f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

As some of you may have read on my MP4 thread I have had the misfortune to be delving back into web video formats recently and what a bloody minefield this has become.

As the web grew all the major players launched their own video formats and sites had to be coded round which browser the user was running and embedded video playing on the page of a site under any browser was just a pipe dream.

Then along came Flash video .... played in any browser with a Flash plugin (that was all of them then) and could be neatly embedded in web pages. Just as the Netscape vs Microsoft coding headache had gone away so had the embedded video issue too. All was well with the world.

Then Apple took over the world of portable devices and decided Flash must die (for various reasons... some sound, some not), didn't support it on IOS and started touting H264 as the video format of the future. Such was the shift that YouTube had to recode its entire catalaogue to H264.

So you would think OK then H264 it is.... but Google are going to remove native support for it from their Chrome browser and anyway the licence is up in 2016 and those that own the patents (one of which is our beloved friends Apple) may well try and charge for its use from thereon in. Google want us to use Theora instead.

Then we have the whole MP4 compatibility issue as detailed in my other thread where Apple's array of devices all have different MP4 encoding requirements.

So we are going backwards in real terms as sites are going to have to sense the environment in which they are running and tailor their output accordingly as well as needing multiple video formats available. All makes for more time consuming development and lessens the user experience.

It's pretty infuriating.

Dedrater

MPEG LA and all it's licensors (Apple & Microsoft included) are obviously going to charge to use it's H.264 patent from 2016, that's the main reason they are pushing it for the dominant format for HTML5 and the absolute main reason we all should distant our self's from it so we can all have a open free internet, i.e Ogg Theora or Web M.

Not forgetting the latter two standards, formats rather, are much better than the former in everyway.