May 2, 2024

IE9 Will Support Playback of H.264 Video Only

Posted April 30, 2010 at 10:25am by iClarified · 7999 views
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]