You were hoping the format war was over? Sorry - according to officials of Sorenson Media, the format war is still going on.  

'The majority of Web video today is in the Flash format,' they noted, adding that 'Flash can use a few codecs to work including  H.264. H.264 can also be used in QuickTime and Mpeg-4 videos, which is another major format. 'Other, less prominent, formats they mentioned include Windows Media (still big abroad), Real Media, and soon to be WebM video (Google's new open source video).

And of course, as we're all aware, Apple (News - Alert) devices do not play nicely with Flash. The only way that video can be viewed on Apple devices is if that video is encoded in H.264.  So, even though you can view YouTube on the iPhone (News - Alert), Sorenson officials say, you still only get a percentage of the actual content available from them, because for years YouTube only encoded to Flash video.

Window Media-based devices can only view video that is encoded to the .wmv (Windows Media) format or .3gp (type of h.264 file) unless they have a flash decoder built into the chipset, which some newer phones have: 'Content creators are forced to created various versions of their videos for different device type. This is time consuming and costly.'
 
Sorenson Media officials say they're doing something about it, though. 'Our intelligent embed codes in Sorenson 360 detect what type of browser is trying to view the video. For example, if it detects that it is being viewed on the mobile Safari browser, then the player will unwrap the video from the Flash player and serve it up in the native QuickTime player.  We've future-proofed these embedded codes so that when new devices come to market we'll be able to serve them as well.'

Sorenson Media is format agnostic as well. 'No matter what format ends up winning the device and Web format war we'll be able to support it.,' company officials declare, adding that they're licensing their Spark decoder for inclusion on mobile devices 'so that users will be able to view content created in the Flash format.'