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Comment by HerrMonnezza | Hacker News Reader

I can play it on Debian with Firefox, no problems.

Give these phones a break, it's ok for a prototype not to support every format under the sun, even the more mainstream ones. Your comparison with Debian, a well-finished product which gets a lot of money and dedicated human resources to be made polished as hell is a bit unfair.

Keep in mind WebM is only a decade old, it takes time to support a patent-free video format that has readily available implementations, including BSD-licensed software ones. I'm sure Apple will support WebM when they find some money and finally manage to bring iPhones out of beta. Not every small phone producer making it is as big as Debian.

Anyway, if the default browser does not support something it should be easy to install an alternative browser, dumb phones from fifteen years ago had this ability (remember Opera Mobile?) and I hear iPhones are a bit more advanced so I'd expect them to let you do that. What kind of web-capable half-modern device wouldn't anyway.

You are right - Apple should bend the knee and support everything Google shoves into the web without question, just like Mozilla. That's working very well for them.

Come on, I don't like Google and their control on the web. I go out of my way to avoid them. But we cannot blame them for providing us with a decent video codec for which you don't need to pay patent fees. That was truly missing at the time. We had Theora but it is far from being as good. We needed a good open video format at the time.

Apple is holding back on WebM support arguably because it has interests in forcing people to keep using patent-encumbered codecs from the MPEG-LA. They did nothing for pushing an open video format for the web, quite the contrary. They are still fighting against this. Apple is the one deserving to be pointed the finger at. Let's not divert the blame here. I hate Google but we should recognize the rare good things they occasionally do.

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