Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

Google's assumption: People will add WebM encoding to their already complicated video workflows<p>What will actually happen: Chrome will get served h.264 wrapped in Flash.<p>Lose all round, then.

The choice has been made by many places to simply use h264 video via the HTML5 tag to hit the iPhone/iPad and then fallback to a Flash video player which can easily play the h264 source video. Content producers would rather encode videos once, which is why they moved to FLV in the first place. There's no incentive to use anything else here.<p>This hurts users. I am all for standards, but not for hurting users. And like it or not, content producers are using H264 because the devices people like to use can play that video back.

I like Gruber, but he's almost insufferable on issues like these. These questions are "simple" in the least flattering sense. Let's dispatch them:<p><i>If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why?</i><p>The premise is that openness is all or nothing. But Google can support Flash and work towards openness, just as Apple can prefer open web standards in lieu of Flash while supporting proprietary systems. There's no hypocrisy or conflict.<p><i>Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android?</i><p>Maybe in the future. WebM support is new in Android, hardware decoders are really just coming to market, and there are enough existing and in-production phones that rely on H.264. The constraints placed on Google by the handful of Chrome users leveraging H.264 HTML5 video is completely unlike the realities of dealing in the handset market.<p><i>YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”?</i><p>YouTube continues to support other proprietary formats. As with Sorenson, they're not going to drop H.264 until they don't care about the market share of H.264-only devices. In the meantime, they will try to drive people towards WebM in support of "open innovation". This is not inconsistent or even new.<p><i>Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM?</i><p>It should be obvious that Google's hope is anyone using HTML5 video will eventually move to WebM exclusively.<p><i>If not, how will Chrome users watch this content other than by resorting to Flash Player’s support for H.264 playback?</i><p>Content producers won't care if Chrome users end up in Flash, since the content's still available and very few non-mobile users are getting HTML5 video anyway. Flash is still the norm outside of mobile devices.<p><i>Who is happy about this?</i><p>Were people ecstatic that Chrome supported H.264? Most people simply don't care about this kind of stuff and for good reason.

As a person who encodes video for the web for a living I can tell you we won't be switching to WebM because of iOS and other hardware devices that have hardware based decoding.<p>H.264 is the closest thing to a ubiquitous codec there is and assuming Chrome correctly updates the "canPlayType" javascript function I won't even have to update our players to provide Chrome users with the crappy Flash player.<p>As a Chrome user, I'll be switching to Safari so I can continue to get the working HTML5 player.<p>We'll consider switching once Apple adds support for WebM and the millions of old iOS devices are obsolete. In other words it's H.264 for us for the next 3 years.

A big step backwards for HTML5 video adoption and premature IMO. Other than Android there isn't an existing consumer device out there that plays WebM that I know of. Certainly there is no hardware decoding. Now content creators who host their own video will have to double storage costs or be relegated to Flash and the smallest of the big browsers.

Chiming in as the guy who developed the blip.tv HTML5 player: This sucks, even though we were planning on supporting it in the future anyway.

People should really blame MS and Apple for only supporting their own video codec here. I am fully behind the decision of Mozilla, Opera, Google and others to support open and patent unencumbered video formats.<p>Can someone just look at the table at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video</a> and really tell me that this mess isn't the fault of MS and Apple in the first place? Ogg is ready to play a big role and WebM is catching up. The only blocking factor here is Internet Explorer and Safari, not Chrome.

Fantastic. Much as I enjoyed Burn All GIFs back in the day, I don't think Burn All H.264s sounds nearly as catchy or fun. Glad Google is doing the Right Thing on this front -- however convenient or entrenched they might be, hairy patented messes like H.264 have no place on an open web.

I'm looking forward to Google remaining consistent with their words and removing Flash from Chrome in the near future.<p>You know, for the good of the users.

I dont think the open web is up for compromise, I was happy to see mozilla take a stand on h264, glad to see google follow suit.<p>Sure this hurts users in the short term, but a single standard format has not been settled on, this could be much more disruptive if google had of left it in

I'm kinda tired of this Google openness, especially when it so congenially damage their competitors. It would have been different if they never implemented it in first place, but this now it just looks like a move to target Apple.

One of the biggest criticisms against Microsoft over the years is that they suffer from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.<p>Is it just me, or does Google seem to be increasingly heading down this path? Granted, Google tends to go down the open-source route, where Microsoft has tended not to, but I'm not sure that excuse holds up well over the long-term.<p>Either way, I'm genuinely curious if anyone else feels this.

