

Google To Announce List Of Vendors Who Will Support VP8 On May 19th - ZeroGravitas
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2010/04/google-to-announce-list-of-vendors-who-will-support-vp8-on-may-19th.html

======
aw3c2
I cannot wait to rub it into all the "but H264 is already standard, there is
no way that there will be another format supported" zealots. For a patent-free
better future!

~~~
mambodog
Right, but not many organisations are in a position to come along and do us
all* a big favour as Google is here. Between being able to afford it, having a
browser and a mobile OS, and YouTube, they are really holding the right cards
to do this. Anyway, my point is, if Google weren't going to do it, then those
'zealots' would quite possibly have a point.

*I am under no illusion that 'us all' doesn't largely include Google themselves in this case, of course.

------
FooBarWidget
Is VP8 going to be open source? I believe Google still hasn't confirmed this
rumor yet.

~~~
stephenjudkins
I would guess that they will in order to speed its adoption.

If they don't, it won't be long until there exists an open-source
implementation. There already exist very high-quality open source
implementations of H.264, like x264. Since VP8 won't be patent encumbered,
there will probably be even more impetus to create one.

------
barranger
excuse my ignorance, but would that list of vendors possibly include Mozilla?
I would imagine that having both Firefox and Chrome support VP8 day one would
be a major shot against H264 becoming the standard.

~~~
naner
Well Firefox, Opera, and Chrome all support Ogg and nobody cares. Safari and
IE are all that matters since they are what ships with their respective OSes.
H.264 is already the defacto standard. If Google somehow convinced
Apple/WebKit to include VP8 out of the box then that might put pressure on
Microsoft. That also puts most of the weight of the smartphone market behind
VP8. But they also still support H.264 and hardware decoding is much more
mature for H.264 now, too.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Safari on Mac OS X (or Windows) doesn't carry that much weight. Its global
market share is half that of Chrome, and roughly the same as Opera. Even in
its best market (North America) it's going to be rapidly overtaken by Chrome
in the next month or so. There's also at least 3 good cross-platform
alternatives for people to use.

Safari on iPhone and iPod isn't too great an obstacle either despite their
mobile mindshare because they only support H.264 baseline and that (combined
with their mobile nature) means a separate video file is probably recommended
anyway.

And on the Microsoft side only IE9 is announced as supporting HTML5 video
(with H.264 amongst a few other codecs), and no-one knows when it's coming
out, probably some point in 2011 and not for Windows XP. Plus since
Microsoft's VC-1 died off they don't really have a dog in this fight. They'd
have to balance the minor benefit of H.264 patents being a hindrance to open
source rivals (but not Apple or Google) against falling behind web standards
if everyone else goes VP8.

So the one Google really want to convince is Adobe Flash. If they're on board
you get effective 100% uptake within a year of release across all desktops
(XP, Windows 7, Mac OS X) and all browsers (inc. Safari and IE 6, 7 and 8) and
that's the kind of leverage you need to get Microsoft and Apple to follow
domino style. And similarly to Microsoft they gain no real business benefit
from H.264 files that can just as easily be served outside Flash.

~~~
vetinari
I would be surprised, if Adobe would be not on board during Google I/O
announcement. It was announced that Google is going to tightly integrate Flash
with Chrome, support Flash in Android and ChromeOS... so what they would get
in exchange for that? VP8 support in Flash would be one thing.

------
sosuke
I really hope that Flash and every major browser, including the iPad one, is
on that support list, then you'd only have to encode videos once for the web.

