Ignore standards at your peril!

If you are a web developer, you really need to think about who is out there using your sites. Browser market share has changed dramatically from the time when your audience was 95% Windows and IE, with 5% 'others'. Today approximately 10% of web surfers are OSX users, with 88% running Windows.

Windows 7 even though it is still a beta product is proving to be very popular, seeming to suggest that Microsoft will have a hit on their hands when they release it replacing many older copies of Windows out there. The Windows 7 beta includes support for h264 encoded Mp4 video files as well as AAC audio.

This is absolutely huge from the point of view of anyone creating media or including media on their shiny new web 2.0 sites. The h264 codec is incredibly important as it is an open standard which is in use by a very large number of professional industry heavyweights such as, The BBC, BBC iPlayer, SkyTV, and practically every Hollywood studio / editing facility.

This means that if you encode your video as an MP4 file using the h264 codec, it will be natively playable 'out of the box' on OSX, Linux, the Web, the iPhone, and many other mobile internet devices and now Windows 7 using windows media player. The video also does not have to be re-encoded to support YouTube, the BBC iPlayer, and Flash.

I give Microsoft a standing ovation for making use of and adopting open standards. I urge everyone producing content to use Mp4/h264 rather than closed proprietary video formats. I'm sure this would never have happened while Bill Gates was running Microsoft, however, I'd like to see them go one step further and make h264 the default as Apple did several years ago.

Have a look at The quicktime HD guide and Vincent Laforet - Smugmug to see what h264 can do. Sorry, but the next time I see scabby 320x240 video on the web that can only be played on a small number of platforms I will scream!