So, now it’s official. VP8 will be open sourced and support will added to the Flash player: http://webmproject.blogspot.com/
It’s was not a difficult prediction that I mention in an earlier post:
http://www.blixtsystems.com/2010/05/why-google-bought-on2/
Notice the absence of Apple and Microsoft in the list of partners.
So what does this mean?
Like I mentioned in my earlier post, contrary to what many people seems to believe this puts the Flash Player in an excellent position when it comes to video delivery in the future. It will take a long time before most users have browsers that support VP8, while a Flash Player with VP8 can become widespread very quickly.
And with their vested interest in H.264, question is if and when Apple and Microsoft will decide to add the decoder to Safari and IE.
Also, it’s great to see many hardware partners, which means that hopefully it should not take too long before we see hardware accelerated playback of VP8 video.
Related posts:
VP8, the new video format. Now there is not so many movies.
Thanks again for this nice article !
Ganesh,
With no Flash support on coming Windows 8 and Mac, Flash has no future for anything unfortunately…
https://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/metro-style-browsing-and-plug-in-free-html5.aspx
Windows 8 and OSX both support Flash. You are linking to an article saying that the Metro version of IE10 does not support Flash which is not the same as saying it’s not supported on Windows 8.
From the article:
“In Windows 8, IE 10 is available as a Metro style app and as a desktop app. The desktop app continues to fully support all plug-ins and extensions. The HTML5 and script engines are identical and you can easily switch between the different frame windows if you’d like.”
You are right, but it does not ship on Mac by default and it’s now out of the Windows tablet UI. I can see a trend.