The codec war has taken a new turn. On Tuesday, Google announced plans to remove its support for the H.264 video codec in its Chrome browser and declared that it will change its HTML5 support to open-source technologies, such as WebM and Theora. This is a major boost for WebM and VP8, a technology that Flumotion has supported from the beginning. Not only are we the only major CDN to support open formats, but just 48 hours after Google’s release of WebM and VP8 last year, our development team integrated the new open codec and format into our streaming technology.
Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager at Google, pointed out that “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.” He also stated that “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.”
Shunning H.264 isn’t new in the browser world; Mozilla and Opera already ditched the codec in favor of open standards. However, the H.264 video codec isn’t short of backers, with major vendors such as Microsoft and Apple both owning patents in the H.264/AVC patent pool. With this announcement from Google, we’ll just have to wait and see what the long term effects will be for both H.264 and WebM…
