Google Chrome Browser Says No To H.264 Video – Using WebM (VP8)
Google has made a decision to remove support for the Apple backed H.264 codec from its Chrome browser! It is true that Google must pay a royalty fees for the H.264 codec, but that doesn’t appear to be the issue. The maximum annual license fee for a product like Chrome (or Firefox) is $6.5 million, which is pennies to a company like Google. It appears that Googles decision to drop H.264 and go with WebM means that they have picked a side when it comes to video codec support. It looks like the company is showing that it prefers to only support industry standards. Make sense? It doesn’t really to use either as Google is still supporting Flash (Adobe), but has dropped H.264.
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chromes HTML5 video support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
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