[theora] Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video

[Christopher Blizzard]

On 4/12/2010 6:43 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> Google might add VP8 to YouTube, but they sure as hell won't remove
> H.264 from YouTube. Thus, Apple and Microsoft won't care - in
> particular Apple's devices will continue to play those formats.
>
>    

It also depends on which H.264 you're talking about.  I believe that the 
iPhone supports only baseline (Eric C, whom I believe is on this mailing 
list, can confirm that) and I think that the iPad now supports the Main 
profile.  Each of these are somewhat limited on size and profile so 
supporting H.264 is fine, because it's just H.264 at lower quality than 
what you will find with other codecs.  The idea that you can have a 
single H.264 encode and it's supported everywhere is a lie, unless you 
want small + baseline, which is basically the same quality as Theora at 
what I suspect is a much higher computational cost.

Youtube also ships out a lot of H.263 for mobile devices, turns out.

--Chris