Star Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Jul 2009 18:51 UTC, submitted by snydeq
Internet & Networking We here at OSNews have taken somewhat of an interest in the new HTML5 video and audio tags, which should - some day - make embedding audio and video material into web pages as easy and straightforward as embedding images, allowing the web to finally remove the shackles of dreadful Flash video. Sadly, the problem with these new tags are the codecs; as it turns out, browser makers have not reached an agreement about what codecs to choose for video, with mostly Apple throwing a spanner in the works, and Microsoft shining in absence.
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kragil
Member since:
2006-01-04

Hmm, Google cares for money. And youtube already costs them like 0.5 billion a year. Mostly bandwith I guess.
Ogg Theora is 15% bigger than mp4.

That is a lot of cash.

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Kroc Member since:
2005-11-10

YouTube did not get where it is based on quality. Google are being a snooty Vimeo wannabe. If they switched everything to OGG over night, the punters would never notice.

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jemmjemm Member since:
2007-08-06

The quality of most source material is terrible enough - so Theora and mp4 at the same bitrate would look totally similar.

Resource-wise probably the biggest hurdle for Google/Youtube is the need to re-encode all archive to Theora.

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Beta Member since:
2005-07-06

Hmm, Google cares for money. And youtube already costs them like 0.5 billion a year.

How much does h264 licensing cost for serving that content? Are Google big enough to not have to pay?

What about an upstart video hoster, can they afford MPEG-LA fees?

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lemur2 Member since:
2007-02-17

Hmm, Google cares for money. And youtube already costs them like 0.5 billion a year. Mostly bandwith I guess. Ogg Theora is 15% bigger than mp4. That is a lot of cash.


From 2011 onwards, the owners of the H264 patent have stated that they will charge a fee for transmissions of h264-encoded video streams.

For digital TV stations and websites that have the odd video file here and there, that won't amount to much, but for a video website like YouTube this will cost a lot more than bandwidth.

Besides, your data is out of date. The Theora encoder is improving apace, and has almost caught up with H264. Besides, most of the existing video files on a site like YouTube are actually encoded in h263, and Theora uses currently LESS bandwidth that h263 for the same quality.

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Lennie Member since:
2007-09-22

Those bandwidth costs have calculated the wrong way, have a look at this:

http://www.ramprate.com/pdf/RRMarketCommentary-GoogleandYouTube.pdf

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 1