browsers

WebM

Another divide in the standard for web video appears to be emerging. H.264 seemed to have captured the web up until today when Google unveiled the WebM project at their I|O 2010 conference. WebM is an "open" media format for the web.

According to Google

WebM includes: VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

This now presents 3 options for presenting media via the web; H.264, Flash and WebM. The list of supporting companies is impressive, Apple seems to have ignored this initiative thus far, while Adobe is on-board.

A developer preview of WebM and VP8, including source code, specs, and encoding tools is available today.

Read More

The Flash Battle

l-is-for-lego.jpg

Since Apple unveiled the iPad last Wednesday a large focus has been centered on the lack of Flash support.

Sides were quickly formed; Pro-Flash or Anti-Flash.

The Pro-Flash side calling it absolutely unacceptable for a modern and powerful media device to not allow Flash content.

The Anti-Flash side points out the public lack of support on the iPhone along with major reasons to despise the technology.

The Pro-Flash camp pointed out sites like Hulu and YouTube for video, and the numerous games available only through a Flash interface. Adobe even chimed in with a blog post presenting their argument for Flash.

And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.

They have a valid (somewhat) point that the flash platform allows flexibility and a maturity that does not exist in other technologies such as HTML5.

The Flash Blog (An independent site evangelizing the Flash platform) was quick to point out how widespread the content is including pointing out very obviously the porn side of the web. They used a very effective tagline in the post that had twitter ablaze with arguments.

Millions of websites use Flash. Get used to the blue legos.

On the other side of the fence was the Anti-Flash camp, pointing out statements that Flash is the leading cause of crashes on Mac's. The fact that it is a huge CPU hog and that is just a bad format. I would generally count myself in this camp, my MacBook runs Flash content horribly. HTML5 is going to be great, especially when paired with the advances in AJAX.

No Flash required for YouTube thanks to HTML5

YouTube has now introduced a beta of HTML5 video playback using h.264 encoding. The support is for Safari and Chrome only. (No Firefox support at this time) <br/> Sign up for the beta via the link below and give it a try.

YouTube HTML5 Video Player

Syndicate content