I just ran into a video on youtube that played with h.264 codec that is incompatible with Comodo Dragon. It’s compatible on Firefox and on Chrome though; made me a sad.
Firefox, Opera and Chromium (including Dragon) have no H.264-decoder.
Google Chrome currently has a H.264-decoder, but will drop support for it.
Don’t expect H.264- and AAC-decoders to appear in the browser that do not have it. One reason is license fees (for audio and video).
All new videos and most old videos on YouTube are available in WebM-format, using VP8 video-codec and Vorbis audio-codec. It usually takes some more time (hours) before the WebM-version is available.
What is sad in this, is that Microsoft and Apple (members of MPEG-LA) only include support for H.264 in their browsers and phones.
One thing that works for me…if a youtube video says I don’t have the proper codec to view it, go to the uploader’s channel and view the video from there. So far, I have never had a problem watching a video from there.
On the channel-page YouTube always uses/tries to use Flash Player, even if html5 has been enabled by the user.
Any browser with Flash Player installed will “support” any audio- and video-codec Flash Player supports. I think what Squirrel7 is talking about is what Dragon natively supports, i.e. without plug-ins.
Thank you for your responses. It all makes more sense now after reading your messages and looking up more information about this codec. Now it seems that it’s not that important for browsers to natively support this codec, especially with WebM coming out, and Chromium does support Silverlight 5, which I just learned supports H.264 decoding. It’s all very interesting.