No one cares about the desktop, not because of popularity today, but because of popularity tomorrow. And more importantly is the other point I made. On my desktop I have ever codec ever created. It doesn't matter what <video> uses. But it's all of my mobile (and embedded) devices that don't have support for every codec, and I generally can't install a new codec on them.
To put it another, if there were no mobile devices, this would be a complete non-issue.
So you care only about tomorrow's popularity, but are worried about today's hardware?
Tomorrow decoding of WebM on mobiles might not be a problem, even for battery life. Mutlicore SIMD and programmable GPUs are coming already, and their power efficiency steadily increases.
Google has got Qualcomm, Broadcom and few others on board with WebM. If WebM takes off, Apple will need to take all their chipset production in house in order to get chipset without WebM acceleration ;)
Did you miss where I say, "And more importantly..."?
And which chips are on the roadmap to have WebM support? I don't know of any announced QCOM or NVidia devices that have WebM support. The only I've seen is Broadcoms, and its certainly not on par with the existing H264 HW accelerators.
And if Intel doesn't add WebM support, which I don't believe they have commited to doing, this could be long haul. Because desktop isn't sufficient with respect to codecs, you do need desktop chipset support with respect to acceleration. No one will be happy if they can't watch 720P video on their high end computer.
Best case scenario is that we see WebM having the level of coverage as H264 has TODAY is probably 2013.
Like I've said, there will be those of that fight against WebM and you'll fight for it. Maybe we just end up with a fragmented world.
No one cares about H.264 via HTML5, not because of popularity today, but because of popularity tomorrow.
Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month (they also support H.264 and legacy VP6 via Flash). The hardware churn rate in mobile will solve this problem rapidly and the gaps can be filled quite easily by software wherever there is a will.
Devices with the fastest growing mobile OS and hardware WebM decode are shipping this month
That doesn't make any sense. What you meant to say was that the fastest growing segment of mobile devices, prior to the iPhone/Verizon, is Android with devices that don't have WebM HW acceleration.
Again, I'm fine with a fragmented HTML5 world. There will be the Google WebM world. And the MS/Apple H264 world. I'm perfectly happy with that.
To put it another, if there were no mobile devices, this would be a complete non-issue.