[ 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?”