WebM

So I found out about this thing, today. Seems like something pretty neat, and especially good that it's backed by Google. Seems they just want to push Flash video out of existence, which I can surely agree with, seeing as I have an iphone which lacks flash and soon to get a Pandora, which will also lack flash and I also use Linux, which has slow, crashy flash.

The thing I'm worried about is if it's really competitive with H.264 for quality and if more sites will be willing to pick it up. I'm also worried about browsers picking up support. Support for HTML5 video in Linux, simply put, sucks. Most of the browsers rely on external libraries and codecs, which brings you to the same issues as before people adopted flash for video. Only recently does Opera support it, and only with a very very new snapshot, which still requires a very new version of Gstreamer. Of course, in the future these problems will be fixed, but I'd rather they do like HTML5's video intended; have the decoder built in to the browser so it'll just work out of the box no matter the implementation. The way Firefox does Theora is pretty good, and they're probably going to pick up VP8 pretty soon, though. Opera and Chrome just need to play catch up.

Anyway, I hope this all works out well, and the majority of people switch away from Flash videos on their sites. The only situations where I could see it not happening are things like Hulu or Netflix where they want DRM, but they can go fuck themselves, especially netflix.

So I did some more research and found this which is a rather disappointing look at the VP8 spec and codec. It seems that there're still potential patent issues with respect to the spec itself and that even with those issues, it still falls very short of the competing proprietary codec. I don't know much about video encoding and all that, but I figured google would be able to do much better than that.

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