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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

when firefox 4 is released (and is rapidly adopted+), if you are a major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video, you will need to serve webm or theora or you will miss out on a quarter of the world web audience and the majority of the european web audience.

if you weren't planning on doing so, you were either going to have to serve video via flash or not at all anyway. google's decision only tips the scales a little more.

+edit: note that I'm not prognosticating a new firefox monopoly or anything, just that firefox 4 will rapidly replace most of the current firefox 3.*s out there, which currently make up the referenced marketshare.

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major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video

Here's the sticking point -- as the article says, no one's going to go through the pain of dealing with VP8 transcoding and storage. Flash will be for everyone except iOS, where HTML5 H264 acts as a backdrop.

that's your guess, but I'll freely admit that you may be right.

however, there are increasing benefits to being first-class content in a browser, and there will be at least a few major providers (youtube, maybe (someday) people encoding to theora today) willing to transcode and distribute for you.

I believe (and I recognize that this is just my opinion) that web video should first be in an encoding that is free to use in any way. The only way this is going to happen is if Mozilla (and to a lesser extent, Google) make a stand now instead of waiting for one of the many long years between now and 2028 when the last h264 patent expires.

Article states that Microsoft already has a h264 plugin for Firefox. I imagine MS will probably do the same for Chrome. They have big vested interest in ensuring that their DRM video will be ubiquitous. I imagine their licensing fees to companies like Netflix makes it a good business decision.

And Google can laugh all the way to the bank while they build and promote their own competing format.

well, I'm not sure if I completely understand your line of reasoning, but note also, as clark-kent notes below, that Microsoft will also allow VP8 to be installed as a codec at the OS level and then work through IE9. The same will be true with Quicktime and Safari, but my understanding is that that is still hypothetical.

To be certain, lots of conjecture on my part. I just found it very interesting that Microsoft is essentially taking on the h264 licensing fees for Firefox by releasing a h264 plugin for the browser. (I'm assuming that MS will be footing the licensing fees -- or maybe they're just covered by a blanket $6.5 million fee, so it's just the cost of building the plugin that they really have to eat)

My extrapolation is a reach, but supporting h264 on Firefox doesn't make sense except if MS is seeing cash from h264 ubiquity.

Microsoft's Firefox add-on simply replaces the browser's <video> player with a Windows Media Player object, so the fees have already been paid for as part of their licence to include an H.264 decoder with all copies of Windows.

Supporting H.264 makes sense for Microsoft as a licensor of the patent pool.

As long as there's a codec installed for QuickTime to use, Safari will support it in the <video> tag. The same is true of Theora - no built-in support, but if you install the codec it starts working.

if you cared to look at said plugin, you would realize its worth nothing, it just replaces <video> with a windows media player active x object. it does not provide the same javascript api, it does not support scaling, pausing, transparency, overplay and so on, to make it short, its a joke. sadly it seams to be good enough for people like you to suggest it would actually work.

I make no qualitative judgement. I only state that the article says there is a plugin available and posit that it is an interesting development that Microsoft is putting resources into a competing browser.

The details of the implementation are interesting and concerning; however, your judgement of "people like me" is not germane, nor is it based upon any information in this context.

And according to MSDN "..IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows."

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow...

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