The Windows Blog

Great news from Microsoft:

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

In the post the Author, Dean Hachamovitch, reiterates the company line regarding HTML5: “we’re all in,” but this is not a surprising development at all. H.264 is the de-facto standard for mobile web video. Microsoft doesn’t control H.264, and Apple is the pubic face of the codec. It is in Microsoft’s best interests if H.264 has some (serious) competition. It just so happens that it’s in all of our best interests, too.

On2’s VP8 Page

A demo or two, and some more information on a codec we’ll be hearing a lot about for awhile. They’ve got some big claims on decode speed, and say that they’ve paid special attention to the ARM processor- the same processor used in the iPhone. While that’s nice, I wouldn’t hold my breath for software decoding of VP8 on iPhone.

It looks like the On2 pages haven’t been updated in quite some time, though, so this information could be outdated. I imagine Google will have it’s own tech page shortly.

Microsoft Promises HTML5 <video> Support in IE9

Which for them means H.264, apparently, and no Ogg support. I’m glad to see the IE team getting on board, but I wish Ogg was a more viable option for authoring web video.

As it stands, it’s really not worth authoring two formats of video (Ogg and H.264) if you’re aiming at accommodating the most people for the least effort/space. I imagine most places will author an H.264 version and a Flash or Silverlight version, just based on usage.

MPEGLA Announces H.264 To Remain Royalty-Free (For Free Content) Until 2016

This is a good thing, for now, but licensing-wise H.264 is actually probably worse than Flash. It works great with a hardware decoder, but why should I trust the MPEGLA to not pull the rug out from under the internet in 6 years? Of note: The 2016 deadline only applies to “Internet Video that is Free to End Users.” Who gets to define “free?”

The press release should’ve been subtitled “Your Move, Adobe.”