Why Mozilla will support H.264 on OS that comes with it

H.264 is arguably more open than WebM. It has been developed by standards committees over the course of many years, is published and backed by ITU, ISO, IEC and MPEG. A massive number of devices support it, there are loads of independent implementations, it is well documented and understood. It has been blessed as the standard codec in many media formats (BluRay, HD DVD) and for broadcast (ATB, DVB, etc) and is one of the most common video formats on the web today.<p>WebM was originally a proprietary codec called VP8, developed by a single vendor (On2 Technologies) with a single implementation and no real specification. It was purchased by Google, and an ersatz specification was extracted from the implementation.<p>I admire Google for what they are trying to achieve. But given both Windows and Mac ship with H.264 decoding support, and it is fast becoming the de facto format for mobile, the decision seems to be a no brainer.

Money quote:<p>&#62; Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives.<p>Mozilla fought the good fight, and lost. Instead of standing on a street corner with a bullhorn, Mozilla is going to move on to fight the next battle. Those would be WebRTC and Google/Netflix's Web DRM initiative.

To put it more simply, what is the greater threat to the open web: platform-dependent mobile apps or patent-encumbered video codecs?

Any guesses on the minimum number of (known!) patents that must be violated to implement an H.264 decoder? I assume the answer must be greater than zero, otherwise someone would have written an clever/convoluted H.264 decoder that sidesteps known patent issues.

Mozilla's browser usage statistics show mobile devices at almost 2x desktop browser usage next year yet stats available here show mobile as about 10% of the market: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Historical_usage_share" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#His...</a><p>Which of these is right?

Didn't H.264 become free forever on the Web due to fear of competition from WebM? Doesn't sound like a total loss.

I hope they also support ffmpeg libraries on linux to do the same thing. (libavcodec and libavformat)<p>It would be really nice to have VDPAU video playback in the browser!

So, will there be a European/free-world build for Linux/XP Firefox?

At the end of 2010 I think the war of H.264 was reignited and I am surprise that this time by Google.But still H.264 has some big advantages such as such as it supports efficient hardware acceleration and its also an efficient decoder of the browser.