When you watch a video on the web or your mobile phone, the odds are pretty good you are using the MP4 video format and the H.264 codec. There are a lot of choices when it comes to video formats. But, MP4 is the top pick for both web and mobile viewing, according to a new survey released this morning by Sorenson Media.
69% of video professionals use MP4 regularly for the web, and 58% use it… → Read More
We’ve already done a full breakdown of Google’s clarification of their H.264 pullout today. But buried in their post is another interesting nugget worth highlighting by itself: WebM plugins are coming shortly for Safari and IE9.
Yes, plugins.
This is both humorous and terrifying on a few levels. First and formost, the point of all of this H.264/WebM stuff is so that the web can shift to an HTML5… → Read More
Earlier this week, Google wrote a very short post on their relatively small Chromium blog to announce a big change: they were dropping support for the H.264 codec in Chrome. While they may have tried to whisper it, the post resulted in a shitstorm that reached high into the heavens. It seems as if just about everyone weighed in on the decision (including us, twice).
As a result of the fallout… → Read More
On Tuesday Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, and Google fired H.264 from Chrome. The tubes are heated up with analysis of these two seemingly unassociated events, and I figure I’ll mash them together into a counter-intuitive scenario. The unifying driver: Tuesday’s new iPhone 4 announcement from Verizon.
We hear lots about Android these days as a million tablets bloom at CES. But the world we’re… → Read More
A lot has been written about Google’s decision to no longer support H.264 HTML5 video playback in Chrome, and we haven’t seen the end of opinions about it (here’s MG’s take).
Make sure you read this one from Tim Sneath, director of the Windows and Silverlight technical evangelism team, though.
In a blog post entitled ‘An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google’, the… → Read More
Do you smell that? Just wait a second. You will.
Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
The bolding is mine, but that’s Google’s actual statement as to why they’re dropping support for the H.264 video codec from the Chromium open source… → Read More
Just when the H.264 video codec is starting to take over a large portion of new Web videos, along comes Google to shake things up again. Today, along with Mozilla and Opera, it is launching the WebM Project, an open, royalty-free codec that can run in HTML5 browsers without the need for Flash.
Up till now, the battle between Flash and HTML5 video has centered around the H.264 codec, which is… → Read More
A couple weeks ago, in the wake of Steve Jobs’ tirade against Flash and why the iPad won’t support it, I wanted to find out exactly how much video out there on the Web is already encoded in the iPad-friendly H.264 format. Encoding.com provided me with some data showing that 66 percent of the videos it encoded in the first quarter of 2010 were in H.264, up from 31 percent the year before. Today… → Read More
Earlier this week, Steve Jobs kicked the debate about the need for Flash into high gear, especially for Web video. As he explained, Apple products like the iPhone and iPad don’t support Flash because although 75 percent of video on the Web is in Flash ” almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.” The next day, Microsoft… → Read More
You’ll be able to view similar Van Halen vids on the iPhone You knew YouTube was on its way to the Apple TV and now Apple has made it official. Users can download a software update that will add YouTube to the available list of programming. You’ll be able to view and browse YouTube videos and can login to your account to view your favorites. Also announced today, YouTube will be coming… → Read More
site, you may have been disappointed not in the quality of the video, but the playback experience. Apple uses the H.264 codec for all of its HiDef video, as it makes sharp pictures with smooth motion while maintaining reasonable file sizes and throughputs. The problem is, the heavy compression needed to get the quality you see takes an enormous amount of processing power to decompress. → Read More
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