Submitted by R.J. Steinert on Mon, 06/07/2010 - 16:39
UPDATE: It looks like Apple is serving HTML5 players if the browser you are using supports the h264 format natively. The Quicktime Player is a fall back if the format is not supported. Thank you to anonymous for clearing this up. Also, thank you for all the attention from HN, I had 2,000 unique visitors yesterday :).
Today in my RSS reader I saw a link to the iPhone 4.0 official video and I thought, "Oh boy eye candy!" What I got was a big fat "Download Quicktime to view this video" message. My heart sank. Not because I wasn't going to be able to watch the video on my unsupported Linux platform, but because it was suddenly clear that Steve Job's rejection of proprietary web standards (Flash) was completely selfish. Who is he to criticize Adobe for promoting a proprietary web standard and then shove his own proprietary video player down consumers' throats?