Apple Thoughts: Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome

"In a move likened to converting the US from English to Esperanto, Google has announced that its web browser, Chrome, will be removing support for direct HTML5 playback of H.264 video in the coming months, in favor of Google's WebM media container (which leverages the VP8 video codec, also supported by Flash Player and used in the new Skype beta's multiparty video conferencing). This is a blow to the adoption of Apple's preferred video standard, as well as a hint that the Web may see some continued churn within the video format arena."

I was actually quite shocked, and to be honest, a tad annoyed, when Google made this annoucement. H.264 is, at this point, an industry standard. And while you may not think that it makes a huge difference on the consumer end, it does. Most devices that have built in video encoding or decoding use hardware specifically designed to use H.264. Anything else can be done in software, but that uses more processing power and is more likely to drain batteries. Even Android devices don't have hardware designed to speed up encoding/decoding of WebM. I also question Google's motives. They claim they want to only use open standards and yet they install the Adobe Flash player with every Google Chrome install. Last time I checked, Flash was proprietary. It's going to be a huge problem for Apple and other manufacturers, though, if Google decides that YouTube will no longer support H.264. It'll be interesting to see how this develops over the next few months.