H264 has been the bratty high school cheerleader for a while now; it’s popular just because it is. It produces very small compact file sizes (no one likes a fat cheer leader) and it doesn’t compromise on quality (no one likes an ugly cheer leader either). Like any popular cheerleader, this codec also comes with a trust fund and some very over protective parents. Okay the analogy is starting to get silly now.
The H264 codec is patent protected which means a lot of money has to be paid to the owner/creator whenever it’s used. At the moment the person paying that money is the browser owner, Microsoft and Google. They can easily afford this and Microsoft are happy to pay it (because no one else can and it therefore keeps the market under their dominance). This might not affect you now but what happens when all of a sudden you’re the one who’s expected to pay for the right to upload or even watch a video?
Google decided to stand up and say enough is enough, the internet should be free and available for anyone to use and strangling it with this patent protected codec is limiting this so they went in search of a solution.
WebM is the overall shiny new format Google brought last year in their attempt to tell H264 what it can do with its patent protection. The WebM container holds the VP8 codec inside it which is the actual technology that compresses and then decompresses your video file. It produces a sensible sized file (something the old free one Theora always struggled with) and results in a good quality video format.
Of course video would suck without the audio to accompany the visual so you’ve got the Vorbis codec too which does the same compression/decompression magic with the sound as the VP8 visual codec does.
The problem from Apple’s point of view is that they’ve spent a lot of time and money dominating the world with the iPhones, iPods and iPads (and anything else mobile web related that you can put an ‘i’ in front of).
Although they’re not actively trying to screw the little guy over in quite the same spectacular way that Microsoft is, they still can’t realistically afford to support VP8. They’ve put all their eggs in the tech basket marked ‘H264’. It would involve too many updates and modifications going out to their millions of existing devices all over the world to jump on the VP8 bandwagon.
Firefox funnily enough are supporting VP8. They may be big names when it comes to the internet but their pockets are no where near deep enough to afford to pay royalties every time someone downloads one of their browsers.
There’s no way they’d be able to afford it if H264 became dominant to the point they could charge even more money. Also they are one of the most popular browsers on the web and so quality is still very important to them. These two reasons mean they’re team ‘VP8’.
Of course now no one’s happy because we’ve actually got a choice, it was easy before, if we wanted good quality and nice file sizes we stuck with H264, after all it’s not like we had to pay anything. Now Google’s refusing to even support H264 in their Chrome browser and techies everywhere are up in arms.
Google say they’re doing this because we need a web standard but some are arguing that this just means that Flash is going to be around for even longer and it’s pushing back the adoption of HTML5 even more.
Of course the biggest name in online video is YouTube so all we can do now is wait and see if Google put their money where their mouth is roll VP8 across their billions of YouTube videos. If nothing else this might at least tip Apple which would result in three against one instead of two against two.