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HTML5 Encoding Secrets

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An hour is all a developer needs to begin working with MPEG4/H.264 and WebM video. That's the length of Jan Ozer's information-packed session How To: Encoding Video for HTML5 at the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City.

Presenting detailed information on both formats, as well as the codecs that drive them, Ozer gave viewers the knowledge they need to stream to HTML5 browsers. He even covered the histories of the formats:

"One of the benefits, I think, of Google announcing WebM, is before they did there was some chance that we may have ended up paying for royalties for H.264 in 2015," said Ozer. "MPEG LA, which is the group that controls the patents on H.264, said, 'Okay, we're not going to charge royalties until 2012,' and a lot of people didn't use H.264 because they didn't want to get started with it and then have to pay royalties when they'd be switched. And then they said, 'Okay, we'll put it off until 2015.'

"And then Google bought On2, the VP8 codec, then they open-sourced it, and right after Google open-sourced VP8 as WebM, MPEG LA said, 'No royalties ever on free Internet video.' So if you're distributing video for free over the Internet you can encode in H.264 and you will never incur any royalties. Couldn't say that if we had this discussion last year," he concluded.

At the end of the session, Ozer gives the pros and cons of popular HTML5 video encoding tools. Download Ozer's presentation materials and view the full video below.

How To: Encoding Video For HTML5

Learn the technological fundamentals behind encoding both H.264 and WebM formats for playback with the HTML5 <video> tag. Learn the basics of H.264 and WebM encoding and how to produce it for HTML5 distribution. In addition, see how the various H.264 and WebM encoding tools compare in regard to performance, quality, and features.

Speaker: Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo Publishing

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