Google Chrome Drops Support For Dominant Video Format

Google has essentially declared war against the web’s dominant video format, announcing that Chrome will phase out support for the H.264 video codec that encodes most video online.

Instead, Chrome, which now controls 10 percent of the browser market worldwide, will only support two open video formats -- Google’s own WebM format, which launched last year, and Theora, another open-source codec. This seems to confirm that the web’s “codec wars” are in full effect and could indicate that Google has a problem with the royalties being charged by MPEG-LA, the organization that administers the patent pool for H.264 codec. Codecs are the programs that encode or decode any digital data stream, such as digital video. The dominant web video codec, by far, is H.264, which is a proprietary, patented format. The patents that cover H.264 are administered by MPEG-LA, a patent licensing group that collects the royalties for any devices and services that use the H.264 codec and divides it up to all the companies and organizations that own relevant patents. H.264 support is hard-wired into most video cameras and modern mobile phones, as well as devices like DVD players.