Tons of recent news out there about H.264, specifically in browsers due to the announcement by Google about dropping support in Chrome. I think what bothers me most about this move is that they are trying to pass it off under the banner of "openness" by attempting to push people towards WebM.

Mozilla has been very honest about their reasons for not including H.264 decoding, and no version of Firefox has ever shipped with H.264 support. They are a non-profit, and can't justify paying the licensing fees. Their browser also doesn't support other MPEG licensed pieces, like MP3 and AAC. Consistent message from day one and an understandable one.

Google on the other hand has paid for the license, and is likely at the cap already due to YouTube, or possibly for Android (not clear on if Google pays or if HTC/Samsung and others pay). In any case, the license applies to the entire company and any products they ship. And the've shipped millions of browsers with the tech already, along with tech to playback MP3 and AAC audio. They also still haven't provided any immunity for people using WebM, in case it turns out that the tech is indeed in violation of patents that the MPEG-LA holds.

Google did post a followup here. And an Adobe employee jumped in too, with the odd claim that MobileSafari isn't standards compliant due to the lack of plugin support. The HTML spec for object tags specifies the browser has to understand them (instead of crashing, or otherwise having problems when one is encountered), but it doesn't specify it must support every possible plugin in existence. Beyond that, MobileSafari does support plugins, but has no method for users to add their own beyond the ones that Apple included.

Most people now see this move as one that won't move us closer to HTML 5 video tag use, and instead will just push developers back to using Flash for video. Moving to a model where every video has to be encoded in both H.264 and WebM just doesn't seem feasible. At least before, it was easy to just have H.264 video, and serve it via either Flash or HTML5 video. This solution worked for all the major desktop browsers, and all the mobile devices that support hardware H.264 decoding. No device today has WebM hardware acceleration. And thanks to the slow adoption of newer Android versions by most Android phone providers, WebM software support will likely not roll out in a quick fashion even to Google's own mobile OS. This could change in time, but the momentum has been on the side of MPEG standards for a long time now.

What frustrates me with the whole situation is that this is coming after Microsoft gave up the video codec fight and has just moved to support MPEG like most other companies. Right when it looked like there might finally be a unifying codec, Google had to throw their influence around and complicate the situation again. If Google really wanted a good open video codec, they should have made their move years ago, around the same time Microsoft was also pushing VC-1 for HD-DVD/BluRay.