[theora] Bad news from Google

[Basil Mohamed Gohar]

On 01/21/2010 12:06 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 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.
>   
This move is basically about bringing Chrome to the forefront of web
browsers by making it the most compatible browser with YouTube and not
needing a 3rd-party (e.g., Adobe).  I think H.264 was chosen not
necessarily to exclude but more as a factor that that is what the videos
are available in now.  It's been a while since I've seen a video on YT
that wasn't already in H.264.

Soon it will basically be ridiculous to use Google services without
Chrome because the user experience will likely be quite degraded.  At
least, this is what I am thinking this is about.