[marckremers]

But isn't it too late? http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/01/h-264-66-percent-web-video/ This is from May last year, I bet it's even higher now. Say by some miracle that webm takes over, even though it's free, it's a Google run project, and we now that Apple chooses stability over availability (i.e. their rejection of Flash)

From my experience building a HTML5 video playback portfolio for a client, playing high quality webm/ogg is just not doable yet, even via Amazons CDN.

And what i don't get, on a very basic level, are these companies that own these file formats really ever going to cash in on all those files out there? I mean GIF, JPG, PNG are all patented formats, and they are everywhere.

Why doesn't Google announce for example that they will also stop supporting JPG/PNG/GI in favor of their open source WebP format? If they were really drawing bold lines they should be honest about it.

[jarek]

PNG is not a patented format. In fact, the patent wars surrounding GIF were a major, perhaps the overriding motivation for development of PNG.