HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web

“Recently Youtube announced that you could test out an
HTML5-enabled version of their site. They said that they were doing
this partially based on people’s “number one
request” that Youtube do more with HTML5. (They left out the
other half of that #1 request – that the implementation be
based on open codecs, but more on that later.) Not to be outdone,
Vimeo rushed to announce a beta version of their player based on
their site that claims HTML5 support as well.

“To be clear, this is great news. This is just the latest in a
long string of changes for video on the web. We started with a raw
“player” delivered by Real Media. Then on to media
embedded directly in pages via Windows Media + Quicktime. More
recently video on the web has been a a platform play by Flash. And
finally to a place where media becomes a first class citizen on the
web without a single source provider. These moves by Google and
Vimeo (and before either of them, DailyMotion) show that things are
changing for the better, and faster than I think anyone could have
imagined.

“The players from Google and Vimeo do present a pretty serious
problem, though. Each of these require a proprietary H.264 codec to
be able to view them.”

Complete Story