The last few weeks have been filled with controversy in respect to Apple and Adobe, and, in many ways, Google. As HTML5 makes its way to an increasing number of platforms and the rate of adoption rises, various companies are fighting to determine the codec which the new <video> tag should utilize. Apple’s Steve Jobs remains adamant that H.264 is the way to go and that separate plug-ins should not have to be used for viewing video on the web. Meanwhile, Adobe stands by their Flash platform, which includes support for H.264 as well as other proprietary formats. Finally, Google has taken it upon themselves to set the new standard of web video formats with WebM, a VP8 codec the company is open-sourcing after their acquisition of On2. So which will prevail? And does it really matter?

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