Google plans to remove H.264 support

Google announced on Tuesday that they will be dropping support for H.264 which is a HTML Video Codec currently used . They aim to make way for the development of their own WebM and Theora video codecs which unlike H.264 are open-sourced and royalty free and consistent with the codecs already supported by the Chromium Project.

Google acquired On2 Technologies in February 2010 and opened up the company's VP8 codec and creating a new royalty-free media format called WebM. Theora on the other hand is a free and open video compression format from the Xiph.org Foundation.


Admitting that H.264 plays an important role in video, they claim they are favouring open innovation and will pull all their support for open codec technologies.


The changes will occur gradually over the months as they are giving content publishers and developers using HTML an opportunity to make changes to their sites. WebM support has already been added to Firefox, Opera and Chrome.