[theora] Bad news from Google

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Hannes
<theora.list at soulrebel.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> Google has just made [1] the probably largest amount of internet video
> available with HTML5 and h264. Thats really bad news. If somthing else
> doesn't happen soon, h264 will be the de-facto standard by end of the
> year.
> And they even dare say:
> "We are very excited about HTML5 as an open standard and want to be part
> of moving HTML5 forward on the web."

I don't know how this is really bad news:

Youtube already had a h264 only demo, so this is hardly a surprise.

The HTML5 support hear means that the bulk of the work to support
HTML5 Ogg/Theora is already done. To complete support for that 'all'
that would be required is the transcoding.  Youtube already supports
quite a few file formats, so they clearly have infrastructure to
support many variants in different formats.

So the only missing part appears to be a policy decision to pull the
Theora trigger and a non-trivial amount of CPU cycles/disk space for
the conversion to happen.

For all we know they'll never do it... but it's equally possible that
the transcode is currently under-way.