The Cause and Effect of Google's h.264 Decision
· 6 min read
How do the internal workings of a browser that was released only two years ago have an enormous ripple effect on the future of streaming media on the internet? Last week Google announced on their chromium blog that they're dropping support for the h.264 codec, in favor of the open source Ogg Theora and WebM/VP8 codecs. This is yet another snag in the messy attempt to unify the playback of video in HTML 5, as we now find the #2 and #3 most popular browsers lacking support for what currently is likely the most ubiquitous encoding format. So how did we get here?