist. Firefox never had support for h.264 to drop in the first place, because the licensing model is (justifiably) unacceptable to Mozilla. And Google is still entirely committed to WebM. It's just that dropping dropping h.264 from Chrome requires quite a bit of coordination to ensure that the vast majority of content remains accessible--particularly with regards to Google properties.