I wonder how many (huge) sites like imgur it would take saying "we're doing webm, if your browser doesn't support it you get a huge, slow GIF instead" for everyone just to settle on a single format?
The whole debate is only hurting users and developers, while lining the pockets of MPEGLA (or whoever is responsible for h264 licensing).
>I wonder how many (huge) sites like imgur it would take saying "we're doing webm, if your browser doesn't support it you get a huge, slow GIF instead" for everyone just to settle on a single format?
It's very unlikely to see that happen, since using H.264 doesn't cost a dime in royalties for sites like imgur that serve the content for free (ads don't count as per the H.264 licensing terms). The only trouble is really on Firefox and any other browser that wants to implement a built-in H.264 decoder, but nothing stops them from working around that via things like OpenH264 or by using system decoders and so on.
The same will likely happen with H.265/HEVC, as the recently published licensing terms made it completely royalty-free to use the format itself (including for commercial purposes, you have to pay royalties for that with H.264), and you only have to pay to distribute decoders & encoders.
Personally I wish browser vendors would just use whatever's installed on the user system for playing web videos, but for some reason that's not okay because "we need at least one unified always playing format for the web!" and then we don't get that anyway, as the whole WebM mess has clearly shown...
Anyway, since imgur is doing the conversion to video by themselves, there's not really any reason why they couldn't do both H.264 MP4s and VP8 WebMs... supporting only one format makes more sense if you allow direct user-encoded video uploads like 4chan does with its WebM support for example. Gotta say I don't like this whole "hey we took HTML5 video with 'autoplay loop muted' properties and branded it GIFV!" shtick, though.
How many? A lot. And in the mean time, if imgur started to do that, then it will soon start to have a "pdf link warning" in short order as masses of ios/safari/ie users basically segment themselves out of the loop.
In the meantime then the alternative sites will pick up in use because they aren't being dicks about a video format.
Additionally, what about devices that only have mpeg decoding? Basically you're saying screw you non webm supporting people and your battery life. We don't like your kind around here.
Its a great way to kill your site in short. Unless everyone does it at once and upgrades happen to support things, its at best a slow burn like firefox. But at this point webm doesn't have half the use cases as firefox did.
It might be a fun exercise to guess how many big sites it would take, but it's more relevant to realize that there is very little reason for any big site to deliberately not support a huge number of potential visitors.
The whole debate is only hurting users and developers, while lining the pockets of MPEGLA (or whoever is responsible for h264 licensing).