H.264 Standardization, The Final Nail In Flash’s Coffin
The big news announcement of the day is that MPEG LA, license holder for a number of high profile video standards has declared all h.264 video will be royalty free, so long as the video is provided to the end user for free.
The technical implications of this are lengthy, dull and tedious. The short version? You can now watch porn on any device you want without any additional plugins (cough.. Flash).
With an upsurge in mobile devices, the web has been calling out for a standard movie format to call its own without having to rely on third party codecs or plugins.
With no open source formats available, each browser vendor chose their preferred format, obviously with their own agenda. Apple backed H.264, Mozilla backed the Ogg standard and Internet Explorer scratched its head and wondered why people were so excited about standards.
Regardless of fractured browser support, Google announced in May it was open-sourcing its preferred video format, VP8, assuming this would give it the edge for its own products.
This move by MPEG LA ensures that finally, a standard format can be confidently accepted by browser makers without fear that they will one day be forced to start writing checks.
While I hate to see Flash die you have to admit Adobe’s support of it is nothing short of terrible. Seriously, you have to use Linux in order to run it in a 64 bit browser. That is so freaking stupid.
The other side to consider is that the H.264 codec can go within a Flash container.
As has been said, even though it’s royalty-free for end users, It’s not free for a company like Mozilla. They would still have to pay licensing fees for the rights, and they will never support that. There may never be a *standard*, unless Apple were to shift and support WebM or some other open source solution without the need for a plugin.