Hacker News Reader

Comment by NickPollard | Hacker News Reader

So let me get this straight.

Apple supporting only h.264 and deliberately not supporting flash in order to force uptake is a good thing.

Google supporting only WebM and deliberately not supporting h.264 in order to force uptake is a bad thing.

This doesn't seem to be particularly logically compatible to me. Gruber seems to imply the first was ok because Apple got their first and it's already happened, but I'm sure that a lot of people with flash video delivery systems did not particularly enjoy converting to h.264, but they did it.

Considering Chrome's growing market share, plus Firefox and Opera, content providers /will/ be forced to offer a compatible video delivery system. If that has to be flash, so be it.

View on HN

Lets be a bit clear here, Apple's choice of supporting H.264 didn't force (many) people to change their encoding format. H.264 has long been the primary choice for video (outside of the Microsoft formats).

A lot of people are saying "boo Apple" for choosing H.264 for their iOS devices. This is despite the fact that it really the only viable choice for their users. VP8 was proprietary up until May of last year and Theora is really not comprable with respect to bandwidth and quality. There was not a viable open format until WebM and at this point H.264 is deeply entrenched.

Personally as long as the W3C doesn't declare a format for the video tag (like images) I'm okay with Google's move. I think its going to greatly slow adoption of the video tag however. At this point most content providers are going to stick with Flash online for their video players so they can then provide the same (unwrapped) video for their users on other devices. When video content providers are to enocode once in H.264 and use a flash player or encode twice to partially support a now crippled native video tag, I think they are going to stick with one codec, and use flash. Google's choice may strengthen WebM's position in the long term but its weakening native video in the short.

Apple supporting only h.264 and deliberately not supporting flash in order to force uptake is a good thing.

Google supporting only WebM and deliberately not supporting h.264 in order to force uptake is a bad thing.

That's a very poor reading of Gruber's argument. Instead:

Apple supporting only h.264 and deliberately not supporting Flash in order to force uptake is a good thing.

Google supporting only WebM and deliberately not supporting H.264 will not force uptake of WebM, and will instead drive the continued use of Flash for playing video.

Perhaps, though the disconnect here is that open source fanboys pretty much dislike H.264 as much as flash. Neither is open source by OSI standards: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd. All the screaming about running from flash seems kind of silly when you point to something like H.264 as the alternative.

It is a standard, but that means little with all of the royalty-bearing patents surrounding it. It is royalty-free in a limited use case, but still can't be included on your typical linux distribution legally.

Not that I think Google is being altruistic. They obviously have a vested interest in controlling the video format youtube uses. Now is the time to bring a new format to the table, too. Gives them some breathing space to fight it out before worrying about paying royalties for H.264 or its successor.

I'll happily deal with a couple more years of flash (and honestly, we were going to anyway, ie9 isn't going to sweep away 7 & 8 anytime soon) to get WebM as a standard instead of H.264.

> Google supporting only WebM and deliberately not supporting h.264 in order to force uptake is a bad thing.

It's not that simple. It's bad because it cannot possibly have a beneficial effect, as Gruber demonstrated I think pretty well in his article.

> I'm sure that a lot of people with flash video delivery systems did not particularly enjoy converting to h.264

Flash is a wrapper, not a codec, and has in fact supported H.264 encoded video for some time. A "switch" from Flash to (likely MP4 wrapped) H.264 entails only removing the Flash wrapper, not a re-encode of the content. Apple not supporting Flash is not the same thing as Google not supporting H.264 (codec != container).

I know full well that Flash is not a codec; I never implied as such. The point is, many people served a non-h.264 codec through flash, and so they would not have just been able to supply the same source video through a <video> tag rather than through flash.

I don’t think Theora and VP8 were widely used before the first browsers gained support for the <video> tag. Does Chrome support other codecs than those two?

Flash...has in fact supported H.264 encoded video for some time.

Could someone offer a citation for this? My understanding has been that the codec typically used for Flash video has long been almost-H.263, not H.264. Wikipedia, for what it's worth, currently reflects that version of history, saying "Commonly, Flash Video FLV files contain video bit streams which are a proprietary variant of the H.263 video standard", and "The most recent public releases of Flash Player...also support H.264 video".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_video

Does Wikipedia have history wrong here?

Gruber has said that he liked Google’s approach of including many codecs (WebM, Theora, h.264) in the recent Talk Show episode with Dan Benjamin. I’m consequently not sure whether he is supporting Apple’s decision to ship OS X Safari only with h.264, it doesn’t sound like he does. (He is certainly making less noise about it than about Google’s decision.)

This is probably his position on Safari for OS X, not Safari for iOS, since WebM hardware is not out yet (and it is consequently crazy to expect Apple to support WebM on mobile devices – Android phones also don’t).

I've tried to stay out of this debate so far but I'd like to add one point: In my experience, the performance of H.264 playback in Adobe Flash on low-end computers is simply unacceptable. Pretty much any other option offers way much better performance: HTML5 H.264 in Chrome, Safari or Silverlight H.264 playback. I don't know whether it's their version of the H.264 codec or something else in their rendering pipeline but it doesn't really matter anyway.

We're a business-to-business shop that need to deliver web-based video content to our business clients. What we care about is our clients reliably being able to play back video on any of the thousands of their shitty underpowered old Dells. This is why they pay us so we get to come to work tomorrow. Still, we like to think that we do the right thing if we can so we would love to use standard, open technologies but this whole mess around HTML5 video codecs (and the fact that Flash is just way too slow on our clients' machines) forces us to use Silverlight instead which unfortunately also means that we can't support Linux boxes or any portable devices.

I agree. Gruber says:

"Supporting WebM and H.264 is better than supporting only one or the other, in my book. But if you’re only going to support one, I say support the one that is in wide use, with extensive wide-ranging support from camera makers, mobile playback devices, and online video services."

But I seem to remember that he wasn't that keen on Apple supporting Flash, even though it was in wide use by mobile playback devices, and online video services.

Those aren't criteria for judging the fitness all web technologies, they're criteria for deciding between H.264 and WebM, should one feel obliged to choose.

There's no hypocrisy here, because you can take it as a given that Gruber believes that Flash sucks, and not just because he's an iOS partisan. All Mac users were subject to years of abuse by the Flash plugin. I gratefully welcome its decline.

But I seem to remember that he wasn't that keen on Apple supporting Flash, even though it was in wide use by mobile playback devices, and online video services.

Hardware vendors like camera and phone manufacturers aren't substitutable for online video services. And prior to the release of Android 2.3, where was Flash in any measurable use by "mobile playback devices"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com