Originally posted by Christine Tham Again, ahem.
AVI is a "proprietary" container originally designed by Microsoft (Windows media player).
MOV is a "proprietary" container originally designed by Apple (Quicktime).
Neither of these two formats have anything to do with HTML5, and both pre-date HTML5 by a good few years.
AVCHD on the other hand uses M2TS is which an "open" container.
I'm not sure why you think M2TS will make "integrated H.264 encode/decode designs inapplicable" - MPEG Transport Stream is just about one of the most widely supported distribution containers out there - used in DVB broadcasts all over the world. It is supported on just about anything I know, and inbuilt into most GPUs and video processors.
AVCHD support and transcoding is a recent phenom in editing and GPU support. The M2T stream is a Blu-Ray concoction, adopted by MPEG and ISO by Sony strong-arming, not industry consensus. FCP and CS4 relied on hacked external transcoding to edit AVCHD because good old Sony wanted to have all editing loop back to their devices, not more flexible, internet-friendly containers such as AVI or MOV where both MS and Apple actually made the license buy-in part of their developer system. Sony OTOH had no such "openness"
and actually denied licensing, even to Adobe. As such AVCHD is not natively supported at the OS level.
Both MS (AVI) and Apple (MOV) are dedicated to HTML5 and their containers being part of that. Sony won't even sit at the table. They fear the web eating Blu-Ray (duh) and so the concern is that Sony formats will once again be at the whim of Sony paranoia. It's not that AVCHD per se is a bad implementation (really the first with AVC) but that Sony tech is a licensing crapshoot. Sony wants you to transcode and playback on a Sony device. AVCHD not native on a major OS means it should not be native on a camera OS, especially for consumers. That's my take.