Shocking: Google Removing h.264 Support from Chrome

To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

via The Chromium Blog

I’m very, very sad to see this announcement. h.264 is the web video standard while WebM is a new Google codec that nobody uses and nobody uses Theora. We really don’t need video codec fragmentation in HTML5. The likely result of that will just be standardization on Flash video. Do we get to re-hash the video format wars of the 1990s in the 2010s?

This sucks and basically shows that HTML5 is not standardized and not ready for prime time. Not cool at all.

This is an opportunity for Microsoft to look like a hero and fix this for Google like they did for Mozilla.