JJ wrote:
On Wed, 21 Nov 2018 12:06:29 -0700, Bill in Co wrote:
But the thing is, in practice, mp4 (with h264 video and aac audio) seemed
pretty ubiquitous in its usage, and nobody seemed to mind (or at least
so I thought). And ditto with mp3 for audio. Example case in point was
YouTube, in allowing the use of mp4 for its videos. So, something must
have changed, and I don't think it was any alleged superiority of webm
and vp9 over mp4 and h264.

I think it's because of MPEG's momentum, which has been going for quite a
long time. Moreover, their initial innovation was a big deal for the
digital multimedia field. And being accepted as an international standard
gave it more steady footing as a leader. Many gadgets have adopted their
media formats because of that. WebM/other formats haven't widely adopted
yet, or even known yet. MPEG is simply to big to overcome right away.

YouTube obviously paid the rolayties, for the sake of business. They want
their videos to (still) be playable on gadgets, since most of them are
still supporting MPEG's media formats.

IMO... WebM is much better than MP4. VP9 is slightly better than H264, but
MPEG have HEVC now. And Vorbis is mediocre in comparison with AAC. But
these don't really matter. Who has the most good reputation, will keep
leading.

I am curious as to why you said webm is "much better" than mp4. One article
said that webm is "specifically designed for the Internet" (whatever that
exactly means, since mp4's seem to work pretty well on the Internet, too
(and can also be stopped and paused, etc. etc).

I'm aware that h265 or HEVC has come out now, although I don't know how many
older players can accomodate that, or worse, VP9 and OGG, for that matter.
But I guess it's principally come down the royalties thing. (As an aside,
I guess VP8 is more comparable to h264, and VP9 to h265, so I'll add that as
a correction).

Like I said, too bad for a lot of us, since so much stuff that now works
(with mp4 files) will be left out in the cold. And that includes some large
screen TVs too, like my Samsung, which can directly play mp4 files on a USB
stick. How many TV sets can directly play webm videos saved on a USB
stick?

I presume there are some shareware programs out there now that can work with
webm video files just as effectively as they did with mp4 files, but maybe
it's too soon.