Go easy on me, this is my first comment on HN.<p>I see couple of other things, apart from free and royalty side of arguments. My story goes like this:<p>when Apple released iOS device in 2007, H264 was the better choice for mobiles with hardware decoders. Google converted Youtube videos to H264 to support iOS devices. Rest of the world followed. Both Apple and Google wins and they are happy to promote H264 for the wider adoption.<p>Then after three years, a different competitive landscape, with Android popularity even without H264 hardware decoders advantage, at the same time Apple support to H264 but not to flash, gives big strategic advantage to Goolge to move world away from H264 to its own alternative (openness helps the cause). Win to Google, Lose to Apple.<p>Its not important anymore which desktop browser support what. We can work with multiple browsers on our desktops/laptops. Its all about to whose advantage it plays out in mobile devices space.<p>That is why we will see lot of FUD in future in this space while Google and Apple fight for their interests in name of openness.

What the hell? It's sad that Google's corporate strategy is starting to override what's in the best interests of it's users. Web video is finally, after so many years, actually encoded in H.264. Who besides YouTube uses WebM or Ogg? I'll be going back to Safari if this happens.

I thought Chrome came bundled with Flash Player <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/25/google-chrome-flash/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/25/google-chrome-flash/</a><p>...which supports H.264 in an MP4 container...<p><a href="http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html" rel="nofollow">http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html</a><p>....so I'm not clear on what's actually happening here. Is Chrome going to just stop handing off MP4/H.264 from video tags to the bundled Flash Player even though it's there and can play it? Or will it stop bundling Flash Player? Or bundle a crippled Flash Player? None of the above?

This makes &#60;video&#62; about as useful as &#60;audio&#62; now.

So in the near future to use the &#60;video&#62; tag, you'll need an H.264 file for IE and Safari, OGG for Firefox and, WebM for Chrome.

The message is that Google is serious about making VP8 competitive. It won't be removing H.264 support from Android and YouTube anytime soon, but this certainly changes the HTML5 video codec battle.

The biggest H264 supporter is Apple, and it kind of worked because Apple has leverage in the iPhone arena. I don't think Google has quite the same leverage in the browser arena. If this happened at the WebKit level, then maybe. But not at the Chrome level.

So H.264 isn't "open web" ... but Flash is?<p>Google has such an arbitrary definition of open.

I don't see much benefit to support HTML5 in webm or theora. One of the benefits of html5 over flash was the prospect of better resource handling and smooth play, but now as systems get faster, and flash better, there is less and less reason to go down this path. h264 is smooth enough in flash now, and it's about to get even better in the new flash release.<p>There are no real hardware/product reasons for websites to support webm right now.<p>h264 on the other hand gets the benefit of working with all the iphone and more recently apple tv. Promised new update this year will even allow HTML5 video to be streamed to apple TV directly from the browser of iphones, ipads, and i imagine safari. This is one of these technologies that will really increase the use of h264.<p>I run the larges cycling site and we handle 100s of niche video uploads per day so I follow this closely, and as much as I'd like to jump on webm, I'm going to definitely hold of. Currently we convert videos to 3 formats to try handle all cases, and having to now multiply that by 2 with another codec is a lot of extra resources.<p>2.5 mbit h264 web HD/appletv h264 1 mbit h264 for web SD/iphone 300 kbit mobile<p>- webm makes no sense in the short term. - you need apple support to make webm happen faster<p>Think about all the extra resources, time, effort that you are asking from companies in the world to support the 2 formats. If you want to be efficient with society, keep the support of h264 while webm development happens, transition once all the big players support the new format. Alternatively take all the money/time/efforts and get apple to transition. If apple does not jump on the wagon, it's going to be years and years of wasted resources in society.

It's all well and good to focus future effort on alternative technologies that you have a preference for.<p>But to remove a feature you currently support that works well...that's a poor decision that doesn't help your users or the web in general.

