If your plans include exhibiting your movies on the World Wide Web, you should probably be concerned with the changes in video compression formats which are coming soon to Web browsers.
Recently Google — which owns YouTube and promotes the Android operating system for mobile devices — announced that its Web browser, Chrome, would show video using the WebM format, instead of the H.264 format favored by Apple.
Apple’s mobile devices — iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch — use its own browser, Mobile Safari, to exhibit video which is in H.264 format. None of Apple’s mobile devices will show video which has been prepared for exhibition with Flash.
Both firms wish to to replace the incumbent standard format for Web video, Adobe‘s Flash Video.
Here are some links to articles which explain the controversy.
- Google opens VP8 codec, aims to nuke H.264 with WebM. [ars technica]
- Google’s dropping H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness. [ars technica]
- WebM is a royalty-free high-quality open video compression format for HTML5 (instead of H.264). [Wikipedia]
- The webM video format is Google’s proposed solution to HTML5 multimedia accessibility. [<HTML5> doctor]
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