Microsoft Puts h.264 Back into Chrome

Is I suspected they would, Microsoft has released an h.264 codec extension for Google Chrome to support h.264 in the <video /> tag. They provide the same mechanism for Firefox.

http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/wmp-extension-for-chrome

This Extension is based on a Chrome Extension that parses HTML5 pages and replaces Video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plug-in so that the content can be played in the browser. The Extension replaces video tags only if the video formats specified in the tag are among those supported by Windows Media Player. Tags that contain other video formats are not touched.

The Extension also checks if the browser version already supports MP4 (H.264) video codec, if so the extension is not used.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/02/html5-and-web-video-questions-for-the-industry-from-the-community.aspx

Any browser running on Windows can play H.264 video via the built-in Windows APIs that support the format. Our point of view here is that Windows customers should be able to play mainstream video on the Web.

 

Interesting.