[zanny]

There is the downside to this, in that by forcing rapid adoption of web video via <video> they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked by mpeg open source video software is doomed. Why can't we just use ogv :(

[JoshTriplett]

On the contrary, Flash helped h.264 win in the first place. If Flash didn't always exist as a fallback, then sites might have actually needed to offer WebM as an alternative. But with Flash available, sites could just use H.264 and fall back to Flash for anyone without support for H.264 in <video>.

[asdfaoeu]

You're practically limited to h.264 anyway on mobile devices none of the hardware has support for anything else.

[fpgeek]

Every Gingerbread and up phone has support for WebM.

[icebraining]

Hardware support?

[DannyBee]

Newer SOC's have hardware support for it.

OMAP4470 supports it in hardware (so galaxy nexus like phones).

OMAP54XX supports it in hardware.

Tegra 3 supports it in hardware.

So just in time for this development ;)

[gcp]

they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked open source video software is doomed

Aside from libavc, Firefox (and well, Chromium) just doesn't play H264 video at all, for much the same considerations.