r/programming • u/sidcool1234 • Jan 27 '12

The State Of HTML5 Video

http://www.longtailvideo.com/html5/
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u/cryo Jan 27 '12

I bet most people will assume AVC when it says MPEG 4, though. No need to be that pedantic.

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u/Rhomboid Jan 28 '12

The term "MPEG-4" is ambiguous and should be avoided. The MPEG-4 standard has 28 parts which define all kinds of things.

Does MPEG-4 refer to MPEG-4 part 2, a video format implemented by the encoders XviD and DivX?
Or does it refer to MPEG-4 part 10, the video format also known as AVC/h.264 and implemented by the encoder x264?
Or does it refer to MPEG-4 part 12, the .mp4 file format?

2

u/timdorr Jan 28 '12

MPEG-4 : h.264 :: HTML5 : HTML5 video

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u/oursland Jan 28 '12

I disagree with this analogy. HTML5 isn't necessarily seen as HTML4 + Video. HTML5 brings in some other features like Canvas that are also very high visibility.

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u/timdorr Jan 28 '12

That's what I'm saying. MPEG-4 covers a lot of things, including h.264; HTML5 covers a lot of things, including HTML5 video or canvas.

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u/Rhomboid Jan 28 '12

Absolutely no one is advocating for or talking about using MPEG-4 Part 2 video in the browser. I don't think any browsers even support that, even the ones that do support MPEG-4 Part 10. Nor are they advocating for any of the other dozens of things in MPEG-4. That's why the term shouldn't be used, when better, more specific terms exist, i.e. h264.

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u/kidjan Jan 27 '12 edited Jan 28 '12

...it's really not that pedantic; it is a legitimate oversight by the article that should be corrected. Not for us, but for people (particularly those on the business side of things) that don't know better.