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Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla has implemented WebM playback, but WebM hasn't gained enough traction to matter.

> But google, with its control of youtube and Android, can make a serious dent in that.

Uninstall Flash and try using a browser without H.264 codec. I have, and it sucks.

YouTube is the only major site that supports WebM, and even there WebM it's a second-class citizen (videos with ads are not allowed to use HTML5 player, and not all videos are transcoded to WebM).

Google dropped the ball here. Android still has better support for H.264 than WebM. YouTube is half-broken with WebM. Chrome broke promise of dropping H.264 — they know that a browser cannot survive without it.

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And by the way, it is not possible to use Youtube without Flash Player. Some videos simply are not played with HTML player and Youtube tells you to download Adobe Flash Player :( Hope there will be some new competitor, who will offer video services without third party plugins. Maybe Vimeo?

I haven't had flash installed for years. For videos, I made a key-binding that extracts any URL's in XA_PRIMARY, launches https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl and then plays the video with mplayer. Looks better (because the vid is full res) and never skips.

There is almost always a way. But explain that to my mom/room mates/friends who don't even know what a key-binding is.

Don't explain it, just do it for them. Then they'll be the cool ones whose YouTube works better than everyone else's.

Code: https://github.com/jakeogh/youtube-dl-wrapper

Same here. But I continue to endure a WebM only world. I miss out all the vimeo screen casts.. but so what? just means i will have to find another tutorial in text and life moves on.

Mozilla can't stay relevant catering only to users willing to make that compromise, because they are so few.

It is simply a data format that is non-standard and that you have to pay for proprietary decoders. What is new about that? just because google give you that feature if you pay them with your data, does not make it free for everyone. so it is not in place for firefox.

Or should firefox charge a fee for each user? it is crazy, even so when the alternative is already existent and open standard.

what is even crazier is that they demand a payment, for a spec which only "benefit" over the open source code is that they can add DRM on top of it, so they can also charge the end user.

Arguably vimeo could make an effort here too, and do automatic transcoding and delivery to eg: webm and html5. It certainly wouldn't be trivial, but also not impossible.

Has anyone seen any recent news on why Google/youtube doesn't do this btw? The already do transcoding for different quality? And/or if they have any plans for a html5-based viewer that supports ads etc?

And adopt WebM for what business gain ?

Almost nothing supports it. And with Apple dominating in web usage, editing tools and phones/tablets it is hard to see any format surviving without their support. And of course they are fully behind H.265.

if people had no voice youtube would still be showing quicktime or Real video.

I for one rather watch youtube (and uploads my videos there) because vimeo is a pain to watch (have to go get my closed source tablet). while youtube i can just hunt for a non-ad version that will work on html5.

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