Can't we just all settle for .webm?
The cancerous patented MP4/H264 combination must die.
The cancerous patented MP4/H264 combination must die.
It's claimed that WebM is patent free, but this is impossible. There's just too many patents in the video space, any one of which could surface and tank this format.
Remember GIF itself was, for a while, subject to patent problems.
At least with H264 companies like Cisco are releasing implementations with indemnity from that (http://www.openh264.org/) which I think is better than coming up with some wonky new format.
In particular, if you design a video compression format that deliberately avoids doing what MPEG4 or H.264 does, your odds of patent infringement go down drastically.
Though I'd far prefer these services work with both WebM and H264, and use whichever works best.
The whole debate is only hurting users and developers, while lining the pockets of MPEGLA (or whoever is responsible for h264 licensing).
It's very unlikely to see that happen, since using H.264 doesn't cost a dime in royalties for sites like imgur that serve the content for free (ads don't count as per the H.264 licensing terms). The only trouble is really on Firefox and any other browser that wants to implement a built-in H.264 decoder, but nothing stops them from working around that via things like OpenH264 or by using system decoders and so on.
The same will likely happen with H.265/HEVC, as the recently published licensing terms made it completely royalty-free to use the format itself (including for commercial purposes, you have to pay royalties for that with H.264), and you only have to pay to distribute decoders & encoders.
Personally I wish browser vendors would just use whatever's installed on the user system for playing web videos, but for some reason that's not okay because "we need at least one unified always playing format for the web!" and then we don't get that anyway, as the whole WebM mess has clearly shown...
Anyway, since imgur is doing the conversion to video by themselves, there's not really any reason why they couldn't do both H.264 MP4s and VP8 WebMs... supporting only one format makes more sense if you allow direct user-encoded video uploads like 4chan does with its WebM support for example. Gotta say I don't like this whole "hey we took HTML5 video with 'autoplay loop muted' properties and branded it GIFV!" shtick, though.
In the meantime then the alternative sites will pick up in use because they aren't being dicks about a video format.
Additionally, what about devices that only have mpeg decoding? Basically you're saying screw you non webm supporting people and your battery life. We don't like your kind around here.
Its a great way to kill your site in short. Unless everyone does it at once and upgrades happen to support things, its at best a slow burn like firefox. But at this point webm doesn't have half the use cases as firefox did.
The cancerous patented gif/lzw combination must die.
This debate is partly why the web is overrun with enormous animated GIFs.
It seems pretty clear that webm isn't going to be widely supported. Time to move on.
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NO
Apple is never going to support WebM. This kills the format. There are hundreds of millions of devices that can hardware decode MPEG4 than can't for WebM. Nay, billions of devices. Of course WebM is always just around the corner, but this has just led to a stagnation where the scourge of animated GIFs reigned supreme.