This is not an issue. We currently face the same inefficiency of having to encode videos in multiple codecs today. Want your vid on iOS? H.264. Want your vid on other platforms? Pretty open. What's the issue? Just some inefficiency. It means that all videos have to be encoded in a few formats in the backend and a browser detector to tell our server which video to play. As long as the end user isn't harmed I don't see the big deal with Google supporting Google's own format (that they have opened up with a protected royalty-free format).
As it is right now there are probably several elements toyour site that require different rendering depending on the browser (IE6 I'm glaring at you).
> As it is right now there are probably several elements toyour site that require different rendering depending on the browser (IE6 I'm glaring at you).
There's a big difference between an additional CSS stylesheet and encoding and storing every single video on your site twice.
> We currently face the same inefficiency of having to encode videos in multiple codecs today. Want your vid on iOS? H.264. Want your vid on other platforms?
Most companies do not encode their videos with multiple codecs. They encode with H.264 and the video will work with an HTML5 player in IE9/Chrome/Safari on the desktop and Safari/Android on mobile. Fallback to Flash is available for older browsers and Firefox. Companies will continue to use this scheme, it just means that Chrome users will now be stuck with a crappy bug-ridden flash player as opposed to a native player.
You don't need the browser format detection scripts because it's built into HTML5. <video><source codec="video/webm" src="kitten.webm"></source><source codec="video/m4v"></source></video>
As it is right now there are probably several elements toyour site that require different rendering depending on the browser (IE6 I'm glaring at you).