In Which The Geeky Political Drama Regarding HTML5 Video is Explained By a Kindergarten Crayon Drawing

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 3:44 AM on February 6, 2010 in Commentary. View Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/EN

Okay, you see, there are some major advances to watching videos on the web that everyone would be able to experience right now, except all of the browser makers are fighting over what type of video standard to use. It may be confusing to you, so I drew you a picture to explain it in the distinctive art style of Zacqary Adam Green at age five:

You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.

There. Now you know.

  • H.264 is where it's at, just about all video on the net uses it which means painless switching to HTML5 from Flash, and is free for the Internet until 2017 now. Mozilla is expecting all video on the net to be re-encoded, which isn't gonna happen. They're going to lose browser-share to Chrome, which will replace FF as the default alternative browser if they keep this up. :)
  • And then bazillions of people in India or China or Africa who start
    using the Internet and making videos won't be able to afford H.264
    licenses, so they'll encode with something free-er, and then there
    will be this whole international divide on who can watch what in which
    browser, and everyone will be like oshi—

    Or, alternatively, in 2016 (not 2017) every video hosting and
    processing and whatevering company will move to a country where
    software patents don't apply, and x264 is actually legal, and the
    Western economy will collapse (again).

    Or maybe by 2016 we'll have moved to something sensible like DIrac,
    but all of that H.264 video will still be there clogging up the
    archvies, and we'll have another GIF situation on our hands until the
    patents expire.

    By the way, Mozilla doesn't have a choice in "keeping this up" or not.
    Patented software is incompatible with the Mozilla Public License.
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