I think this is bad for HTML 5 video in the short run, but I do not care about it anymore, I wished that everyone supported Theora, and then switched to Dirac in the future, but Apple and Google made me give up of my hopes.<p>However in the long run I think this will be an example of 'worse is better' happening, I think WebM will win over H.264. If that is bad or no that's depend on how do you see Apple and Google, if you believe this post contain a good message or if you believe Gruber but not both, for me both are just false in their pretense of openness, which is why I supported Theora in the first place.<p>Theora vs. H.264 was the first big fight that I remember in HN were the majority of comments were just bullshit for me (just like this thread), although there were really good ones from both sides, I also commented in the matter, back then I said that codecs would grow in irrelevance, I belive that H.264, as a patent covered standard, will lose in the future because its licensing terms are not clear and a license for its use can be pretty expensive to people trying to win some money from web video, specially those that have no money initially to spend in royalties (like startups, open source and non commercial projects), my example back them was a cloudy video editor, maybe something that is impractical today, but that I do expect becoming at least practical for simple uses in 2 to 3 years from now.<p>For this type of user paying for royalties in the beginning just does not make any sense and is stressful for their financial situation, this if they want to win money with their project, it's even more complicated for open source projects, for the case that people want to win some money from their company or project a good comparison would be the college student that take loans, trying to make some potential money in the future while spending money that he does not have in the present.<p>I think that WebM will have the preference of this public if they are not aiming Apple products. For me this will happen just because MPEG LA was incompetent enough and did not knew how to deal with the situation, opening the standard to small business, not charging users and business that only stream the using codec, things like that that the consortium never clarified (they never defined the "broadcast market" from which they plan to charge royalties from).<p>More could be said about why I think H.264 will be a thing of the past in the following years, but them my comment would be too big.

I actually see lack of H.264 support as more of a blow for those desktop browsers than anything else. With both Firefox and Chrome on the desktop refusing to support the video codec preferred by most (non-PC) device vendors, and both mobile browsing and video usage on the web dramatically increasing, I can't see this having any long-term effect other than marginalizing these browsers for the majority of users. Users who just want to visit a video site and have it work equally well on any device they happen to be using.<p>H.264 is royalty-free for at least the next 5 years, has widespread hardware encoding and decoding support and its patents will eventually expire. Removal of this codec from Chrome just doesn't make any sense to me. I'm sure all those people who have recently switched to Chrome won't find it too hard to switch away if the "more open" video support starting burning through their laptop battery three times as fast.

Don't like it? Branch Chromium and retain H.264 support.<p>First customer here.

So are we going to get third party Chrome distributions that backport the missing H.264 functionality?

And exactly who does this end up helping? I'm all for open formats, but I'm more for compatibility.

Must be part of the long game by Google. Stop supporting h.264 and push their own format in their browser, which also means ChromeOS and GoogleTV.<p>The format will need hardware because it is so difficult to decode with software.<p>Google gets hardware support on their laptops and mobile devices, changes YouTube to be WebM only, forcing Apple/Windows/Nokia/SonyEricsson to need hardware to decode.<p>Consumer loses out (the video quality of this, and the image quality of their image format is not exactly what should be expected to be released in a new format for 2011).

I'm sort of happy that Google is doing this. I'm not always happy with google and what they do - not being evil sure as hell doesn't make you a good guy - but if there's another bunch of guys who aren't on the 'good' side, it's MPEG. I really would like to see the HTML &#60;video&#62; tag evolve in a way that doesn't require an MPEG technology.<p>HOWEVER, I'd like to raise a couple of points.<p>One is that the x264 devs, easily some of the most codec-knowledgeable people in the world, have raised questions about VP8's patent exposure. It's fair to say that On2 didn't have to worry about getting sued over implementation details of VP8 as long as its design was hidden and proprietary, but I'm quite confident that google is going to get shaken down over webm, a lot like Microsoft did with VC1. Unlike Microsoft and VC1, Google will settle and license the patents in question, with indemnification for webm users, because webm is more important to them than VC1 was to MS. But it's going to cost them.<p>Second, anyone serving video now has a nice low-resistance path that means encoding exclusively in h264 - served up via the html5 &#60;video&#62; tag for iPhone and newer browsers, and served up inside flv with a flash plugin for older browsers. H264 isn't going to go away anytime soon, so google wants everyone to start encoding 2x now - with h264 and VP8. Or I guess you can just start using YouTube...?

I'm the go-to guy in my office for html5 video(audio) and this just made my job that much harder. Shit, today I just found out that our videos arent playing on android devices now this

Reminds me of "embrace, extend, extinguish".<p>BTW, will it be possible to enable it back with an extension? I don't really want to stop using Chrome because of this.

