In January 2011 Google caused a storm in a tea cup when they stated their intention to remove H.264 video support from their implementation of the HTML5 <video> tag.

But that doesn’t seemed to have happened.

At the same time Mozilla stated their support for open standards – OGG and WebM – as opposed to the royalty encumbered H.264.

So we had Google and Firefox on the one side, and on the other H.264 licence holders Apple and Microsoft.

But now Google’s open source ally seems to be weakening its stance. The onslaught of H.264 is leaving Firefox out in the cold whereas Google still haven’t dropped H.264 from Chrome.

So just as Firefox is feeling left out in the Webkit-vendor-prefix saga – it is poor Firefox that takes the flank. Firefox is obviously getting tired of playing the odd man out, trying to stick to open source principles, but with a business eye on the realities of what developers are actually using. That Google don’t put their money were they mouth is and pull H.264 support from -webkit based Chrome must be especially galling at Mozilla Towers.

Can’t say I blame Firefox for looking at H.264. Come 2016 when the H.264 license is revisited by MPEG-LA, this does potentially leave us at the mercy of Apple and Microsoft. But, hey that’s nothing new in this game.

ps I thought it timely to repost my test videos so we can see the current state of play.

Video Test Zone

To keep a track of video support, here are examples of the major players.

H.264 – in this case a 12mb mp4

If you can’t see anything above your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video with H.264

H.264 – in this case a 4mb mp4

If you can’t see anything above your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video with H.264

H.264 – in this case a 1.6mb mp4

If you can’t see anything above your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video with H.264

H.264 – in this case another 8mb mp4

If you can’t see anything above your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video with H.264

Ogg

If you can’t see anything above your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video with OGG

WebM

If you can’t see anything above your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video with WEBM

More on HTML5 Video.

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