
WebM for Internet Explorer - captn3m0
https://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf
======
PLejeck
How old is this project? That's the old download page from Google, and the old
YouTube design. And an old version of Windows.

~~~
evilpie
The installer has this timestamp: 1373509356 (Thu, 11 Jul 2013 02:22:36 UTC).
So the last version probably isn't too old. (The timestamp of course is not
necessarily correct)

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Nux
Nice, but ... webm needs to get hardware support (ie so it can be played from
smartphones, tablets, raspberrypi etc), until then it's doomed to irrelevance.

~~~
mda
Most of the newer Arm chips have hardware WebM support.
[http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/arm-
socs](http://wiki.webmproject.org/hardware/arm-socs) .

~~~
samspenc
Just curious: is it possible for the same hardware to support _both_ WebM and
H.264?

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devx
Does it support VP9 and Opus yet?

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AshleysBrain
Couldn't a software decoder be written in Javascript/HTML5? Then no plugin
needed - which also means Metro mode support - and it should be passable for
most desktops. And if it is choppy then hey, Chrome has built-in support...

~~~
buster
A laptop becoming noisy and a webpage that will suddenly become unresponsive?
Who is his right mind would implement this on his own webpage? It would only
be attributed to your "shitty, slow" site, users don't care what video codec
their browser supports..

That said, i had so high hopes for ONE standardized video codec in HTML5, but
the w3c/whatwg just fucked it up (or better yet MS, Apple and Co. who couldn't
agree on one standard just for profit-reasons).

~~~
meepmorp
> or better yet MS, Apple and Co. who couldn't agree on one standard just for
> profit-reasons

Odd that the two companies you explicitly mention were just fine using h264
and didn't really stand to make money off the decision.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Actually Apple was on record as being against patented tech in W3C standards
and reached reportedly reached out to the patent holders to see if they would
licence H.264 baseline royalty free and they refused.

Apple also once held up the release of a new version of QuickTime until the
Mpeg-LA backed down from the crazy royalty structure they planned for AAC.

But they failed this time, so Apple supporters pretend everything is fine with
the current royalty system, and Apple opponents pretend they never even tried.

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kumarski
Makes me wonder how many HN readers are in China.

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jensenbox
Just give it time - it will get discontinued like every other google project.

~~~
aniket_ray
Off OP's topic but I find this post on every HN post about Google launching
something and frankly this post adds little value to the discussion.

Google Reader is dead and it's not coming back. Reader usage was extremely low
and it made no business sense for Google to run it. If Reader actually had
enough users, Google wouldn't have shut it down. Many entrepreneurs, including
me in the past, have had to take this decision to shut our services because
they did not have enough traction. Failure is part of taking a risk and you
should be more appreciative of the risk.

I was angry at the Reader shutdown too as I was an avid Reader user. I was
quick to switch to Feedly but lately I find myself being infrequent checking
my RSS feed. I seem to be getting more and more of my news from techmeme and
hacker news. When I talk to tech friends about this, it seems the they were
already doing this. The rest of the world had already moved on and I was just
late to realize this.

Was I angry at first? Yes. Am I still angry? No.

PS: I'm an engineer at Google right now.

~~~
jensenbox
The comment was not just about Reader - it is about fact:
[http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/](http://jensenbox.github.io/timeline/)

~~~
patrickaljord
What fact? The fact that out of hundreds of services, they shut down 12? Even
37signals shut down some of their products and they have very few. Also, this
list features google maps api v2 and v1, come on, this is ridiculous. I also
see plenty of stuff no one used or that were replaced by services that
everyone enjoy (google video by youtube).

~~~
anon1385
They have shut down (among others) Code Search, Google Video, Wave, Buzz,
Google Labs, Google Desktop, Google Notebook, Google Sets, Google Listen,
Google Reader, Google Squared, Google Catalogs, Google Answers, Audio Ads,
Google Base, Browser Sync, City Tours, Click-to-Call, Google Dashboard
Widgets, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Google Mashup Editor, Google Directory, GOOG-411,
Joga Bonito, Aardvark, Lively, Music Trends, Ride Finder, Google Shared Stuff,
Sidewiki, FastFlip, Google Translate API, Writely, Google Health, Google
Spell, PowerMeter, Google University Search, U.S. Government Search, Slide
products (Disco, Pool Party, Video Inbox, Photovine, Slideshow, SuperPoke!
Pets), Google Pack, Google Search API, Image Labeller and Google Dictionary.

~~~
jmillikin
Half of those were replaced with better products, and most of the rest were
things nobody actually used.

The "Google kills all their products" whisper only started with Reader because
it's awfully hard to get anyone mad about the shutdown of Sidewiki or audio
ads.

~~~
anon1385
Funnily enough, I actually originally compiled that list long before Reader
got shut down:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3120666)
I just added a few more recent things to it since then. So some of us at least
were pointing out what was going on long before Reader.

As far as I remember the translate API was the first of the recent closures
that really caused a storm.

~~~
magicalist
You should at least do some basic searches on these before asserting them.
After said "storm", the Translate API was not shut down as originally
announced. It became a paid API[1]

[1]
[https://developers.google.com/translate/](https://developers.google.com/translate/)

~~~
anon1385
I'm well aware of what happened. Making it paid was as good as closing it for
a lot of the free services that were using it.

The point was that a lot of people were upset about it when the closure was
announced, and thus we can see that people have been getting annoyed at Google
for closing things down since well before Reader was shut. This is counter to
the claim of the Google employee above that everybody loved it when Google
canned products before Reader.

