It's Mobile Safari with its impressive mind/marketshare and total lack of user customizability that's the main battleground here. (Though luckily most of the iDevice installed base can only cope with baseline H.264.)
Safari on Mac OS X will pick up WebM decode as soon as Perian auto-updates to it. Perian (basically ffmpeg for Quicktime) being one of the must-have installs on Mac OS X in order to play any video/audio codecs and containers outside the blessed subset that Apple chooses to support.
What does Blackberry use then? Or what will Windows Phone 7 use? And WebOS? (I am asking seriously)
I think in the mobile realm you can't blame a company for not supporting a format without hardware acceleration. Now, once the new chips arrive with WebM acceleration, and someone doesn't support it then sure, I agree that sucks.
Apple's the only manufacturer that seems to make a selling point out of not shipping tools that users can shoot themselves in the foot with.
A perfect example is mobile Flash, which is (or soon will be) a major selling point of basically all non-Apple mobile devices and runs lots of legacy VP6 video without hardware acceleration. And Adobe has committed to supporting VP8/WebM in future Flash versions.
Ok. First I think the jury is still out if it will be a major selling point or not. Maybe you are right, maybe you are not. It seems a bit premature to use such adjectives.
Second that is true about Apple. But that's their philosophy: I am sure if Firefox can have their own philosophy so can Apple. They like things that work, and work well (though sometimes they fail, as shown by the antenna problem). I don't see any reason why Apple wouldn't include WebM support once its hardware is capable of decoding it in hardware.
But if your argument is that Apple should implement WebM despite it being much worse for mobile simply because otherwise Firefox can't join in, then I think you are asking a bit much.
If it hardware acceleration weren't important for the battery then I would agree with you that Apple should implement WebM pronto (while still keeping AVC). As it is, I think there are not clear rights or wrongs, and it's up to each company to decide what they think we'll be best.
> Perian (basically ffmpeg for Quicktime) being one of the must-have installs on Mac OS X in order to play any video/audio codecs and containers outside the blessed subset that Apple chooses to support.
Or just not using QuickTime Player, which was basically mandatory in previous versions as QuickTime Player rather sucked balls (QuickTime Player X is pretty big improvement over the Player 7 so it's a viable option)
Safari on Mac OS X will pick up WebM decode as soon as Perian auto-updates to it. Perian (basically ffmpeg for Quicktime) being one of the must-have installs on Mac OS X in order to play any video/audio codecs and containers outside the blessed subset that Apple chooses to support.