HTML5 telecasting has a few hurdles to leap before it can fully replace Flash , but one looms larger than all others : Opposition to proprietary television formats , like h.264 . handily , Google has just open - source their own data formatting , called WebM.
If you ’ve been following theFlash / HTML5 / h.264 dramafor the last few months , this intelligence might sound a little conversant : That ’s because in August of last class , Google acquired a firm call On2 , a video compression company with handful of picture codecs — the VP series , including the recent , VP8 . Many the great unwashed suspected that Google , which owns YouTube , would roll support for these codecs into its product — let in Chrome web browser app — and possibly even open - seed VP8 .
https://gizmodo.com/giz-explains-why-html5-isnt-going-to-save-the-internet-5461711
And , well , that ’s what they ’ve done : They ’ve effectively open - sourced VP8 , under the name WebM. The entire WebM projection include a video recording codec ( VP8 , fundamentally ) , and audio codec ( Ogg Vorbis ) and a container , based on .mkv , or Matroska . It ’ll support HD , patently . Most significantly , it ’s not bound by royalties or restrictive licence .
What this means is that anyone build a entanglement video site , or a web browser app , now has a new alternative to h.264 , the favorite proprietary standard , and Ogg , an open generator touchstone that reasonably much nobody uses .
Does this matter to you ? Yes ! How ? Well ..
As it stand , HTML5 video recording is in a standstill : browser app makers like Mozilla ( Firefox ) and Opera want web video to be based on receptive applied science , like Ogg , because it head off messy royalty and licensing schemes , and in the case of Firefox , can be desegregate into the browser app , which itself is open source . Apple , Google and Microsoft ( along with most entanglement video providers who ’re using HTML5 , are run low ahead with the h.264 standard , which offer tight compression , and panoptic accession to hardware quickening ( many devices can expend video hardware to decrypt h.264 video already ) .
As the Ogg folk see it , h.264 is n’t free enough — its future could become mired in right of first publication and licensing conflict , which would n’t be good for anyway . And for the Mozilla groundwork in particular , the concept of proprietary formats is philosophically unacceptable . As the h.264 folks see it , Ogg is an inferior measure , and is itself capable to legal threats , from which it would n’t really be defend . ( Who would step up ? ) Hence , stalemate .
Google ’s WebM offers the best of both worlds , in theory : It ’s a well - compressed , in advance standard , now free in all senses of the word , and backed by a massive bay window that could presumably a. ) oversee its spread and use and b. ) protect it in motor hotel , should anyone have any problem with it .
Mozilla and Opera are already on control board to digest the measure in approaching web browser vent , as is Adobe ; all predict , but all predictable . We wo n’t really get laid if WebM will matter , though , until reinforcement shows up in other browsers : Chrome is a given , but what about Safari and IE ? want of backup from Microsoft would leave WebM bushed in the piss , and Google — and others — ineffectual to deploy it in earnest . That , and current gen ironware wo n’t accelerate WebM decoding , so it ’s really not practical on wandering equipment , which depend on computer hardware financial support to make streaming video smooth , and prevent battery sucking . ( This means no support in current - gen iThings and smarpthones . )
For now , though , Google ’s collected afew toy dog for us to act with , including supported browsers and a special YouTube psychometric test whoremaster , so you could see what it count like . ( Spoiler : It appear like YouTube . )
Update : Oh man , here ’s some promising news show from Mary Jo Foley : accord to her sources , Microsoft will suffer WebMin IE9 .
Update II : Microsoft corroborate , which bodes very well for WebM , albeit years down the line . ( IE9 is n’t due out until 2011 . ) That leaves the clod in Apple ’s tourist court , which , well , should beinteresting to watch out .
https://gizmodo.com/oh-hey-steve-jobs-officially-thinks-flash-sucks-5527204
Update III : Aaaand we have the first dissent : h.264 developerJason Garrett - Glasercalls the specification “ and H.264 Baseline Profile with a good S computer programmer . ” In English , this means he believes the specification to be too closelipped to h.264 in some way , which could leave it candid to attack by MPEGLA , the company that licenses h.264 . He also call the spec sloppy and incomplete — perhaps predictable give his background , but interesting still . Lesson : Nothing is dewy-eyed in web video recording .
[ Google WebM ]
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