HTML 5 - audio codecs, h.264 licensing issues - Part 2

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12 points·Arkid··4 comments

Youtube has already converted at least 2/3 of their old videos into WebM, and all the new ones are converted to WebM as well. I hope Google makes the WebM player the default on all browsers supporting it, and leave Flash fall-back for the others, once they have all of them converted (early next year?). I figure by then they should fix all the remaining issues with it, too (no fullscreen mode for 1080p video, etc)

I think it's the only way to make video on the web not be patent encumbered. They need to take a stand and push for it, with their own services. Nobody else is going to do it for them. They should adopt this Apple-like strategy with WebM, like Apple did against Flash (and it turned out to be the right one). Google only really embraced Flash on Android to spite Apple anyway, not because it was the right strategy or path to take.

Completely agree with you on this. However, Google's removal of h.264 support is a very interesting move. Possibly because of infrastructure issues but with so many iOS supporting h.264, youtube may need to support h.264.

New youtube videos are still being transcoded to h.264 (among the other formats). I don't think anything with that is changing short-term.

The main issue with WebM is that the player doesn't support all the features that their Flash player does (e.g. advertising and annotations).

And this will not necessarily make the web less patent encumbered. Just like companies extract patent licensing fees from companies making use of Android, companies will probably try to extract licensing fees from companies using WebM. The problem isn't the formats so much as the patent system.

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