Google’s Chromium Blog states they are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project.
Most Web video today uses Adobe’s Flash plug-in, which uses H.264 or other codecs. HTML5 has built-in support for video. Google is supporting the “open” WebM (VP-8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future.
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. These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give content publishers and developers using HTML <video> an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their sites.
TechCrunch wonders how Google get away with dropping support for H-264 under the guise of “open” when baked into their browser is Flash, an un-open plug-in?
The only time Chrome ever fails or has performance issues is due to Flash. And because they bake it in, you have no choice but to live with it or manually disable it (which most users have no idea how to do, obviously). Anyway, Google’s stance is essentially that they bake it in for security and performance purposes.
Flash is a huge security risk in web browsers because flaws are not only found often but the patches take a lot time to matriculate to users — if they ever do. That’s because users are forced to install updates. Of course, that’s one big problem with being a plug-in in the first place rather than a standard part of the browser itself. So Google thought they could solve this problem just auto-updating Flash within Chrome
How can Google justify dropping support for H.264, but not Flash (which also uses H.264 for video)? Simple, Adobe is also one of the WebM partners and will support WebM technologies inside Flash. Yup, Flash is siding with Google on this one.
One of the big backers of H.264 is Google’s ever-growing rival, Apple. More specifically, the technology is front and center to much of what iOS has to offer.
The key point is that it’s fine if Google wants to take this stand for open. But to do so, they need to do it across the board. And that includes dropping Flash from Chrome just like they’re dropping H.264.
H.264/AVC is widely supported in video cameras, Blu-ray players, and many other devices. But it comes with significant royalty licensing fees, explains C/Net. MPEG LA made H.264 free to use for video that’s streamed for free, but other fees exist for those using the technology in products.
Trend Micro Chairman Steve Chang says “open” is less secure. Speaking to Bloomberg yesterday he said, “Android is open-source, which means the hacker can also understand the underlying architecture and source code.” Apple, he said, has been “very careful about it. It’s impossible for certain types of viruses” to run on the company’s iPhone.
According to infrastructure expert Jason Perlow, it’s all about YouTube:
“The movement away from H.264 and to open formats such as VP-8 and Theora is simply a canary in a coal mine. It’s all about Google coming to the conclusion that supporting all kinds of video formats at YouTube requires a large amount of infrastructure, which costs a great deal of money.My guess is that the decision to eliminate H.264 not only applies to the Chrome browser for the PC, the Mac and Android Devices, but to also to the actual encoding of content stored in YouTube’s Storage Area Networks (SANs)”.
