The WebRTC codec debate and how it affects appear.in

I definitely blame Google most for not sticking with their original plan of stopping support for h.264 in Chrome 10. They could've done like Apple, when they decided not to support Flash, and Apple "won" - why? Because them dropping the support for a proprietary plugin was the right thing to do.

Google could've done the right thing and dropped the proprietary h.264, too, but they didn't, and instead left Mozilla alone, as they "watched and saw" how things were going, instead of pushing VP8 as hard as possible to Android devices/chips, and making VP8 the default codec for Youtube, with fallback to Flash, for browsers who didn't support it.

That being said, I think Mozilla adopting Cisco's "open source" binary blob for h.264 turned a situation from bad to worse. Daala better be 2-3x more efficient at the same quality than HEVC/VP9, and arrive in 2015, otherwise the codec war is probably over (at least for the rest of this decade).