On Jan 13, 2:09 pm, Reinier Zwitserloot <reini...@gmail.com> wrote: > It's obviously a win for consumers because WebM or OggTheora winning the > format war is a vastly superior situation for us consumers to be in, > compared to anything controlled by the MPEG-LA consortium, such as H.264.
I beg to differ. Consumers consume - video content in our case. So they don't pay H.264 license fees (Microsoft / Apple / Adobe do, and I know consumers indirectly pay in the end, but it's such a small amount since license fees are capped), which levels the playing field among the codecs. OggTheora has pretty bad video quality, compared to H. 264, so they're out. WebM seems to have a similar quality, at least at web streaming bit rates. So it comes down to "How well does the video play on my device?" And this is where WebM fails and H.264 shines - software HD video decoding is a no-go for netbooks, smartphones and a tough task for lower-end notebooks. And it's only recently that Flash - which delivers the majority of online video - supports H.264 hardware decoding. I don't know about Android, but my iPad has an amazing runtime when playing H. 264 video - I think even better battery life then reading a book in iBooks or the Kindle app (at least it felt this way on a flight to the U.S. last year). If I read it correctly yesterday, the first hardware decoder for WebM will ship in Q1 (they didn't say which), so none of the mobile devices sold so far will display WebM smoothly. Maybe the upcoming Nvidia Tegra 2 (that seems to be in most upcoming Android tablets and some smartphones) can somehow be programmed to decode WebM at least partially in the future; its specs only list H.264 hardware decoding. I think that Chrome not supporting H.264 will just mean that Chrome users will still see H.264, just through Flash. Firefox has bigger market share than Chrome and has never supported H.264, but that didn't do squat for making OggTheora or WebM (though I'm not sure if a Firefox release already officially supports WebM) more popular and got H.264 through Flash instead. The only ones that may be better of with WebM are companies that ship video decoders / encoders (consumer electronics companies, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe etc.) and that sell videos (movie studios, Hulu, wedding movie dude). And even the wedding movie dude may resist since none of his tools support WebM yet - and neither does his video camera. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
