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Comment by CyberMonk | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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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?

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