My thoughts run along the lines of Stephen Shankland's: Microsoft/Apple/Adobe/Canon etc may not charge you directly for the H.264 royalty they pay, but it’s part of product cost somewhere
While there are people who will happily pay premium prices for iOS devices, in the near future there will be a commodity market for tablet and phone devices. A commodity market that likely will be characterized by razor thin margins. d.w., if I had to guess, my speculation is that “Today, every mobile device and PC comes out-of-the-box not only with H.264 decoders in their hardware” is either inaccurate today or will soon be. Heck, my current phone can barely render Internet text.
I’ve heard it argued that, as component costs shrink, the “dumbphone” is tending towards extinction as a product category. I’m no expert on hardware supply chains, but I think the standard issue “bucket of parts” that even the cheapest vendors pull from when designing a new handset is tending towards integrated GPUs that include hardware acceleration of h.264 “for free”. Otherwise, how does something like this ([link]) even exist?
I stand behind Hamranhansenhansen’s point: as long as it’s more work for providers to create something in WebM for an end product that isn’t materially better for users, this is just Ogg Vorbis vs. MP3 all over again.
“dumbphone” is tending towards extinction as a product category
Depending on how you define your terms, that is an absolute certainty. Even my throwback phone would have been a technological marvel 10 years ago, and perhaps even 5.
“for free”
[citation needed]
My understanding is that for a mere $6.5 million dollars, Hamranhansenhansen can make this problem go away.
“interest on the change between the cushions of the couch in the rec room” is not an argument that resonates with me. I’m sure that there are lots of things that many of us would appreciate having for free, with the bill going to Big Business or Big Government depending on whether you are red-leaning or blue-leaning (or is it the other way around? Whatever. Onward).
I don’t criticize Apple for supporting and funding the H.264 effort, and I don’t criticize Google for not wanting to fund my vices. It is their money, and they are welcome to decide on their own how they wish to spend it.
I will say that if there were an opportunity made available to standardize WebM and make it a required codec for HTML5, I personally would be inclined to try to find a way to support that effort.
I think that any effort to make WebM a required part of HTML5 will very quickly run into the realities of tens of billions of dollars worth of mobile phones, set top boxes, videogame consoles, blu-ray players, televisions, consumer cameras, editing and production pipelines, and the rest that have already factored in the h.264 support that’s already been paid for by consumers and companies involved in video distribution.
You can correct me if I’m misremembering things, but I always understood that one of the guiding ideas in the HTML5 effort was to codify some of the best practices in use on the web as it is, as opposed to dictating the web as we’d like it to be. In this case, I think it’s pretty fair to say that the h.264 codec is pretty well established part of the practical, working web.
Removing h.264 support seems like a bit of a windmill tilt, in that light.
I always understood that one of the guiding ideas in the HTML5 effort was to codify some of the best practices in use on the web as it is, as opposed to dictating the web as we’d like it to be
Speaking as someone who is a wee bit too close to that problem: my observation is that there are multiple conflicting “guiding ideas”, many of which seem to be trotted out when it is convenient to do so rather than when they prove to be helpful in making hard decisions.
The HTML5 parsing (by that I mean lexical tokenization) algorithm is close to that goal, but higher level concepts (like when exactly you are allowed to use table elements or presentational attributes) are very much an attempt to engineer the web. And some parts of the larger HTML5/WebApps picture (like local storage) are outright new inventions. Some of which will rightfully end up in the trash pile.
Speaking as someone who is writing this on a machine that was purchased with “no OS”, on which I installed Ubuntu, and am currently using Firefox, my perspectives on what is pretty well established on the practical, working web don’t exactly match yours.