[murgindrag]

Animated GIFs are supported by iPhone. This outputs animated gifs. Animated gifs are the standard cross-platform format.

webm is no less standard than mp4. The battle of webm versus ogg versus mp4 (which refers to h.263 and successors) is mostly a question of technical communities (and Apple versus Google versus Firefox). Each platform supports their own subset, based on what they value. At this point, as far as marketshare, Chrome is in the lead.

Apple is throwing its weight behind mp4/h.263 mostly to keep open standards from raining on their proprietary, closed garden. There's no technical reason for it.

Most of my pages have videos transcoded to all three, but I think if they're going to output just one, webm is probably the best format to go with. Most users won't download all three; they'll download one and share it. For that, webm is the right choice. Otherwise, you'll run into more problems when Apple users try to share patent-encumbered MP4 files and have others not be able to view them. Outside animated gifs, someone needs to break; might as well be iPhone.

If you have a problem with that, complain to Apple; they could include webm and off cost-free. They choose to strip it out in order to screw you over.

[cstrahan]

The reasoning I've seen for iOS/Safari not supporting webm: there isn't hardware support on the iPhone, which would hurt battery life. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16319651

However, I think that would be poor judgement on Apple's part. I mean, sure, preventing someone from watching a webm might preserve battery life, but why stop there: imagine the savings if they were to strip iOS down to merely being able to make phone calls!

Let the user consume whatever media they want, and if that media drains battery, that's on the user for making that choice. I can see that Apple wouldn't want people to complain about iPhone battery life if webm took over the web, but then I wouldn't mind some minor nag at the beginning of playback to the effect of "hey, this video you're playing may drain your battery faster than you might otherwise expect, so take it up with whoever is serving this content to provide an alternative encoding for iOS".

[murgindrag]

That was fascinating, not so much for the technical discussion, as the presumptions behind it. That discussion views users as pure consumers, and doesn't even contemplate a human being might want to make a video, a web page, or share a video file (except through Youtube).

[leephillips]

This is eye-opening. I just checked webm on caniuse, and it is fully supported in all major browsers—except Safari.