4 ms·
If you consider mobile, which the article did not, the numbers are closer but still slightly favoring webm. Opportunities for growth 4% world share of Firefo
by zaphoyd 15y ago
If you consider mobile, which the article did not, the numbers are closer but still slightly favoring webm.
Opportunities for growth
4% world share of Firefox 3.6 users -> webm
26% world share of IE 6-8 users -> up for grabs?
iOS/Mac growth -> mostly h.264
Android growth -> both
23% loss for h.264 if/when chrome drops support
Why webm still doesn't matter yet: demographics and fallback availability.
The devices that exclusively support h.264 are more valuable users for video (mobile, console, set top box) and have no fallbacks. Most of the webm support base (desktop Firefox, chrome) can fall back to flash h.264 player. Half of the webm support base presently supports h.264 natively anyways (chrome, android)
Other notes:
- webm support can be trivially added to desktop safari and IE9+ by mildly tech savvy users.
- h.264 tools and encoders are better and hardware encode/decode support is far better
- the openness and cheapness of webm will probably improve its tool and hardware support in the long run especially if/as uncertainty about its patent status declines.
- nextparadigms 15y agoIf WebM is ready for mainstream, Google can just make it the main format for Youtube, and with a fallback to Flash. That shouldn't affect regular users at all (again, if WebM is good enough). The advantage is that by doing this, they can push WebM faster on the web, and as long as it's as good as Flash or better, there shouldn't be any drawback.
- sek 15y agoThey do this already, every 10th of the Youtube videos i watch is Html5. I have testtube deactivated. Look at the volume bar, it looks a little bit different. That i didn't recognize it most of the time is a good sign.
- stanleydrew 15y agoJust because it is HTML5 doesn't mean it's using WebM. Could be H.264 in a video tag if you're using Chrome or Safari.
- batista 15y agoYes. Actually not only "could be", but it is H.264.
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoHe said "Chrome or Safari" and Youtube prefers to serve WebM over H.264 where possible so it's likely WebM if it's Chrome. It's even possible that you'll see WebM in Safari if you've got Perian installed, but I don't actually know that for a fact.
- Someone 15y ago"If WebM is ready for mainstream, Google can just make it the main format for Youtube, and with a fallback to Flash. That shouldn't affect regular users at all (again, if WebM is good enough)." AFAIK, iOS supports neither Flash nor WebM.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoUsing Flash as a fallback (at least currently) requires an H264 version anyway.