

The WebRTC codec debate and how it affects appear.in - sventy
http://appearin.tumblr.com/post/67062092300/the-webrtc-codec-debate-and-how-it-affects-appear-in

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salient
I definitely blame Google most for not sticking with their original plan of
stopping support for h.264 in Chrome 10. They could've done like Apple, when
they decided not to support Flash, and Apple "won" \- why? Because them
dropping the support for a proprietary plugin was the _right thing to do_.

Google could've done the _right thing_ and dropped the proprietary h.264, too,
but they didn't, and instead left Mozilla alone, as they "watched and saw" how
things were going, instead of pushing VP8 as hard as possible to Android
devices/chips, and making VP8 the default codec for Youtube, with fallback to
Flash, for browsers who didn't support it.

That being said, I think Mozilla adopting Cisco's "open source" binary blob
for h.264 turned a situation from bad to _worse_. Daala better be 2-3x more
efficient at the same quality than HEVC/VP9, and arrive in 2015, otherwise the
codec war is probably over (at least for the rest of this decade).

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kkowalczyk
Yes, blame Google, who spent, literally, over 100 million creating, supporting
and pushing forward a new, non-patented codec (VP8, VP9) and in general trying
to push web video forward.

Blaming Apple or Microsoft for not willing to put VP8 in their browser or for
not willing to donate h.264 patents to public pool would be obviously crazy.

Let's blame the one party that actually does something positive for web video.

