|
A quick tutorial for those not in the industry...
h264 is a video codec owned by the MPEG group.. it is NOT open source... Adobe licensed the technology years ago and integrated it into FLASH... which is the NUMBER ONE reason h264 is so popular...
Now, let's switch gears .. MS has Internet Explorer, Apple has Safari... both companies are members of MPEG LA and license h264... On the other side are the supporters of open source Mozilla Firefox and Opera... they do not have licenses and therefore support the open source alternative Ogg Theora video.
Now here is where it gets wierd... Google Chrome supports BOTH formats... and to make it even wierder... Google bought On2 Technologies... a company that makes video codecs... they made the original Theora (then called VP3) and it's likely that next month Google will release the VP8 codec as open source... if they do so... the debate over which codec will be implemented in html5 will heat back up.
This issue is far from as settled as Jobs seems to indicate... Apple and Microsoft are setting themselves up against the open source community .. it will all come down to Google, in my opinion. If they release VP8 AND switch youtube over to VP8 AND throw their weight behind it as the html5 standard... then Apple and Microsoft are screwed unless they follow along.
As I have stated many times... this thing is a mess and far from being resolved.
|