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Comment by kierank | Hacker News Reader

Too many.

No, it's not; video is complicated, and it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side than to expect every client to be able to a) play back any arbitrary bitstream or b) transcode on the fly. In a ideal world, we'd all be serving up 10-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV and your computer would be able to handle it (to say nothing of your phone); but until that happy day of unlimited bandwidth and free cycles, multiple bitstreams is hardly an onerous cost to pay.

That depends on your perspective. If you're producing and serving one ready-made video at a time, say for a video tutorial, maybe converting to multiple formats isn't much of a burden. If you're rendering videos, say for raytracing demos, and they take a lot of processing power to render and you have many of them, it's a significant burden to recode all of them multiple ways. Given that there is one way that is already well established and works reliably almost everywhere -- Flash -- I don't have much sympathy for HTML5 advocates who can't offer a solution that isn't at least as easy and customisable as what we've had for years already, nor for a certain brand of hardware that makes a point of not playing by the same rules as everyone else in the game.

I don't know what you mean by "customizable", but the easy solution is to just use Baseline H.264 with a modest bit rate. It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else. Ogg is unnecessary, because everything that doesn't support H.264 natively supports Flash.

> It plays on everything mobile, plays native in many browsers, and plays in Flash everywhere else.

H.264 seems to be the most widely supported format today, if you don't get screwed by the whole patent mess. A significant class of users do, though, if only because they use OSS browsers that are never likely to support a royalty-encumbered format. And of course, if you're distributing H.264 videos you probably need a lawyer one way or another.

As for customisation, Flash offers all kinds of possibilities that HTML5 video just doesn't, from custom controls to copy protection. Some people might not care, but they're probably the same ones who object to table-based layout and then expect you to write 20 lines of CSS and import three different IE-specific stylesheets just to get a trivial layout. Check out past comments from people who work at places like Google/YouTube.

> it's a lot easier in aggregate to do multiple transcodes on the server side

ah, that brings back good old memories. We used to prepare at least three formats for WMP, Realplayer and Quicktime. AFAIK HTML5 isn't doing anything better.

Two is too many, I agree, but it will almost surely be 1 in the next coming months (assuming Microsoft supports WebM + VP8)

Are you choosing to ignore iPhone/iPad/OSX or is there something I'm missing?

Will Apple choose to ignore WebM and VP8?

Yes.

While I find the parent overly optimistic (the day IE9 ships WebM is the day that I take a flight on Hog Airlines), I think this is also missing the point.

Hypothetically were IE to ship with WebM support, Apple doesn't have the market share to enforce their current codec monoculture. The converse is not true however; Microsoft doesn't care if Safari/iOS can play WebM. The onus is thus on the IE team, and I think Apple is irrelevant to the issue.

I have clients ask for videos that work on the iPad and iPhone, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

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