Articles tagged h.264.

Google announced a new video codec in May 2010, called WebM. This format uses Ogg Theora audio and VP8 video codecs. Google received VP8 when they purchased On2 for $106 million back in August of 2009. WebM is designed to take on the H.264 video codec that has become the digital video standard. Google says WebM is an open and free format.

Since Google does not make any money on WebM, Why have they created it? Google makes money by selling advertising. In Google's eyes, users are the product and advertisers are the customers. The more users Google has, the more they can sell to their advertising customers, and the more money Google makes. Google creates free products and services to bring in more users. 

The two leading browsers on the Mac are Apple's own Safari and the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser. There are other browsers available for the Mac, including Google's own Chrome, but this test will be between the two market leaders.

During the testing period, Firefox 4 beta 11 and Safari 5.0.3 were used. Although Firefox 4 is still in beta, it is already better than Firefox 3, which Safari clearly beat in past competitions. This test examined eight key areas for browser performance and usability. Now it is time to compare these two browsers.

The talk of the town is Apple's big iPhone 4 deal with Verizon, but Google also came to the table yesterday with a little announcement of their own. Google delivered an under-the-radar announcement, stating they will be dropping support for the h.264 codec in favor of their open source WebM codec.

Google claims their Chrome browser dropping h.264 is about supporting open standards. If Google were truly concerned with supporting open standards, why does the proprietary Flash still ship with Chrome as a preinstalled plug-in? As John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out, the hypocrisy is thick.