HTML5 Canvas, 2nd Edition

H.264 + $$$ = .mp4

H.264 is a high-quality video standard that has received the backing of some very big players, such as Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft. However, despite offering high-quality video, it defines only a standard—not a video codec. An organization named MPEG LA owns the intellectual property, and they license it out to software and hardware vendors. Many companies that have implemented H.264 have done so with their own proprietary codecs. As a result, the varying codecs are incompatible with one another, making this a tricky format to use across multiple platforms. H.264 videos have the .mp4 extension. Most for-profit corporations have implemented support for this format on their platforms, but the developers of open source browsers like Firefox and Opera have not. In late 2010, Google dropped H.264 support in Chrome in favor of WebM.