An open letter sent from Steve Jobs about Flash recently prompted a tacit show of approval from Microsoft over agreement on the H.264 video format. The opinions of two of the largest hardware manufacturers certainly means something, and it may be tipping the scales away from Flash and towards H.264.
Encoding.com indicates that in the past year, H.264 format went from 31 percent of all videos to 66 percent. By contrast Flash VP6 and FLV made up 69 percent one year ago and now represent only 26 percent of all videos.
“The formats can be confusing between containers and codecs,” said Encoding.com President Jeff Malkin. “FLV is the Flash container with the old H.263 codec. Flash VP6 is the Flash container with the VP6 codec. H.264 is a codec that is utilized in a number of different containers (.FLV, .MP4, .MOV) and on Apple mobile devices and when deployed by browsers for HTML5. Microsoft just announced that IE will use H.264 as the default codec for HTML5. And, Google will be soon offering the VP8 codec as open source which will add another formidable flag in the format wars.”
Source: Tech Crunch
