Initially, Google drops H.264 in favor of WebM in Chrome. YouTube begins serving WebM in an HTML5 wrapper to Chrome clients. Mozilla, in search of open codecs with wide support implements WebM in Firefox. Other video services begrudgingly make the leap and start encoding their video in WebM format to support a growing number of users.
Google extends an olive branch to Adobe in order to get WebM support in Flash, ensuring that desktop computer users on all platforms will be able to play back WebM content, hardware support or not.
This gives Google the coverage they need to start turning the screws. While the events outlined above are unfolding, handset manufacturers see the writing on the wall and start including WebM hardware support in Android handsets.
Apple, being fully involved with H.264, fights all of the above every step of the way. The stubborn company that they are, they will not adopt hardware WebM support in their devices in favor of uniform H.264 support across their product line. This will hurt battery life during video playback for non-Apple sourced video on iOS devices and will erode the Apple user base because of competitive disadvantage.
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None of the above may be true, but it sure would make for a great "Pirates of Silicon Valley 2".
>Other video services begrudgingly make the leap and start encoding their video in WebM format to support a growing number of users.
Or they just support those users instead by serving them Flash - which they have to do anyhow to support IE6/7/8 and Firefox 1/2/3, avoiding the hastle and cost of more video encoding and storage. And none of the rest then happens.
That doesn't preclude the rest of the scenario from playing out. To the contrary, Flash and WebM support is a critical component. Google needs two things to apply pressure to Apple with WebM:
* Widespread WebM support in web browsers (Flash is a good vehicle for this)
* WebM exclusivity (or at least preference) on Android handsets
I'm not sure how they'd execute the latter. The handset manufacturers pick the chipsets and build the drivers, so it's not clear to me how that part plays out.
Like I said, it's a stretch, but given that Google seems to want to go head-to-head with Apple, it's plausible, IMO.
The alternate explanation is that Google simply wants a win for "openness" wherever they can get it, and they recognize that they can't win the war in a single battle.
Google are not removing video tag support, they are removing the h264 codec. h264 is pretty damn well established and is actually a standard without the quotation marks, and an open one at that.
The problem is a standard can be 'open' yet restricted, i.e. you have to pay to distribute software using it. Can't pay? Can't give people the program. The tricks that LAME uses to work around MP3 encoding patents aren't going to work for browsers.
Of course it will go away once the patents expire, just like with GIF, but calling it 'open' now is just marketing speak which doesn't come close to the actual nature and purpose of open-source software.
well they are nothing alike. Flash player is a free but proprietary implementation of an swf player. H264 is a licensed and patented codec specification.
