There are some problems with video on the web today. The numerous video formats make things difficult for both content creators and viewers. Different video formats require different plugins, and therefore content creators are forced to choose a format and hope people will be able to play it.
For now, Adobe Flash is the closest web video comes to having one single unified standard, but unfortunately it has its own set of problems.The full version is not at all ubiquitous on mobile devices, which are becoming increasingly important. The iPhone, for example, does not have Flash. The plugin is notorious for crashing browsers, hogging CPU resources and performing poorly. Even if Adobe were to address all of these issues, placing full control of web video in the hands of a single company and their proprietary format is a bad idea.
Another format war?
What is needed for Web video is one single unified, efficient, and hardware-accelerated standard that is not under the sole control of a single company. The W3C tried to get us there by adding <audio> and <video> tags to HTML5, but was drawn into a controversy over which format to support.
Apple, Google/YouTube, and Nokia favor H.264, which is widely implemented and has hardware acceleration. Mozilla, Wikipedia, Opera, and Dailymotion favor Theora, a completely open format. Apple and Nokia fear unknown patent issues with Theora, and Google doesn’t consider it efficient enough. Theora’s supporters dislike H.264’s royalty fees. YouTube uses H.264 but not Theora, and Firefox 3.5 does the opposite.
Uncertain conclusion
Both codecs have some important proponents supporting them, but in some key areas H.264 has advantages over Theora. It’s built into commonly used video editing software, used by YouTube, and has hardware acceleration so that it works in devices like the iPhone. Microsoft has a possible conflict of interest and has yet to announce Internet Explorer support for the <audio> and <video> portions of HTML5. It’s unfortunate that standardized web video is being held back by this mess, but I hope it will eventually come to be.
See also: “Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate” by Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul.
So when are you going to update this thing? I want me some sweet tech content already.
Yeah, I’ve got a long list of topics to write about. It’s just a matter of getting around to writing a new post. I don’t actually have Internet at my apartment.