14 DAY TRIAL // Google is making a bold move and has announced that it will be dropping support for the controversial H.264 video codec in Google Chrome in the next couple of months. Codecs have been at the heart of a heated dispute around video content support in the proposed HTML5 standard.
On the one side, Mozilla and Opera support only open codecs, on the other Apple and to a degree Microsoft support only the free but proprietary H.264.
Until now, Google had remained somewhat neutral, offering support for all codec choices, H.264 as well as the open source Theora and Google's own WebM format which uses the VP8 codec released as open source last year.
Not anymore though, Google is taking a stance and says it will only be supporting "open" codecs going forwards. Which would be the great, principled thing to do, if only it were true.
"We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles," Mike Jazayeri, a Product Manager at Google, wrote.
"To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project," he announced.
"Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future," he explained.
"Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies," he added.
Just when the HTML5 video debate had died down, Google is stirring things again with this move. Google has a history of choosing 'open' technologies and many of its projects are open source even though most don't cater to any community around them.
Mozilla has never supported H.264 and neither has Opera. So Google is now merely doing what others have done before. But this is not the full story.
While the move is great for openness in principle, in practical terms it only means that websites will stop considering HTML5 video as an option altogether and go back to using Flash which supports H.264 videos and just so happens to be bundled with Google Chrome.