SillyDog701

[Antony]

Google announced that Chrome will drop the support for H.264 video in Chrome's HTML5 component with an intend to increase Google's internally-developed WebM format as well as Ogg Theora.

Google does acknowledge the popular H.264 format had an "important role" but claimed that Google's WebM is open despite MPEG-LA standards group, Microsoft and Apple have warned that WebM may violate patents and could face legal trouble.

Abandoning H.264 could be a potentially risky move for Google. The majority of HTML5-enabled video on the web uses H.264 and in many cases was put online to help support the iPad and other devices that don't have built-in Flash.

Many web users pointed out that Google being hypocrisy on Chrome's integration of Adobe's proprietary Flash standard which contradicts Google's claim of only support open video formats.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13

[Antony]

According to TechCrunch, H.264 has 66 percent of web videos.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13

[Don_HH2K]

The idea behind embedding Adobe Flash into Chrome was to provide for a leaner user experience, not just for Web videos.

In other news, Opera is supporting Google's move.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:2.0b9pre) Gecko/20110104 Firefox/4.0b9pre

[Antony]

In terms of standards, it is more about the de facto standard support, not blind supporting of just open.

Without a doubt, open source extremists would insist everything open.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5

[crazypenguin]

I rubs me the wrong way what Google is doing in this case. It just doesn't make sense. Chrome will become another IE if they keep an making such changes.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.5; Windows) KHTML/4.5.4 (like Gecko)

[Antony]

Google has offered an lengthy excuse on why WebM was the codec in HTML5 <video> tag.

Despite the lengthiness of the excuse and the word "Flash" was mentioned, Google smartly avoided to explain its double standards on integrating proprietary Flash video.

Google acquired the VP8 technology (the heart of WebM) from On2 Technologies last year.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.0 Firefox/3.6.13

[Fulvio]

I am not interested in going into this issue, more than superficially. What does the word support mean? With ISP, a program can work, but the ISP is not assisting the user. Is this the way with Google Chrome? Or they will make the
H264 unusable? What difference does it make to an average user? Other than Apple users?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:2.0b8) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b8