IE9 Will Support Playback of H.264 Video Only

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Posted April 30, 2010 at 10:25am by iClarified

Microsoft has announced on the IEBlog that Internet Explorer 9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

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The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

H.264 is an industry standard, with broad and strong hardware support. Because of this standardization, you can easily take what you record on a typical consumer video camera, put it on the web, and have it play in a web browser on any operating system or device with H.264 support (e.g. a PC with Windows 7). Recently, we publicly showed IE9 playing H.264-encoded video from YouTube. You can read about the benefits of hardware acceleration here, or see an example of the benefits at the 26:35 mark here. For all these reasons, we’re focusing our HTML5 video support on H.264.
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Dean Hachamovitch (General Manager, Internet Explorer) goes on to mention that while Flash is an important part of today's web it does have some issues "particularly around reliability, security, and performance" and they work closely with engineers at Adobe in ongoing technical discussions.

Read More [via 9to5Mac]

IE9 Will Support Playback of H.264 Video Only

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MrEdofCourse - April 30, 2010 at 1:59pm

This is misleading. What Microsoft is saying is that within the HTML5 Video tag, IE9 will only support H.264, as opposed to Ogg Theora (which is open source and what Mozilla.org wants to use for Firefox). Microsoft is still likely to shove Silverlight down our throats and IE9 will most certainly be capable of playing Flash videos as well as supporting Active-X controls for a variety of other formats. This shouldn't come as a surprise because Microsoft hates open source and has a vested interest when it comes between the sole choice of H.264 versus Ogg Theora in the HTML5 Video tag. Microsoft is choosing what it feels is the lesser of two evils for itself.

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Googs - April 30, 2010 at 9:56pm

Thanks for the truly "clarified" answer.

Jay - April 30, 2010 at 12:14pm

First apple, now Microsoft. Lol, that just sucks ass for you adobe. This reminds me of the blu-ray vs hddvd war.