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Comment by marbletiles | Hacker News Reader

The content is all in h.264 because it works in 99.9999% of places. You can make every browser support webM tomorrow and that still wouldn't be a compelling reason for publishers to add WebM in favour of the status quo.

The only thing that could achieve such a thing would be a device with iOS levels of popularity that a) doesn't support h.264 b) doesn't support Flash. Who is going to make such a device? A: Nobody, because it won't support any web video at all apart from maybe YouTube.

You can grouse about open principles all you want, but the big video producers don't care; they will not be a factor. Audience demand is the only thing that matters, and they won't demand WebM when h.264 is already working "fine".

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Android if not today will be more popular device than iOS soon. I was thinking the combination of Android + Chrome would be enough to motivate publishers to encode using Webm?

See my point below: it has to only support WebM, and they're not brave enough to do that against iPhone, esp if they had to kill the Flash support we've heard so much about.

I'm not yet aware of an Android device which supports WebM hardware decoding. Virtually all of them support H.264 hardware decoding.

This is not an iOS vs Android argument (though many have tried to make it so), all of the current devices chose H.264 as their primary codec because when they were being designed and developed that was the only logical choice.

Google switches youtube to WebM and people will want WebM in their browser, they may even be prepared to switch to chrome if it's the only thing that can view WebM easily.

When Google decides to take the internet TV business away from people like Netflix - remember they are an advertising company - they want their own codec to avoid any arguments.

Yes, YouTube would have to switch to WebM -- ie no support for serving any other codec -- for that to be true. Which is effectively turning off YouTube for every browser and device on the web today.

Are they going to do that? No chance. Some day, maybe, but they're not going to lead the way.

And while YouTube is still additionally serving h.264, there's still no pressure for everybody else to change.

They may also turn 480p and higher to be webm only; effectively making h.264 low quality, intended only for "legacy mobile devices".

There is a strategy in the middle however for google/youtube to make people want to migrate to browsers and devices that supports webm/vp8: all they have to do is to continue serving both webm and h264 versions, but make the h264 version a worst experience.

For example: make all h264 encoded clips on youtube become grayscale while mantainig the vp8 ones high quality and in color. People would not be prevented from watching youtube on iDevices, but watching it on those devices would be like watching an old black and white tv :)

And when people start flooding apple feedback and support channels with "why my youtube lost its colors on my ipad?" questions, then maybe Apple can add vp8 support on iOS.

Don't forget that more and more video content will be available on iPad from ITMS. And I assure you, it won't be grayscale, and it won't eat as much battery as WebM without hardware support.

Yep, Apple could be the provider of the devices that can play everything! Both the paid, hardware accelerated, hollywood/DRM-ed stuff from ITMS and the free amateur/amazing content of youtube(hopefully harware accelerated eventually too).

Apple supporting both vp8 and h264 would continue to be the company with the best mobile devices, but if they don't embrace the open unemcumbered format that firefox, opera, chrome and youtube uses they will be giving an either/or kind of choice for mobile consumers, they would be making them choose between hollywood and youtube, stating that their costumers cant have both.

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