Today, Google made publishing video on the web harder. They announced that they will stop supporting H.264 video in HTML5 <video> elements in Chrome in the next couple months. As someone who publishes video on the web (and writes a tool that publishes video on the web), choosing a codec is hard. The best choice today is H.264. It's the only codec that will work on most mobile devices. It's the only codec with hardware decoding support (which is especially important for underpowered, battery-strained mobile devices). Up until now, you get HTML5 support in Safari, Chrome, and IE9.

What really frustrates me is that Google seems to not care about the web developers of the world. Google added HTML5 <video> support and the H.264 codec to Chrome in October of 2009. They announced its removal less than 15 months later. I'm fine with advancing standards, but adding support for something and then removing it that quickly is too much churn. Web developers don't need to rewrite their sites every year to adjust to what Google wants to support this year. If they choose to add something, they need to keep it for a reasonable amount of time, then deprecate it for a reasonable amount of time before removing it. 15 months feature lifespan followed by a "couple months" of deprecation is not sufficient.

I find it funny that this move will not only hurt those outside Google, but those inside as well. Youtube now must choose between supporting their own browser, supporting most mobile devices, or doubly encoding their videos to support both. I'm really interested to see what the Android team does. Google disapproves of H.264, but it's the only codec with hardware decoding support in mobile devices. Do they drop support for H.264 as well, leaving them with no way to play HD video and enormous battery drain from decoding low-res videos through he CPU alone? Or, do they stick with H.264 despite their desktop browser abandoning it?

Google, please get your act together. I know you're not big on common vision and working together within your organization, but this is getting ridiculous.