Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 19, 2011. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Even though some measure slower conversion, the WebM codec is equal or superior to H.264 in most relevant areas. But that is not why Google decided to say goodbye to H.264 in one of the next versions of the Chrome browser (the only browser recording actual growth rates, while Safari, Opera and various Internet Explorer incarnations lose market share).
The WebM codec is a container format based on VP8 that uses Ogg Theora, among other things, and will be linked and embedded using the /video/ tag in the coming HTML5 wave. So that Chrome is not the only browser to handle the codec, Google will provide plug-ins for IE9, Safari and Firefox, and will probably begin converting YouTube videos later this year.
Google wants to advance open technologies in this way, as H.264 will not enter the open-source pool until at least 2028 because of ongoing patents. The claim that the resulting licence fees would drive Google to switch is not tenable, however, because those fees are capped at 6.5 million US dollars per year (petty cash for Google).
In the long term, Google will simply advance open technologies – especially since the change merely gives Adobe’s Flash format a brief advantage, while otherwise neither the relevant major developers such as Microsoft or Google nor the major browsers such as Firefox, IE, Opera or Chrome face immediate disadvantages, and even fringe phenomena in the developer scene such as Apple are likely to have problems with the switch only if they resist the current.
