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Comment by carlsborg | Hacker News Reader

But it isn’t free so it’s a pity it’s taking over the world. Chrome plays h.264 / mp4 because they are licenced. Firefox counts on OS support. (The Cisco plugin only supports webrtc calls) so you can’t legally watch MP4 videos on Linux.

Webm seems to be as good and free.

Can some comment if I am mistaken about this?

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A bit tangential, but you are mistaken in that you are confusing container formats and codecs. MP4 is a container format, which can contain, among other codecs, h.264 video. WebM is another container format, which can contain, among other codecs, VP9 video. MKV and AVI are other container formats, and h.265, VP8, and AV1 are other codecs. There are lots of codecs compared to container formats, and the same codecs can often go in multiple different containers (you can even convert encoded video losslessly to a different container format).

Licensing issues are almost all around codecs, not container formats.

It's not, but it actually won't be too long until the patents expire for it (a quick google says 2027). The same used to be true of mp3. It was ubiquitous, but annoyingly not open, and now it's both.

It’s all capped at a max payment and not terribly expensive.

VP9 and its new versions will take over but it will be a while until it’s implemented in hw fully.

Non-free standards are bad for open source and innovation in general.

The good thing about standards is everyone can have their own.

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