[JethroUK]

Click on a link to any common video file type using Internet Explorer and the video runs in media player

Google Chrome just downloads the file

Tried a google search for "google chrome video formats" and all it finds are articles on GC dropping support for H264 - like it supports the other 4573829 formats - but cant actually find any video format it does support - not a sausage - bugger all


Anyone know which video format is supported by Google chrome? avi mpeg mp4?

[alias alias]

Chrome supports Theora WebM VP8 and H.264 manual install.

Windows Media Player HTML5 (mp4) Extension for Chrome
http://www.interoperabilitybridges.c...ion-for-chrome

[JethroUK]

Originally Posted by alias alias

Chrome supports Theora WebM VP8 and H.264 manual install.

...

mmmmm..

never heard of any of them

I have 5382947 video convertors, each of which converts 75438294732894732 different video types - but they've never heard of any of them either )

so 'None' seems to be the answers for all practicable purposes

looks like i'll stick with IE for now - cheers

[JethroUK]

For anyone with same problem

Converted all the videos to mp4 - the files are tiny compared to original avi - yet still perfectly watchable - stream nicely from Internet Explorer (without any special add-ons or website engines) and to my surprise - they stream from Google Chrome too - in fact even faster

[alias alias]

If they are local files not on the internet then set the default program to WMP.

Right click the avi / mp4 > 'Open with' > 'Choose default program..'

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...ogram32423.jpg

[barky99]

your ability to see the video content depends on codecs you have installed (I installed vlc media player to cover most of them), then other content requires flash player, silverlight

[JethroUK]

Originally Posted by alias alias

If they are local files not on the internet then set the default program to WMP.

Right click the avi / mp4 > 'Open with' > 'Choose default program..'

http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g2...ogram32423.jpg

Google Chrome doesn't use WMPlayer, it just plays directly thro the browser - like i say - it actually faster than Win Explorer at streaming mp4s

[Esot-eric]

Originally Posted by JethroUK

Google Chrome doesn't use WMPlayer, it just plays directly thro the browser - like i say - it actually faster than Win Explorer at streaming mp4s

MP4 isn't a codec, it's a container (think of it as a jar that you can stick all sorts of audio and video codecs into).

Usually MP4 files contain either MPEG 4 part 2 video or MPEG 4 part 10 (h.264) video with AAC or MP3 audio.

Google have previously said they're going to drop Chrome support for h.264 (i don't even know if they support MPEG 4 part 2). Whether they're still going to do this or not i don't know.

h.264 isn't royalty-free so there are problems with including support for it in free browsers (you also need a license to encode and stream video using h.264 but MPEG-LA are letting people use it for free until 2016).

Webm is Google's answer to this problem. They bought a company that created video codecs and released the VP8 codec royalty-free. This means it's supported in Chrome, Firefox and Opera with IE support if you have the codecs installed system-wide. It's also supported in Android 2.3.4 and above.

When Webm (which is VP8 video and Ogg Vorbis audio) was originally released there were some reports slamming it as being of poorer quality than h.264, but these have been debunked now.

h.264 is far more popular as a format, mainly because of hardware support, but Google also makes a hardware VP8 ASIC design available for free too, so hopefully there will be more hardware support in the future.