Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

As a person who encodes video for the web for a living I can tell you we won't be switching to WebM because of iOS and other hardware devices that have hardware based decoding.

H.264 is the closest thing to a ubiquitous codec there is and assuming Chrome correctly updates the "canPlayType" javascript function I won't even have to update our players to provide Chrome users with the crappy Flash player.

As a Chrome user, I'll be switching to Safari so I can continue to get the working HTML5 player.

We'll consider switching once Apple adds support for WebM and the millions of old iOS devices are obsolete. In other words it's H.264 for us for the next 3 years.




Why can't you do two formats?


Cost/benefit. We outsource encoding to Zencoder which costs $.02 to $.05 per minute. Then there is also the price of disk space and the amount of time it takes for the video(s) to be available. Maybe one day the cost/benefit will change.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: