Chrome H.264 video decision a vaccination against license trap

[ Thanks to Amy Bennett for this link. ]

"Yesterday's announcement that Google would be dropping built-in support for the H.264 video codec in the HTML5 video tag caused quite a stir in the open source and browser sectors, with many people lining up to either praise Google or deride them for the decision.

"The derision basically goes like this: H.264, which is already supported in Internet Explorer and Safari, is a widely used codec for HTML5 video playback, while WebM and Theora are not. Why would Google drop support for a perfectly good, widely deployed, and essentially free codec in favor of video support that is perfectly good and not as widely deployed, just to foster more openness on the Web? And why is it that such an open friendly move is being implemented in a browser that will still continue to support Adobe Flash--which is decidedly not open--for video playback?"

Complete Story

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