The Great Codec War

At the Second Battle of Chrome, WebM seems to have struck a surprise victory against H.264, when Google announced that it was dropping support for H.264 in <video>. Well, maybe it was only a pyrrhic victory. Reactions seem to differ a lot, but I think a lot of them miss the mark.

I've seen some people (I'm looking at you, Ars) claim that this will help kill HTML 5 video. This claim seems to me to be bogus: HTML 5 video effectively died years ago when no one could agree on a codec. Of the several video sites I use, the only one to support HTML 5 is YouTube; everyone else uses Flash. Since it's already dead, you can hardly kill it by switching codecs. This just shifts the balance more in favor of WebM. And as for H.264 working nearly everywhere, AppleInsider, your chart is just Blatant Lies.

Another thing that people do is compare video codecs to image codecs, most particularly GIF. But H.264 is not GIF: GIF became wildly popular before Unisys seemed to realize that it violated LZW. It is also unclear, looking back a decade after the fact, if Unisys targeted only encoders or both (lzw.info implies both, but Mozilla had GIF code long before the patent expired, and I don't see any information about LZW licensing). H.264, however, clearly mentions licensing for the decoder. Furthermore, it was relatively easy to make a high-quality image codec that doesn't require stepping on patents (which we now call PNG); the video codec market is much more strangled to make that impossible.

While on the topic, I've also seen a few statements that point out that H.264 is an ISO standard and WebM is not. Since people love to make the comparison between H.264 and GIF, I will point out that GIF is not an ISO standard nor an RFC, ITU, W3C, or IEEE document (although the W3C does have a copy of it on their website, it appears to not be accessible from their website by internal links). The commentary about "open standards" typically means "I can implement it by reading this/these specification(s) without paying a fee to anybody", not "there exists an officially-approved, freely-available standard" (incidentally, ISO standards generally are NOT freely-available).

But what about Flash, most people say, both on the issue of support for H.264 (although it will be supporting WebM as well) as well as the fallacy of open support. The answer to that is two simple words: "Legacy content." Flash works for everybody but a few prissy control freaks, and so much stuff—more than just video, in fact—uses it that not supporting it is impractical. Remember, half the web's users do not have HTML 5-capable browsers.

All of that said, where things go in the future is very much an open question. I see several possible directions:

1. The U.S. declares software patents invalid. Mr. O'Callahan can tell you one scenario that could cause this. It's actually not implausible: the Supreme Court in Bilski seemed mildly skeptical of expansive patentability claims, and a relatively clean software patent claims would probably allow them to make a coherent "narrow" ruling on software patents in general. And, though the U.S. is not the world, an anti-software patent U.S. ruling would probably lead to nullification of software patents worldwide.
2. MPEG-LA changes their minds and allows royalty-free decoding (not encoding) of H.264. This solution is fairly implausible, unless MPEG-LA desperately decides to try this gambit to stop H.264 from becoming obsolete. The circumstances which would lead them to do this would probably be on the back of a steep descent in H.264 popularity, so the actual value of this outcome would be minor.
3. Apple caves in and allows either Flash or WebM on iOS. With alternative browsers on mobile allowing these options, that means only about 17% of the mobile market has no support for video other than H.264. Depending on the success of other OSs, this may force Apple to support one of the two alternatives to allow video to work on iOS. I don't know how plausible this is, but seeing as how Android is both newer than iOS and more popular, a long-term decline in Apple's fortunes is not unreasonable.
4. The world continues as it does today, with no single solution supporting everybody. Not ideal, but it is the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, it's also probably the most likely.