2011 is shaping up to be the year that Google stops being the golden child and starts stepping on toes.
Google announced via the Google Chrome blog that they’re dropping H.264 support in order to push their open-sourced WebM format. Which is a good thing for the open-source community, right?
No. H.264 is the most widely-used codec on the internet*. It was part of the HTML5 standard, so that the <video> tag could be used universally to make playback simple. Every podcast that I watch regularly, be it from Revision3, TWiT, CNET, or other, is encoded in H.264.
I mean, I’ve spent years encoding my video library in H.264. I have no doubt that it’s the absolute best video codec around.
Sure, I’d love for the standard to be open-source. And if WebM wins, I won’t complain. But I just wish it was nice and simple: for music/audio you go with MP3, for video you go with H.264. No “codec wars,” no over-complicating everything. That would be great.
But not everyone agrees on the same format, and that’s okay. The problem that I have is when a company, like Google, decides to throw away a common codec that nearly everyone uses in order to push their own “standard,” be it open-source or not. As for as I see it, it’s just Google pushing their own format and limiting the options for their users (a non-open-source ideal), and the only thing that this can do is make it more difficult for content creators. I think it will dampen the creativity on the internet and only make it more confusing for most users. I can’t see people wanting to encode/publish two versions of their videos. This is not the way to establish an HTML5 standard; in fact, it seems like a great way to increase the need/usage of closed-source Flash.
*this is a made-up statistic. My short trek through the Google failed to confirm that statistic’s validity.