Why Google was correct in Chrome dropping H.264 | Hacker News Reader

Why Google was correct in Chrome dropping H.264

arpitonline.com

14 pointsarpit14 comments

Google as a business is well within it's rights to do whatever it wants to further it's business interests, and/or tick off it's competition. Let's just not keep saying it's all for the user.

The real question is will Google follow through and remove all support for H.264 from YouTube. That will be the telling sign that they're serious.

or Android.

Just because you're not a suicide bomber doesn't mean that you're not a serious Muslim.

Just because you're not a double negative doesn't mean that you're not a confusing sentence.

Haha good point. How would you have put it, though?

Chrome ships with Flash. Flash plays H.264. Thus, Chrome still supports H.264, now it just has to go through Flash.

There are Android phones with H.264 hardware support. There are no Android phones with WebM hardware support (software support, yes).

So... there is no point to converting YouTube videos to WebM: it doesn't benefit Android, it doesn't benefit Chrome. It would be a pointless waste of space.

Flash will support WebM in a future version. Additionally, Google could update the iOS YouTube app to support WebM in a future iOS version.

Once both reach sufficient market saturation YouTube will be able to completely switch from h264 to WebM.

No point in updating the iOS app unless there's going to be hardware support.

Two possibilities.

First, Google could go software only for older hardware. It will suck for them. But by the time YouTube phases out h264 there will be few of these and the latest hardware will accelerate both WebM and h264.

Second, there could be a way to utilize the h264 hardware decoder to work with WebM through a wrapper. The ffmpeg decoder for WebM is basically a wrapper around the existing ffmpeg h264 decoder already. I've never worked with decoders myself, but this at least seems plausible.

Regardless, I think bundling WebM software decoding along side h264 decoding in the YouTube iOS app is a no-brainer even if YouTube doesn't take advantage of it right away.

Google are not making the iPhone YouTube app, Apple are.

HTML5 video is DOA and Google might as well lay the groundwork for the next round. Major content providers don't support HTML5 video. Netflix, Hulu, and anyone else with intellectual property to protect want nothing to do with it. So we're going to need to keep our proprietary plugins and our proprietary apps through the HTML5 era. Even YouTube needs to stay proprietary.

So if HTML5 video is DOA, why support h264? Why be democratic when people are going to use Flash and Silverlight anyway? At least this way there might be a real push for the standard HTML5 video codec to be free and open source.

WebM video is DOA and Google might as well lay the groundwork for the next round. Major content providers don't support WebM video. Netflix, Hulu, and anyone else with intellectual property to protect want nothing to do with it. So we're going to need to keep our proprietary plugins and our proprietary apps through the WebM era. Even YouTube needs to stay proprietary.

Your argument goes both ways.

Actually they are equivalent. HTML5 video tag is codec agnostic. In this instance HTML5 includes to both WebM and h264 video over HTML5. Both are DOA.

So why support h264, which is scary and patent encumbered, when Google can give a little boost to its own WebM standard at no risk to Chrome's viability in the browser market?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com