Opera Supports Google Decision To Drop H.264

An anonymous reader follows up to yesterday's Google announcement that they would drop H.264 support from Chrome. "Thomas Ford, Senior Communications Manager, Opera, told Muktware, 'Actually, Opera has never supported H.264. We have always chosen to support open formats like Ogg Theora and WebM. In fact, Opera was the first company to propose the tag, and when we did, we did it with Ogg. Simply put, we welcome Google's decision to rely on open codecs for HTML5 video.'"

Re:Sad news for the web

[Kjella]

Every time this comes up the meme is that they're waiting for someone with deep pockets to sue. Well, Google has extremely deep pockets. If Google can use it with impunity without getting sued, you can be sure this is nothing but patent FUD. And if Google is sued, well at least there will be a real trial on the validity of the patents. Either way there's no reason for Opera or Mozilla or anyone else not to join in as long as Google leads the flock.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[MtHuurne]

How relevant will TV, radio, Blu-ray etc be in 2020? CD sales are already being replaced by digital downloads and while a lot of people continue to listen to the radio, they often do so by streaming it over the net. I see no reason why the future would be different for video.

Re:No news here.

[afidel]

Yes, .264 is that big. It's embedded into just about every consumer electronics device that plays video. All the smartphones have hardware accelerated .264, all the settop boxes have .264, etc. It's not that these things couldn't get WebM support, its that it took 6 years of arguing in committees and standards boards to get everyone to agree on h.264 and then another 3 years or so for a significant number of products to end up on store shelves and then another couple of years before those devices became a major percentage of devices. Basically you're looking at around 10 years to go from codec to ubiquity.

Re:Sad news for the web

[lingon]

So your solution is that we should go with the 100% patent encumbered codec instead? I fail to see how this solves the problem. With WebM, at least we have the possibility of a free and open solution.

Re:I wish..

[BitZtream]

Yea, its not like the money Mozilla makes from google and other advertising that they couldn't spend a little bit of that on a license for the codec or anything.

Don't confuse personal agenda and bullshit about why someone is/isn't doing something with reality.

H.264 is dirt cheap, they most certainly could work out a licensing deal to suit Mozilla.

There is no doubt in my mind that doing so would be about 6 billion orders of magnitude more productive than most of their other retarded projects. Tell the CEO of your fanboy club to cut his bonus this year and you'll pay for h.264 licensing for the next 20 years.

Re:I wish..

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Even if they spend the money it still would not be legal. Since GPL requires that others have redistribution rights, and patent licenses violate that. Its not just the fee, its what you have to sign to pay the fee.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[TheTurtlesMoves]

JPEG has always had a royalty free version. Always. Pretty much the *only* version of the spec that is used.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Draek]

So is WebM, with the advantage that we wouldn't have to deal with shady licensing issues for the next 20 years.

H.264's only advantage is that it's the current state-of-the-art, and only a fool would believe that'd still be the case five years from now, let alone twenty.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Idbar]

Your comment assumes complete lack of evolution and support. Back in the day, when I had a 75MHz Pentium processor, have I thought the same way, I'd have said that MP3 would have choppy playback because of software decoding. (In fact I couldn't have any applications open if I wanted to play music on my computer). Yet, I bought my first CD-MP3 player and it was just fine. The fact that you currently don't have the hardware doesn't mean you won't have it. Do you remember the time when TVs, DVD and BD players came with absolutely no applications such as Hulu or Netflix?