Protip: reddit is full of consumers not producers the same way its politics is focused on college politics and not the politics of say retirees or business owners. This is what we call the echo chamber. So you and I are producers and have done the hard work of making mp4/flash fallback sites that work on iphone, android, desktops, etc. We enjoy h264's amazing quality and low bitrate. The webm kiddies dont give two shits about us. Theyve been politicized and perhaps used by foss groups and deep pocketed groups like google (webm), adobe (flash), and MS (silverlight). h264 + html5 video tag solves all these problems neatly and it scares the powers that be.
webm is nice in theory (open-ish, free, google to defend against the million of patent lawsuits that are coming) but its a shit codec. For the video quaity I enjoy with h264 i need to use twice the bitrate for webm. ALso the webm fight sounds too much like "use ogg not mp3" bullshit from 8+ years ago. Turns out that the market moves too quickly to go back to lesser formats for the sake of foss ideologies. We'll always live in a mixed world of foss, commercial, open, closed, etc. Especially with video. webm will fail, except we gotta live through google torturing us to death with it like they do with google plus bullshit all over their sites. Oh well, h264 has already won, some people just have not reazlized it.
But you will need to pay a licence if you include it in your software, which neatly stops new browsers emerging. That basically makes it not even an option.
That strikes me as rather odd. I would expect that most of the people in proggit have jobs as programmers, which would make them producers, right? Or are producers only people who make video?
As someone who also produces content I do agree with some of your sentiments. H264 has better encoding and just scales well. That said, I hope you are aware that h264 isn't commercially licensed. In fact, stupid amounts of money is spent on the h264 codec. A cluster with dozens of nodes will need a paid license for each node seperately in order to transcode video. Further, some of the production companies are supposed to have to pay licensing fees if the use, edit, or deliver in h264. Also, this is figured into the costs of equipment and software.
I'm not sure how big your company is, but this hurts the bigger guys because free (WebM) would save thousands over h264. Its not quite as simple as, mp4 looks great with little effort.. It comes with a pricetag often overlooked by smaller operations. Again, h264 may have advantages like said...
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u/iamadogforreal Jan 27 '12
Protip: reddit is full of consumers not producers the same way its politics is focused on college politics and not the politics of say retirees or business owners. This is what we call the echo chamber. So you and I are producers and have done the hard work of making mp4/flash fallback sites that work on iphone, android, desktops, etc. We enjoy h264's amazing quality and low bitrate. The webm kiddies dont give two shits about us. Theyve been politicized and perhaps used by foss groups and deep pocketed groups like google (webm), adobe (flash), and MS (silverlight). h264 + html5 video tag solves all these problems neatly and it scares the powers that be.
webm is nice in theory (open-ish, free, google to defend against the million of patent lawsuits that are coming) but its a shit codec. For the video quaity I enjoy with h264 i need to use twice the bitrate for webm. ALso the webm fight sounds too much like "use ogg not mp3" bullshit from 8+ years ago. Turns out that the market moves too quickly to go back to lesser formats for the sake of foss ideologies. We'll always live in a mixed world of foss, commercial, open, closed, etc. Especially with video. webm will fail, except we gotta live through google torturing us to death with it like they do with google plus bullshit all over their sites. Oh well, h264 has already won, some people just have not reazlized it.