Google and Video

[bryant]

Google hates H.264! H.264 is used almost everywhere, not just for Web video; it’s also the Blu-Ray encoding standard. So this is very exciting.

Despite my knee-jerk pro-Apple response, I believe that Google is correct in stating that WebM is the better political choice for Web standards. It is open in the sense that there’s no licensing fee and Google has no ability to institute one. It is not an open standard insofar as the standard does not belong to an impartial standards body, which is slightly problematic, but practically speaking it’s not a huge deal. H.264 does, FWIW, belong to such a body. But it’s not free to license, and that is again the more important issue.

WebM may not be the better choice from a legal point of view, in that we don’t know if it’s encumbered by patents. It would be nice if Google would indemnify people using WebM from patent lawsuits, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to require them to do so. Google doesn’t have to do your legal work for you, even if it would be nice if they did. Anyhow, I am not competent to have an opinion on the legal issues, so “we don’t know.” If I needed to make a corporate decision about this I’d pay for a lawyer to tell me things.

Technically speaking I don’t care. Web video is not the place where I demand top-notch video quality. H.264 might be better; even if it is, it’s not going to matter 99% of the time.

Now the fun part. Google’s stance, while correct, is in direct conflict with their Flash support. Google’s statement: “Adobe Flash Player is the most widely used web browser plug-in. It enables a wide range of applications and content on the Internet, from games, to video, to enterprise apps.” So, yes, this is true. Likewise, H.264 is the most widely used Web video format, which enables a wide range of video on the Internet. You’re either making decisions based on usage or not.

Which makes me suspect that Google is, with WebM, making the right decision for the wrong reasons. This only makes me about 50% happy.

Edit: this post makes the excellent point that Flash does share one key characteristic with WebM: namely, it’s free to distribute. However, Adobe has not to my knowledge guaranteed this in perpetuity.

Mirrored from Population: One.

Comments

[gentlyepigrams]

While I see and agree with your logic, is IE a big player that way any more? I mean, isn't IE the browser of choice for corporate intranets that can't be upgraded? Or is it just that the sites that I read that talk about their stats are unrepresentative that way?

[bryant]

It's between 40 and 50% worldwide, depending on who you listen to. Firefox is #2; Chrome is #4. Safari is small on the desktop, but big on mobile. See here. If Safari is the lone browser not supporting WebM, that's one thing, but if you add IE 9 to that you're definitely at 50%+ of the market that won't play it natively.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

I think there's another future issue to consider. Mobile vs. Desktop. Currently mobile is about 6% in NA (statcounter). I can't find (and wouldn't trust) a numeric prediction of it, but it's tripled in the last calendar year. Even with H.264, you have to start worrying about profiles at that point.

IE is not a big player in HTML 5 yet, although it is likely to be. Without a more detailed breakdown, it's unclear how much of that 40-50% is never-gonna-upgrade-and-never-gonna-watch- versions of IE. I also wonder how soon IE9 will make that big of an impact, given the slow uptake of the dependent OS. At work, I'm on XP.

statcounter is interesting, but it's never as good as looking at your own stats. I look at w3schools.com browser statistics, which is for obvious reasons tilted towards standards compliant browsers and technology adopters, but within IE they show a 0:3:1:1 ratio of IE 9/8/7/6 (http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp)

[bryant]

Yeah, mobile's a big deal -- I think that's why Safari's support is relevant. IE by version is also a big deal. I'm hearing that IE 9 will only support WebM with an additional download? Which is way not as good as built in support.