
H.264 Already Won—Makes Up 66 Percent Of Web Videos - mjfern
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/01/h-264-66-percent-web-video/
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pavs
They would have won if there was a valid competition. Its an ever changing
market, there is no definite winner or loser. Its as silly as saying IE
already won five years ago. IE had a market share at 95% in 2003. Did they
win?

With Google opening up VP8 the market is likely to be shifted in the next 4-5
years. They have both the money and tech background to make VP8 just as good
if not better. Hardware adoption is a matter of time.

~~~
sigzero
Apple and Microsoft are behind H264 now...that will be hard to overcome mostly
because the public just wants it to work and doesn't care about the tech
behind it.

~~~
pavs
I won't comment on MSFT, because they have a really fucked up attitude towards
open standards. But Apple, whether you like it or not, supports open standards
(at-least when it comes to browsers). There is no reason why Apple won't
support an open format over H264, if the performance is comparable.

If I had stakes at H264 or any proprietary video coded/format. I would be
concerned for my future.

~~~
DrJokepu
Steve Jobs himself said a couple of days ago:

 _All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to
go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just
because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t
infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty
free or open source._

Source: [http://blogs.fsfe.org/hugo/2010/04/open-letter-to-steve-
jobs...](http://blogs.fsfe.org/hugo/2010/04/open-letter-to-steve-jobs/)

~~~
pavs
You think Google doesn't know that? You think Google just spent $100 million
without investigating on patent problems and how they will deal with them?

Was Steve referring to VP8, its not opensource now, he is most likely only
referring to existing open source codec.

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Auzy83
Firstly, who are encoding.com? Unless I'm mistaken, only a small percentage of
the market use their services.

The same editors in Techcrunch who believe that H.264 won because of the
results from one web encoding company, probably also believe Apple dominate
the market after walking into an Applecentre, and that Techcrunch dominates
the news market.

This is perhaps the most deceptive article I have ever seen. I am so sick of
Apple users standing up for Steve Jobs with clearly misleading evidence. Doing
so may help keep their stocks afloat, but its terrible journalism. No, H.264
hasn't won, and cannot in fact win because standards keep changing.

Also, Apple certainly doesn't dominate the market! Their sales figures are
absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the market and whilst the flash-disabled
iPad/iphone may be selling well, their sales figures are insignificant
compared to the number of flash-compatible internet devices out there (and
with Android getting flash, this will likely hold true).

If anything, due to the way that Steve Job's is treating developers, it's
possible people will see what jerk's Apple are, and return the trend to flash
again.

Anyway, I think it's too early to say though. Sooner or later browsers will
decide on a common format, and it's unlikely to be H.264 (because of the
patents, and the fact even companies don't like paying licensing fees).
Furthermore, just because Steve Job's says "all video formats have patents",
people interpret it wrongly to mean Xiph will get sued. It could be possible
that Steve Job's is just being an idiot too (Steve Job's also is happy to give
off the impression that OSX cannot get viruses).

Thing's will change soon, but it is difficult to say which format will win
still.

~~~
tvon
I agree with the first two paragraphs, I think you went a little nuts after
that though.

~~~
Auzy83
I'd agree.. But my point for Apple is valid. Most of the people saying H.264
has won are simply agreeing with Steves view

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naner
This chart is a little confusing. They should have listed h.263 instead of FLV
if that is what they meant.

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treyp
sorry, but that doesn't mean that there's a war with a single winner who has
already won. people are encoding videos like this because the popular ways of
playing videos are through flash and through the iphone.

once HTML5 video picks up, if a major browser (firefox) doesn't support h.264,
we'll probably see people encode more than one format, unless something else
gains widespread player support fast (vp8, i'm looking at you).

i don't think h.264 is going away, but i don't think it's surely a lone winner
going forward.

~~~
tzs
Or Firefox will get forked, and the fork will support using host OS video
playback facilities, so will play whatever the host OS supports. That will get
H.264 support in Firefox (or whatever new name the forkers give it, since they
won't be able to use the Firefox name...) on 95+% of the desktops. Once
someone writes a Flash video player that hooks into the host OS's video
interface, that will get H.264 support for forked Firefox on 99+% of desktops.

My money is on Ubuntu doing the fork, if Firefox remains stubborn.

~~~
briansmith
In many ways, Google Chrome is the ultimate fork of Firefox. It took almost
all the good ideas of Firefox and dumped the bad code. If somebody was going
to come up with a "new" brower, a de-Googled Chrome would make a much nicer
base.

~~~
stuaxo
Thats not a fork, it doesn't use any firefox code, it's based on webkit.

At best you could say that it's a fork of khtml.

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jon_dahl
This is a strange article. H.264 is clearly the leader, and clearly the best
video codec available today. But everyone already knows that, and so it isn't
news.

The news is VP8, which will finally give H.264 some competition. "Microsoft
won - makes up 90% of desktop market" isn't news. "ChromeOS captures 50% of
desktop market": now that would be news.

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chime
Great data but that's such a poorly designed chart. Three nearly identical
blues and a green? _sigh_

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MikeCapone
I'm still waiting to see some independent real-world comparisons between h.264
and VP8. Until I've seen that, it doesn't really matter, because if VP8 isn't
closer enough, or better, than h.264, it will have a hard time becoming a
standard.

~~~
jacquesm
Google owns youtube, if they convert youtube to use VP8 then plenty of others
will follow and it will be a de-facto standard.

Real world comparisons between codecs would be the ideal way to settle this
but with the 800 pound gorilla behind it VP8 stands a good chance even without
such comparisons. If 'it works' in the eyes of the majority of the users then
that means it is good enough, even if the underlying tech is marginally better
or worse then H.264.

I'd expect google to try to do a good job at least, and since they have H.264
to shoot for they would be foolish not to use their extensive library of
videos for comparison purposes.

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datums
Facebook also uses it for their video platform

"Facebook uses the H.264 video codec and main-profile AAC (also known as
MPEG-4 Audio) for audio, muxed inside the MP4 container."

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ZeroGravitas
Don't they mean _Flash already won_ since it represents 99% of web video (and
99% of H.264 video as well).

~~~
GHFigs
No, they don't. The subject is the video content itself. _How_ you play it
back is only relevant insofar as it explains _why_ there is so much content.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
For 85% of the world, the _only_ way they can receive H.264 is via Flash and
that is changing only very slowly. For another 14%+ they get it via Flash
anyway and again will continue to do so for some time.

This article pits H.264 against VP6, H.263 and Theora two weeks before Google
is supposed to announce VP8 and declares a winner?

It even says 40% of all video is delivered via Youtube, and that's not even
getting into speculation that Adobe and Google will both support VP8 to stick
it to Apple.

Anyone claiming how you play it back is irrelevant is trying to push a bizarre
Apple line that suggests they are the one's pushing H.264, when in reality
they are riding the coat tails of Adobe on this one and quite likely to be
left behind if Youtube and Adobe pick a different winner.

