The war on H.264 is over: “We lost,” says Mozilla at Apple Insider
Thank Goodness, sanity finally prevails! In fact Mozilla’s previous approach – holding out for Ogg or WebM codecs – had the unfortunate side effect of driving even more people to the very closed Flash for distribution of H.264 in FireFox. Exactly the opposite of what the Mozilla folk wanted.
I’ve long said that H.264 is “one codec to rule them all” (because it scales so well) and it’s about time Mozilla realized that the world really only wants one codec. Well, really users just don’t want to care about codecs at all!
Comments
7 responses to “The war on H.264 is over.”
that link doesn’t work
Sorry, had an errant character at the end. Fixed now.
This is really great news for anyone encoding video for web distribution.
Supporting Firefox meant many people stuck with flash video on the desktop for consistency and fell over to HTML5 on mobile devices. Think this move will make it easier for people to use one codec and HTML5 video across all devices.
With one codec that works on everything, and flash going by the wayside, it should simplify the encoding workflow for adaptive bitrate streaming.
Given that Google Chrome never removed HTML5 H.264 support and Adobe never implemented Flash WebM support my hunch is that this foretells a major push by Adobe to implement HTML5 interactive tools with H.264 support. When Adobe starts pushing the creative toolset, wi’ll start to see the shift methinks. Do note that there’s still a lot missing in HTML5 H.264 support compared to Flash H.264 support but WebM was one stumbling block.
Philip,
The URL is still broken for me.
That errant character is still there. It’s a quotation mark at the end of the url.
I replaced the short link with a conventional one. Hope that works better.
Now if only Opera would support it, I’d be happy. Damn fast browser.