HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web January 22, 2010 in Long Attention Span <http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/category/long-attention-span/>, Standards <http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/category/standards/>, Video <http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/category/video/> | 35 comments <http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what-history-...> /For background on the free software angle on this story please check out Robert O’Callahan’s post <http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html> on this topic. Also check out Mike Shaver’s shorter background post <http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/> as well. This post differs from theirs in that I want to talk about network effects, why codecs should be considered a fundamental web technology and what the long-term effects of the choices at this inflection point might look like./ Recently Youtube announced <http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/introducing-youtube-html5-support...> 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 <http://vimeo.com/blog:268> 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 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264> to be able to view them. These codecs aren’t compatible with the royalty-free web standards that the rest of the web is built on. The fact that they are being so unabashedly hyped along with the new darling of the web – HTML5 – means that most people don’t understand that something very dangerous is taking place behind the scenes. If you think that this isn’t an issue that’s worth worrying about you need to read the rest of this post. In particular the history of GIF shows us what happens when patented technologies are used on the web and what happens when network effects over-run the natural drive to royalty-free technologies at scale. MP3 pricing gives us a glimpse into the strategy around H.264 licensing and what the landscape might look like 5 years from now, assuming H.264 were baked into the web platform as a requirement. I’ll also talk about other options that might be coming in the near future that most people don’t know about.è [...] Continua qui: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what-history-...