“Mozilla research director Andreas Gal has proposed a rare change of heart that could see Boot2Gecko, and possibly Firefox, adopt H.264 playback,” Electronista reports. “The move would let HTML5 pages use the video tag for in-page H.264 as long as the OS underneath already supports the codec,” Electronista reports. “At least in theory, it would let Mozilla officially keep active support only for open formats like WebM while acknowledging the reality of H.264’s much wider reach.”
Electronista reports, “Mozilla has only ever supported WebM for HTML5 video on the view that it wanted ‘unencumbered’ formats that didn’t require paying for a license if it was directly implemented. Gal, however, said that Google had undermined WebM by backtracking on its intention to pull H.264 from Chrome to steer support for WebM, the codec which it owned. Trying to make a stand on ideology wouldn’t work given how popular H.264 was and how little Google played a part. ‘Google pledged many things they didn’t follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price,’ Gal added. ‘H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ha!
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