Google statement on codecs

"We believe that legacy hardware for hardware video encode and decode acceleration should all be thrown out and everyone should embrace our new standard which has no such support"<p>Yeah, that'll fly.

Also, Ericsson, in a different thread.<p><a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg04938.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg04938...</a><p>No other companies so far, apparently.

I read the thread, no responses from Apple nor Microsoft a.t.m.<p>But considering WebRTC could potentially ruin much of Skype's business, a cynical guess would be that they won't make this easy.

So when is Google dropping H.264 in Chrome, as they indicated they would a year and a half ago? (<a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in...</a>)

The website is down, here's cache:<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&#38;newwindow=1&#38;output=search&#38;sclient=psy-ab&#38;q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ietf.org%2Fmail-archive%2Fweb%2Frtcweb%2Fcurrent%2Fmsg04953.html&#38;oq=&#38;gs_l=&#38;pbx=1&#38;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&#38;fp=7b5e0dd64d88d370&#38;biw=1366&#38;bih=667" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&#38;newwi...</a>

I could understand reasons for their support for VP8. But "superior quality" is definitely not a strength on VP8 side.

I was hoping Google would adopt Mozilla's Opus codec for audio, but I can't believe they are actually going to do it. Well done, Google!<p>Will Opus replace Vorbis in WebM as well, though?

Looks like Mozilla's talking about WebM while implementing hardware-accelerated H.264. <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=714408" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=714408</a>

I feel like the assertion that VP8 is royalty-free needs to be taken with some skepticism given that (to my knowledge) it has not been tested in court. If Google is willing to indemnify the whole Web from liability that might be created if VP8 is found to infringe patents, then I'd say, let's make that the standard. I don't think they've done this though (or even could).