apple and m$ make money from mpeg4, h264, mp3, acc, etc. They are evil corporations, there not going to make it easy to use formats that they don’t make money from are they!

I have a stuff it attitude. Suckers might not have support for WebM now but they will when they shift there buts and update there browser or install/update whatever software is needed. Lets not let current/average systems, setups, etc holed us back. They need a big push!

So use WebM if not OGG. Use fall-backs like a embedded video player like VLC Media Player and download links and flash (yuck yuck yuck) which will support WebM soon if not already.

Thanks for your input! I do understand that the H.264 codec licensing issue is quite complicated and involves many parties. And I can even get behind Mozilla’s stand in not supporting it because of it. I was just trying to get across, in my rambling frustration, that in my opinion, things would be much simpler for both end users and web developers if all browsers supported all formats and codecs.

The various bugs doesn’t worry me one bit, that’s just how development goes. I merely pointed them out for information purposes.

I’m sure WebM will be a big hit, and frankly, I’m sure it’ll be a rather good format when there are more tools to create them out there. Especially considering the hardware acceleration as you mention. YouTube will of course have a very large roll in spreading the knowledge and tools about it to the masses.

I absolutely agree with you, that the future of web video is rich with possibility. I’m looking forward to a Flash free video implementation to be frank. My issue is simply that I’d rather not have to create separate video files for each browser just to share a video of my daughter with my family and friends, it becomes such a tedious task. Not to mention the storage space issue. It just feels like Flash 2 points – HTML5 1 point in a way.

I am in no way an expert in anything video, my frustration comes from a front-end developers standpoint, and even more so, in lack of a better term, a bloggers standpoint. I’m curious to see if YouTube will offer a simple embedding solution of HTML5 video, and what happens with the formats there. Will YouTube simply offer the WebM format only? Maybe with a Flash player fallback?

Yes, the video element is in disarray at the moment, but most of the issues are fixable bugs; iOS4 already addresses the issues with the poster attribute and so on, and future versions of browsers will likewise fix their implementation bugs. It’s a necessary consequence of implementing from a spec which isn’t stable yet. In a year’s time – or even six months – things should be very different.

As for the codec, I don’t follow that everyone should just use H264 and get over it. For one thing, H264 only works really well when there’s hardware acceleration available, whereas WebM works better when there’s not. Also, the licensing deal is a bit more important than the way you’ve mentioned it here.

I’m pretty sure OGV will go the way of the dinosaurs, but with YouTube backing WebM I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. It would involve getting people to download the WebM codec on IE/Windows, but that was also the case with the Flash plugin.

All I mean to say is, don’t be hasty in your conclusions. Web video is fine in Flash for now, but has a future rich with possibility.