Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

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And why will that happen? Because people like to pay license fees so much they will be all too eager to pay the fees for both h.264 encoding and flash?

Yes, businesses that already use h.264 and flash will probably continue using them. But the bootstrapped websites and startups will opt for the free stuff at least initially, and of all those bootstrapped startups some will be successful enough to make some noise. And then some of the established companies will have cost cutting rounds and will look at those license fees and think about whether they really need to pay them when some of their brand new competitors aren't paying them. At this point the iPhone will start looking bad for not supporting the newest and coolest video startups that are supported on android and Jobs will eventually cave too and add WebM support to the iPhone.

Everything in the web thus far has gone towards the lowest cost and easiest alternative that is still effective, and this will not be different.

You're dreaming if you think Apple is going to add WebM hardware decoding support to iPhones. That would basically mean that all previously sold iPhones would be marginalized, it would increase the hardware costs and space/power requirements, and there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.

I believe lukeschlather provided a good response, but I would like to add something more about the hardware side. It is a mistake to believe that one needs an entirely newly designed hardware chip to handle the WebM standard. Those hardware accelerators are not pure hardware. They are like little computers, with their own processors, and their own instruction memories, and their own software (or firmware). The processors are designed to efficiently compute the most commonly used math operations of the standard (which are usually Fourier transforms, matrix operations, etc.). The firmware causes the processor to apply the mathematical operations properly to the data to decode the video.

The thing is that all of those video standards use more or less the same basic math operations, just in a different way. This means that a WebM hardware accelerator would look very similar hardware wise to a h.264 one but would have different firmware.

In practice, I am sure that the hardware companies will make one hardware accelerator that can handle both h.264 and webm through different firmware programs. So you wont need much additional silicon or power to handle WebM. It might cost more, if the hardware companies decide to charge extra for WebM support, but that surcharge will not be much, because (i) they do not need to pay license fees, and (ii) there is a lot of competition in that field.

Android is already marginalizing old iPhones (and to some extent Apple's business model is built around marginalizing old iPhones.)

Also, Google controls YouTube. So H.264 <video> YouTube could see a sunset at some point, which would be a BFD.

That's a really interesting point. All at once you helped me understand the giant chess game we're watching.

You're dreaming if you think Apple is going to add WebM hardware decoding support to iPhones.

You're dreaming if you think Apple could ignore WebM if it became the de facto web video standard. It all depends if WebM becomes that popular.

> there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.

hristov's entire parent post was about why this sentence should end in "for now."

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