March 19, 2012 09:02 pm EDT

Mozilla caves, will support H.264 to avoid 'irrelevance'

It looks like Mozilla is ready to throw in the towel in its battle against the patent-laden H.264 video codec. Over the last week or so, the software foundation has struggled publicly with whether or not to support the MPEG-LA-owned format. Now several of Firefox's biggest players have all come out in support of the move and all that's left is to actually bake the appropriate code into the browser. Both chairman Mitchell Baker and CTO Brendan Eich embraced the decision this weekend, however begrudgingly, in blog posts. Both admit that success in the mobile space requires them to abandon the quest to make WebM the standard for streaming video in HTML5. Even with Google's support, at least on the desktop, VP8 was never able to seriously threaten the entrenched and battery-friendly (not to mention, Apple and Microsoft backed) H.264. For more details check out the source links.

Mozilla caves, will support H.264 to avoid 'irrelevance' originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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