It's obviously a win for consumers because WebM or OggTheora winning the format war is a vastly superior situation for us consumers to be in, compared to anything controlled by the MPEG-LA consortium, such as H.264.
We could all chew the fat about why google is doing this (and by all means, do! - interesting stuff to read), but we'll never know for sure. What I do know for sure is that (A) continuing to ship flash out-of-the-box is inconsistent, (B) This is a problem for the current crop of mobile devices (as in, if H.264 ends up losing), and (C) In practice you need to serve both OggTheora and H.264, which is annoying but an inevitable part of format wars. If I were google, and if my assumption that supporting H.264 is virtually free for google is correct (and that's a big if), I'd ship with both H.264 and flash, but disable them out of the box. Enabling them is as simple as going to preferences, 'advanced' tab, and clicking the appropriate check boxes. That's a simple enough deterrent to pressure content providers into offering OggTheora or WebM. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
