Microsoft are desperately trying to stop driving web professionals & users mad with their browsers.
In the IE9 Platform Preview demo & keynotes stuff they did a month ago, they showed youtube with html5 video working on IE9. They did not mention h.264 by name in the demo, but it clearly was. Html5 video is not working in the current preview release of IE9 but it will be supported in an update. Their other main focus beyond supporting standards was on hardware-accelerating lots of stuff, be it svg or css3 or video. They had a demo showing the CPU use for some 720P video on a machine running Chrome, which was high, and then using IE9 with hardware decoding of the video, leaving lots of CPU free, and then hey revealed that the IE9 one was actually playing 2 HD videos at once. This hardware decoding of video is something I have been going on about for years, its been a long time coming, and the devil is in the detail, but certainly its started to become more commonplace in recent years and its a big factor on mobile devices too. So far its mostly been all about h.264, and is one of the big reasons I think other codecs will struggle to displace h.264. There is no reason why it cant happen with VP8 given time, but h.264 certainly has a very big head start in numerous different ways. The bad news about IE9 is that its not going to work on XP, only Vista and Windows 7. Firefox is under some pressure, still very popular and not going anywhere in a hurry, but has serious competition from Chrome and eventually IE9 if Microsoft dont mess up. Safari, other webkit browsers, iphones & ipads may only make up a small market share, but so long as there is a buzz about Apples products they will likely be given more weight when people think of what codec to use than the simple percentage of web traffic would suggest. Fingers crossed it all turns out well anyway because HTML5, CSS3, canvas, svg & WebGL done right in many browsers, and hardware accelerated where possible, will deliver us a really lovely web experience that will make flash seem rather clunky. There are going to be some fun ways to navigate web video in future, some great apps & collaborative possibilities. Some of the ideas that were just on the edge of peoples thoughts back in the earlier days of this group, or even beyond peoples wildest dreams, are going to blossom. Its possible our imagination will even be lagging behind the technological possibilities, presenting a rare opportunity to have a brand new frontier to dream in and make your own. I know its not a fashionable buzzword these days but I still like the term multimedia. And there could be an interesting convergence between games & video online, to an extent anyway. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In [email protected], Rupert Howe <rup...@...> wrote: > > Mozilla reckon that Firefox handles 30% of worldwide web access. And > you can bet it's an even higher percentage of people who watch online > video. Even after IE9 with HTML5 becomes widely used in a few years, > that 30% lack of support for h.264 (or more by then) will be a big > issue for anyone wanting to use HTML5 for video. Unless Mozilla change > their mind. > > Interesting to see what Microsoft will do about video codecs in IE9. > Have they said? I haven't seen. If they do allow ogg/vp8 to be used > with the video tag, will it just be the 5% Safari users and iPad/ > iPhone users who'll be left out? That'd be pretty decisive and easy > to prioritize for producers. And if they fail to support it, and just > support h.264 & their own codecs, it'll be just the 30+% Firefox & > Opera users who are in the minority, tipping the balance the other way > - but not decisively, just annoyingly? Given Microsoft's record of > driving web professionals mad with their browsers, you have to worry > that sanity will not prevail here. > > Rupert > http://twittervlog.tv
