H.264 Already Won—Makes Up 66 Percent Of Web Videos | Hacker News Reader

H.264 Already Won—Makes Up 66 Percent Of Web Videos

techcrunch.com

36 pointsmjfern31 comments

They would have won if there was a valid competition. Its an ever changing market, there is no definite winner or loser. Its as silly as saying IE already won five years ago. IE had a market share at 95% in 2003. Did they win?

With Google opening up VP8 the market is likely to be shifted in the next 4-5 years. They have both the money and tech background to make VP8 just as good if not better. Hardware adoption is a matter of time.

>> Its as silly as saying IE already won five years ago.

Or even closer to the topic, RealPlayer.

Apple and Microsoft are behind H264 now...that will be hard to overcome mostly because the public just wants it to work and doesn't care about the tech behind it.

I won't comment on MSFT, because they have a really fucked up attitude towards open standards. But Apple, whether you like it or not, supports open standards (at-least when it comes to browsers). There is no reason why Apple won't support an open format over H264, if the performance is comparable.

If I had stakes at H264 or any proprietary video coded/format. I would be concerned for my future.

Steve Jobs himself said a couple of days ago:

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

Source: http://blogs.fsfe.org/hugo/2010/04/open-letter-to-steve-jobs...

You think Google doesn't know that? You think Google just spent $100 million without investigating on patent problems and how they will deal with them?

Was Steve referring to VP8, its not opensource now, he is most likely only referring to existing open source codec.

FUD? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1312180

There is a reason, Apple will get revenue from the likes of Google. Apple is a licensee of H264.

Apple won't support open formats, even if they are technically superior to encumbered ones.

For example, see Vorbis and FLAC support in Quicktime.

IE had a market share at 95% in 2003. Did they win?

"For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting." - Gen. George C. Patton

Except the video format needs to stay the same, because no one wants to keep encoding their videos to the latest format so they will work. In the case of the migration from IE to Firefox, they were both HTML browsers so it's not really a good analogy.

> They have both the money and tech background to make VP8 just as good if not better.

They've got youtube, I think that's a much bigger factor here.

Firstly, who are encoding.com? Unless I'm mistaken, only a small percentage of the market use their services.

The same editors in Techcrunch who believe that H.264 won because of the results from one web encoding company, probably also believe Apple dominate the market after walking into an Applecentre, and that Techcrunch dominates the news market.

This is perhaps the most deceptive article I have ever seen. I am so sick of Apple users standing up for Steve Jobs with clearly misleading evidence. Doing so may help keep their stocks afloat, but its terrible journalism. No, H.264 hasn't won, and cannot in fact win because standards keep changing.

Also, Apple certainly doesn't dominate the market! Their sales figures are absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the market and whilst the flash-disabled iPad/iphone may be selling well, their sales figures are insignificant compared to the number of flash-compatible internet devices out there (and with Android getting flash, this will likely hold true).

If anything, due to the way that Steve Job's is treating developers, it's possible people will see what jerk's Apple are, and return the trend to flash again.

Anyway, I think it's too early to say though. Sooner or later browsers will decide on a common format, and it's unlikely to be H.264 (because of the patents, and the fact even companies don't like paying licensing fees). Furthermore, just because Steve Job's says "all video formats have patents", people interpret it wrongly to mean Xiph will get sued. It could be possible that Steve Job's is just being an idiot too (Steve Job's also is happy to give off the impression that OSX cannot get viruses).

Thing's will change soon, but it is difficult to say which format will win still.

I agree with the first two paragraphs, I think you went a little nuts after that though.

I'd agree.. But my point for Apple is valid. Most of the people saying H.264 has won are simply agreeing with Steves view

  and return the trend to flash again.

Flash is not a codec. Flash can be used to serve H.264

This chart is a little confusing. They should have listed h.263 instead of FLV if that is what they meant.

sorry, but that doesn't mean that there's a war with a single winner who has already won. people are encoding videos like this because the popular ways of playing videos are through flash and through the iphone.

once HTML5 video picks up, if a major browser (firefox) doesn't support h.264, we'll probably see people encode more than one format, unless something else gains widespread player support fast (vp8, i'm looking at you).

i don't think h.264 is going away, but i don't think it's surely a lone winner going forward.

Or Firefox will get forked, and the fork will support using host OS video playback facilities, so will play whatever the host OS supports. That will get H.264 support in Firefox (or whatever new name the forkers give it, since they won't be able to use the Firefox name...) on 95+% of the desktops. Once someone writes a Flash video player that hooks into the host OS's video interface, that will get H.264 support for forked Firefox on 99+% of desktops.

My money is on Ubuntu doing the fork, if Firefox remains stubborn.

In many ways, Google Chrome is the ultimate fork of Firefox. It took almost all the good ideas of Firefox and dumped the bad code. If somebody was going to come up with a "new" brower, a de-Googled Chrome would make a much nicer base.

Thats not a fork, it doesn't use any firefox code, it's based on webkit.

At best you could say that it's a fork of khtml.

Ubuntu doesn't ship with H.264 decoders either, it's not in their interests to support encumbered codecs.

More likely, though, everyone will just use h.264 and fall back to Flash (since Flash plays h.264 without any problems) when the browser doesn’t support it.

This is a strange article. H.264 is clearly the leader, and clearly the best video codec available today. But everyone already knows that, and so it isn't news.

The news is VP8, which will finally give H.264 some competition. "Microsoft won - makes up 90% of desktop market" isn't news. "ChromeOS captures 50% of desktop market": now that would be news.

Great data but that's such a poorly designed chart. Three nearly identical blues and a green? sigh

I'm still waiting to see some independent real-world comparisons between h.264 and VP8. Until I've seen that, it doesn't really matter, because if VP8 isn't closer enough, or better, than h.264, it will have a hard time becoming a standard.

Google owns youtube, if they convert youtube to use VP8 then plenty of others will follow and it will be a de-facto standard.

Real world comparisons between codecs would be the ideal way to settle this but with the 800 pound gorilla behind it VP8 stands a good chance even without such comparisons. If 'it works' in the eyes of the majority of the users then that means it is good enough, even if the underlying tech is marginally better or worse then H.264.

I'd expect google to try to do a good job at least, and since they have H.264 to shoot for they would be foolish not to use their extensive library of videos for comparison purposes.

Facebook also uses it for their video platform

"Facebook uses the H.264 video codec and main-profile AAC (also known as MPEG-4 Audio) for audio, muxed inside the MP4 container."

Don't they mean Flash already won since it represents 99% of web video (and 99% of H.264 video as well).

No, they don't. The subject is the video content itself. How you play it back is only relevant insofar as it explains why there is so much content.

For 85% of the world, the only way they can receive H.264 is via Flash and that is changing only very slowly. For another 14%+ they get it via Flash anyway and again will continue to do so for some time.

This article pits H.264 against VP6, H.263 and Theora two weeks before Google is supposed to announce VP8 and declares a winner?

It even says 40% of all video is delivered via Youtube, and that's not even getting into speculation that Adobe and Google will both support VP8 to stick it to Apple.

Anyone claiming how you play it back is irrelevant is trying to push a bizarre Apple line that suggests they are the one's pushing H.264, when in reality they are riding the coat tails of Adobe on this one and quite likely to be left behind if Youtube and Adobe pick a different winner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com