> I'm sure that a lot of people with flash video delivery systems did not particularly enjoy converting to h.264
Flash is a wrapper, not a codec, and has in fact supported H.264 encoded video for some time. A "switch" from Flash to (likely MP4 wrapped) H.264 entails only removing the Flash wrapper, not a re-encode of the content. Apple not supporting Flash is not the same thing as Google not supporting H.264 (codec != container).
I know full well that Flash is not a codec; I never implied as such. The point is, many people served a non-h.264 codec through flash, and so they would not have just been able to supply the same source video through a <video> tag rather than through flash.
I don’t think Theora and VP8 were widely used before the first browsers gained support for the <video> tag. Does Chrome support other codecs than those two?
Flash...has in fact supported H.264 encoded video for some time.
Could someone offer a citation for this? My understanding has been that the codec typically used for Flash video has long been almost-H.263, not H.264. Wikipedia, for what it's worth, currently reflects that version of history, saying "Commonly, Flash Video FLV files contain video bit streams which are a proprietary variant of the H.263 video standard", and "The most recent public releases of Flash Player...also support H.264 video".
Flash is a wrapper, not a codec, and has in fact supported H.264 encoded video for some time. A "switch" from Flash to (likely MP4 wrapped) H.264 entails only removing the Flash wrapper, not a re-encode of the content. Apple not supporting Flash is not the same thing as Google not supporting H.264 (codec != container).