Hacker News Reader

Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

Just when I thought there was a chance that this topic would get a break on HN. I guess I appreciate the link, if Google hadn't tweeted about it (I'm assuming they will) I probably wouldn't have seen this link.

Their answers are right, but it's the answers that aren't present, that are more telling. They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms. In my opinion, those are the only questions worth asking.

Their answers about H.264 having little adoption with the <video> tag and about having to dually encode with the current HTML5 video scene anyway is spot on. WebM gets you native playback in every major browser but IE, with Flash fallback working in IE. There actually is a day, very soon that, Flash assisted, anything will play WebM.

Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post.

View on HN

"or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms"

Are you referring to other devices running Android? I don't think Google's stance is anti-h.264, it's anti anything that isn't royalty-free (forever) in the web stack. And I agree with that.

Android, YouTube, etc. I suppose the distinction of it being the "web stack" is one thing, but doesn't it seem that YouTube should fall in line with their WebM-friendly stance? I can certainly get behind it, and despite my cynicism in regards to timing, etc, I'm behind the 1000lb gorilla using their weight to bring attention and popularity to freedom.

Evidently more of YouTube's videos are being encoded in WebM, previously it was just 720p videos uploaded after the WebM announcement in May 2010:

http://imgur.com/rWIIf

"Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post."

This has been discussed on the WebM blog:

"The WebM/VP8 hardware decoder implementation has already been licensed to over twenty partners and is proven in silicon. We expect the first commercial chips to integrate our VP8 decoder IP to be available in the first quarter of 2011."

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...

"They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms."

Incidentally, months ago they've also blogged about why they'll keep YouTube using Flash, rather than HTML5: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

Oh I saw that, I meant more that there are millions of mobile (and non-mobile) devices that have hardware decoding that won't be able to play WebM video anywhere near as well as H.264.

I think people change phones pretty often, especially in the smartphone market, so the mobile devices should be the quickest to support WebM.

The smartphone market is also growing quickly itself, which is why Android managed to equal the installed base of iPhones only a few months after the marketshare (i.e. current sales) rose above Apple's.

WebM will work on all major browsers, IE9 by downloading and installing the VP8 codec on Windows, Safari by installing the codec for quicktime. Of course it will work on Opera, Firefox 4, and Chrome.

The problem is getting it on iOS devices.

Are you saying Safari doesn't count as a "major browser"?

Don't most statistics put it at about 5%?

I don't know if it's "major" but it's probably worthy of consideration.

~6% worldwide, ~8% Europe, ~13% US according to to http://www.netmarketshare.com/

I would canonically count IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera as "major browsers".

Given that that it has 5-6% of market share, I think it is fair to leave it out of the major browsers. Not ignorable, but hardly major. It is iffy to even place Chrome as one, even though it seems like it will be in the future.

Sorta (I didn't realize how much higher their share was than Opera's). If they choose not to implement a free, open source, easily available codec because they're Apple... then they can get lumped in with Internet Explorer and enjoy the fallback to Flash. I know Jobs is a big fan.

Flash does not play WebM. How would "the fallback to Flash" work in this case?

Not currently but WebM (VP8) will be supported in Flash (http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_f...)

And lets be clear Safari on the desktop isn't the interesting one. Its the iOS devices. The iOS devices won't have Flash to fallback on either. So basically every iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch won't be able to watch your WebM videos AT ALL. There is no fallback, unless you encode to H264.

Now maybe you can say that in this new HTML5 web world mobile Apple devices are irrelevant. I personally think you'd be wrong.

H264 is the only codec that will generally be supported on every device, either directly or by Flash. From Chrome to Firefox to iOS to IE.

If Youtube goes WebM/flash only, iOS will support WebM, period. Not being able to watch youtube videos would be like the Flash noise of a year ago, but worse, as there's no reason not to support WebM.

Apple and Jobs aren't shy about saying, "Nope, not doing it". Especially with those they view as enemies and trust me, Google is their arch enemy now, much moreso than Microsoft.

A big reason they may not do it is backwards compat on HW accleration. They have a working solution on all devices today (H264). They're not likely to want to screw their old customers over a codec they aren't particularly fond of that was rammed down their throat by Google.

Here's what I'd do if I were Apple, host my own video service, that serves H264 or Flash. MS and Apple throw their marketing weight and services around that (their various products auto upload to this new service). Now all iOS devices can play this video AND so can everyone else. YouTube dies a MySpace like death.

If YouTube tries that I really think they may be sealing their own fate.

To put it another way, people are NOT going to give up their iOS devices. But they will use a different video service.

If YouTube and all online video is WebM, then iOS will have no way to play 99% of videos (no flash remember). Apple can't afford for ipad to be "the device that doesn't play videos"

iOS appliances have hardware support for H.264. If Apple can actually keep H.264 content available by refusing to support VP8/WebM, their captive users would benefit by longer battery life and maybe smoother playback.

Yes. Safari is a minor browser. Tiny market share.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com