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Google has been coping a fair amount of flak ever since it announced the withdrawal of H.264 support from its Chrome browser. Apparently, the internet giant was having nightmares about a closed, royalty-fettered future of web video before it decided to drop H.264 support in favor of the open source WebM format. However, the company couldn’t quite explain why it continues to support other closed-source technologies like Flash and Silverlight.
The internet giant posted a lengthy explanation on the Chromium Blog this past Friday, but did little to address the principal gripe about its decision to drop H.264 support. In fact, instead of explaining why it has different yardsticks for different closed technologies, it actually made it a point to emphasize support for Flash and Silverlight. It now sees a symbiosis between H.264 and the two plug-ins.
“H.264 plays an important role in video and the vast majority of the H.264 videos on the web today are viewed in plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight. These plug-ins are and will continue to be supported in Chrome,” wrote Mike Jazayeri, a product manager at Google, in a blog post.
“Our announcement was only related to the <video> tag, which is part of the emerging HTML platform. While the HTML video platform offers great promise, few sites use it today and therefore few users will be immediately impacted by this change.”
It is now concentrating its efforts on popularizing the use of the open-source WebM format for HTML5 video. An uphill task to say the least. Nonetheless, the WebM Project team will soon release plugins to enable WebM support in Internet Explorer and Safari through the HTML standard <video> tag. This not only defies logic but belies the raison d'être of HTML5 video, which was conceived as a means of disencumbering web video from the clutches of special plugins. That said, all major stakeholders are equally culpable for the current state of fragmentation.
Another major hurdle in WebM’s path is the widespread hardware support that H.264 currently enjoys. The open-source format is unlikely to take off in an era of hardware-accelerated video without support from GPU vendors.
Comments are closed on this article
damicatz
January 18, 2011 at 7:29am
The HTML5 video tag is a joke.
Do you want to know why so many people use Flash for video? It's because Flash is basically universal (not counting the iPhone/iPad but no one gives a crap about those anyways). If I make a video using Flash, it will work on any device that supports Flash.
The problem with the HTML5 video tag is one which is typical of any "standard" designed by committee. By trying to appease everyone, the W3C has ensured that the video tag does nothing particularly well. The W3C has no spine. If they did, they would have mandated a video codec and told Apple and Microsoft to shove it.
As a company that is offering video content on my website, why would I use the HTML5 video tag, and have to worry about offering video in multiple codec formats (and use more costly storage space) or transcoding video formats on the fly (using valuable CPU time) when I can just offer it in Flash and not have to worry about whether a given device supports Codec A or Codec B?
Walnut
January 17, 2011 at 12:27pm
This makes a lot of sense to me. If Google were to support H.264 natively in HTML they'd be supporting the inclusion of closed-source tech into brand new standards. Compare that to supporting Flash, which is just supporting closed-source tech in old, legacy standards for the purpose of compatibility with existing content. It's two totally different decisions made for totally different reasons. The only reason why Google is getting flak for this is because articles about Google are always contraversial and there are more than a couple of tech sites that absolutely love to cash in on the increased traffic from their inflammatory "opinion" pieces. I appreciate MaxPC's relatively unbiased coverage of stories like this. It's why you guys continue to be my first source for technology news.
Deanjo
January 17, 2011 at 5:11pm
They already support "inclusion of closed-source tech into brand new standards". They still have AAC and MP3 support for example built into their browser. Both are still present and are in the same boat as h264. Google is just being a hypocrite trying to push their own alternative technology.
Walnut
January 17, 2011 at 7:11pm
It's not really the same situation. MP3 is all over the place. If they decide not to support it, a lot of people will be impacted. The same cannot be said for not supporting H.264's inclusion into the <video> tag, as that will impact no one right now. What it will do is force HTML forward into open-scource alternatives. When HTML5 is adopted across the industry, it won't be loaded with closed-source tech.
