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Comment by marshray | Hacker News Reader

WebM is an inferior codec to h264.

One of the most important properties of my media formats is it's accessiblility.

The fact that h264 is heavily patented by these creeps makes it inferior for my purposes by a large measure.

What business wouldn't pay a slight file-size penalty (to maintain the same quality) in order avoid being bound to some per-seat licensing agreement with all its associated administrative and reporting obligations?

Drive space is most-rapidly-decreasing cost in the world and bandwidth isn't too bad either. Patents take twenty years to expire. Do the math.

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"One of the most important properties of my media formats is it's accessiblility."

Great! H264 is what you want then. It's not only supported, but also hardware accelerated, on most devices out there. WebM isn't, and won't be for a long time.

"What business wouldn't pay a slight file-size penalty (to maintain the same quality) in order avoid being bound to some per-seat licensing agreement with all its associated administrative and reporting obligations?"

Every business that would rather pay royalty fees than for extra bandwidth required by a shitty codec. You probably also want the majority of your customers to actually be able to view your content. So there's also that "minor" inconvenience. But aside from that, what business wouldn't go the WebM route, right? :P

"Do the math."

Actually, I'll let you do it.

Every business that would rather pay royalty fees than for extra bandwidth required by a shitty codec.

Seriously, how much of a bandwidth increase are you alleging for a similar quality?

Great! H264 is what you want then. It's not only supported, but also hardware accelerated, on most devices out there. WebM isn't, and won't be for a long time.[...]You probably also want the majority of your customers to actually be able to view your content. So there's also that "minor" inconvenience.

Device adoption is certainly a good point. Based on the viewing habits I see of the kids, over the long term I'd bet on whatever YouTube is moving to over whatever remnants of IP the old television industry is trying to keep restricted.

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