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Comment by Charuru | Hacker News Reader

Next move, suddenly youtube stops encoding in h.264 and youtube won't be able to be played on the iPad.

And Android tablets look a LOT better.

If YouTube goes exclusively to WebM/Flash, who wins that game of chicken? Apple or Google?

I actually think Apple wins it as someone creates iTube. People will switch browsers. They won't give up their iPad (at least not until there are some better Android browsers on the market).

"Someone" is probably Apple, with their huge new data centers et al

If it's half as successful as Ping and half as reliable as MobileMe, Google might have a problem on their hands. (Not.)

There's lots of ways YouTube could marginalize H.264 without turning it into a full fledged game of chicken. They could make HD content exclusively WebM but still serve H.264 SD. They could prioritize WebM encoding so that there would be a delay before H.264 content was available (imagine getting told "this video is not yet available on your device" once every 6 months or so). They could make the most popular stuff in both formats but only offer WebM for stuff at the end of the long tail. They could offer a more favorable cut of ad revenue to content providers who opt out of H.264 (ostensibly because it saved on licensing fees).

You do know that the reason h.264 is better on iOS is because the hardware decoder, right?

Android doesn't even do hardware-accelerated graphics, let alone video decoding.

Some parts of Android graphics are GPU accelerated, and the vast majority of Android devices accelerate video decoding (though codec support does vary, and up till now doesn't generally include VP8, though the TI OMAP hardware at least can be updated to support it).

FUD. All the Tegra 2 stuff at CES was hardware accelerated and the Motorola Atrix even played video @1080p over the hdmi port

It's valid when it ships.

The Atrix runs Android 2.2 (Froyo) which shipped last May. I was just talking about CES because we've been bombarded the past week

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