A very bad decision.<p>First, H.264 != VP8/WebM. WebM is roughly equivalent to H.264 Baseline Profile and can't get the quality/compression of even H.264 Main Profile. I won't even mention H.264 High Profile, which is crucial for HD content.<p>Second, there is no hardware support for decoding VP8 right now, while there is for H.264. Which means that if publishers indeed start dropping H.264 (which I hope won't happen), we'll get stuck for years with mobile devices that get poor battery life. Instead, we'll get promises of Great Things "just around the corner, in a couple of months". That's similar to the perpetual cycle of great, smoothly working Android devices which always exist in the future tense.<p>Third, no one knows if VP8/WebM is immune from patents. It most likely isn't, it's just that nobody has laid claims yet. Most modern video processing techniques are patented in some way and sticking fingers in your ears won't make those patents magically go away.

Looks like Mozilla wins this one.

Sad move, the web take years to more or less standardize on H264. Ain't WebM an inferior alternative at the moment? The reason cited "our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.", so we can expect Flash to be removed as well? I can see next up in the horizon: YouTube to remove H264 support.

This is not an issue. We currently face the same inefficiency of having to encode videos in multiple codecs today. Want your vid on iOS? H.264. Want your vid on other platforms? Pretty open. What's the issue? Just some inefficiency. It means that all videos have to be encoded in a few formats in the backend and a browser detector to tell our server which video to play. As long as the end user isn't harmed I don't see the big deal with Google supporting Google's own format (that they have opened up with a protected royalty-free format).<p>As it is right now there are probably several elements toyour site that require different rendering depending on the browser (IE6 I'm glaring at you).

Descriptivists and Prescriptivists<p><a href="http://jacobian.org/writing/descriptivists-and-prescriptivists/" rel="nofollow">http://jacobian.org/writing/descriptivists-and-prescriptivis...</a>

Shouldn't video codecs be done as plugins in browsers anyway?<p>Give us the tags to support it but leave it up to a plugin.<p>I know that multiple developers can focus on different parts of a browser's codebase at once, but it still doesn't make sense to me that a browser codebase should maintain a video codec as advanced as H.264 which constantly has room for performance/quality improvement.

O great now its back to flash.<p>Pretty shitty move by google.

What I get from here:<p>They have a codec that performs like this other one, but open for everybody to use without paying royalties. They have an agreement with most browsers to support this codec. None of the other browsers want to pay royalties for these codecs.<p>Well... the plan is clear

As a content producer, this upsets me. I would only consider WebM if it is superior to h.264. But either way I'm having second thoughts about using Chrome and Youtube if they really nix h.264. Google thinks they are bigger than they really are.

Does anybody know if it is possible to disable Chrome's automatic updates so that one can pin their version of chrome to the last release that supported H.264?<p>Edit: found it...<p><pre><code> defaults write com.google.Keystone.Agent checkInterval 0</code></pre>

1. I've now switched back from Chrome to Safari. 2. I'm glad that I made the decision to switch my organizations web videos from Akamai to Vimeo &#38; not Youtube. 3. Google is the new Microsoft.

Long live Flash video?

so is Google going to re-encode all their Youtube content to WebM videos now? and i wonder if Android will continue to play h.264 videos or not.

ATTENTION GOOGLE! Flash is not open! Not only does Chrome support Flash, it ships with embedded Flash plugin! What a hypocrite!

Just switched back to Safari.<p>Sorry google, but I own an iPad. :(

It can´t be all about freedom if they´re dropping Theora too. (related: how can Theora be so bad is Vorbis is so good?)

This is very annoying their player is already terrible.

Google is starting to remind me more of Microsoft every day. But at least Microsoft doesn't make their anti-competitive strategic decisions under the guise of being "open" and "not evil".

This is a great move...<p>Mpeg-LA has been bullying everyone for too long...

Has everyone so quickly forgotten that Flash will soon support WebM playback? It's a significant point in the discussion. With any flash capable browser having WebM support, along with native support in Firefox, Chrome, Opera... it seems there is some sense in this move.<p>It does seem a bold strategy, I would have probably waited at least a bit longer.<p>Edit: Oh, "These changes will occur in the next couple months"

Next move, suddenly youtube stops encoding in h.264 and youtube won't be able to be played on the iPad.<p>And Android tablets look a LOT better.

Interesting. YouTube must be a mess with all of these competing formats it needs to support. I assume it will eventually switch to WebM for both HTML5 and Flash by default and just use h264 for compatibility. Still, it must be horrific.

Phone me when Youtube only supports WebM, this is just a PR stand.

Bye bye, Google Chrome. This is me deleting you from my Mac.