Hacker News Reader

Comment by CyberMonk | Hacker News Reader

The "what" being that, assuming the ideal is a move away from proprietary technologies like Flash, supporting WebM alone in the current environment is likely to have the opposite effect (and thus hurt web open standards, at least in the short to medium term).

I too liked Chrome's support of both WebM and H.264. Theirs is a disappointing move.

View on HN

When the world gets into H.264 there's no way back but waiting for 20 years for patents to expire.

This was the last chance to at least try to keep the web video both open and free. It's a far shot, but it's at least a try. Before this move, the game seemed beyond lost, now it is only probably lost.

Flash will support WebM too, Skype is using it, so there are some chances. It's a very long way off, but now WebM has a fighting chance.

Too late. Seriously. The world got into H.264. We're here. It's it. What is WebM's fighting chance? Did you read the article? Do you have any counter points to Gruber's thesis? The web will continue to use H.264 and all Google is doing is ensuring that Chrome users (myself included) just get H.264 video in a flash wrapper. If we get WebM through Google/YouTube then great, but nobody else is going to bother serving it to us... why would they?

Only something incontestably better than h.264 will replace it. The consumer electronics industry doesn't waste resources going sideways, only forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com