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No, you can't do that with H.264

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Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#21

Post by sailormoon »

romland wrote: post #13
romland wrote: post #10

The problem with these write-ups about how bad H.264 is (or will be in 2011) is that it will not reach the right people in time; the masses. The people who clicked through to an article with H.264 in the title already know about the ins and outs. The companies that implement and support H.264 also know all about the license, and they have most likely gotten some pretty sweet deals for getting this thing as widely dep…

Worse yet, we do not even know how the license will look When skimming the comments on that page, seems there is something new, (as of yesterday): http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme... [pdf]

Very good information, well spotted!

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#22

Post by qjz »

dagw wrote: post #8
middayc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I do things with video on web, so irrelevant, that they won't notice me" is not the solution to these things. At least not if you want to be a web entrepreneur? If the only widely adopted format on web becomes h264, which would already be the case if Mozilla wasn't resisting (which most of you attacked), then you have no other option than to use this format. And pay, unless your plan is to be unnoticeable. And video…

This could greatly strengthen the business case for sites like YouTube. Since they have a h264 license you don't have to worry about it. Let them compress your video for you and problem solved. The only downside is that all your videos now has to be hosted on YouTube. Perhaps in the near future we'll see a new service which lets you host password protected private videos. I wonder if Google had this scenario in mind…

That's hardly the only downside. It seems more like the final straw to me.

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#23

Post by cjbos »

middayc wrote: post #12
dagw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could greatly strengthen the business case for sites like YouTube. Since they have a h264 license you don't have to worry about it. Let them compress your video for you and problem solved. The only downside is that all your videos now has to be hosted on YouTube. Perhaps in the near future we'll see a new service which lets you host password protected private videos. I wonder if Google had this scenario in mind…

Yes, this would greatly strengthen all big players that want to own the web (Goog, Apl..). Now if you want to make the competitive browser you have to pay the licenses, same for video site and probably many things. The absurdity goes even to this. If you compile the "Open Sourced" Chrome by yourself and distribute it you would have to pay the license to MPEG guys.

On VP6 is still the most widely used codec on the web... almost all live streaming is vp6. (Flash web cam chat is Spark codec).

So the opportunity still exists for you or your sister to encode web videos for commercial use and have them playable by the majority of users today with no legal hassles.

The issue tends to be with the HD quality video craze thats happening now. VP6 is fine, but its noticeably different in quality to h.264. Most people wont notice the difference when encoded at high bitrates unless you know what to look for.

What bugs me is Apple is part of that whole h.264 consortium that owns the h.264 patents, yet the also serve on the web standards group defining html5... I don't think they can be impartial there, also denying flash on apple products is more to do with protecting the codecs that can be used to the ones they own. If you sell a app on the apple store that uses h.264 video then you better be sure you own the commercial license as apple know who you are.

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#24

Post by alextgordon »

qjz wrote: post #20
PanMan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nice, but as long as Flash, Silverlight, iPhones, don't support Theora but do support h264, it's not that practical..

But there are no barriers to adopting Theora practically overnight, once the market expresses an interest. Vorbis seems to be well supported after an initial wait-and-see period.

Apple and Microsoft are the barriers. Neither one is going to adopt Theora.

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#25

Post by demallien »

motters wrote: post #5
eelco wrote: post #2

Well, so how much does the licensing actually cost? On their website MPEG LA mentions there are certain thresholds to "minimize the impact on lower volume users" ( http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Intro.aspx ). If you're running an consulting business using this format is it so weird to pay a little (or maybe nothing?) to use it? I'm pretty sure you can find outrageous (and oftentimes unlawful) things in…

In the sort of world that we've occupied until now there is nobody who is going to sue you for making a cat video using a particular codec. But I notice that over time enforcement of licenses is becoming more strict, and perhaps eventually license enforcement will be automatic. Using the H.264 standard for video on the internet seems like a dumb decision to me. It's not rocket science to choose some format which does…

Developers, and even device manufacturers, don't really have much of a say in this. The problem is that many applications these days are in processing power constrained devices - netbooks, smartphones, set top boxes.

For example, at the moment I'm working on a set top box. The processor is simply unable to handle 720p decoding. We need to rely on the decoder built into the chip to make it happen. And that decoder only does license-encumbered formats.

Because there are a lot of devices that fall into this category, content providers are pretty much constrained to generating content in the formats handled by hardware, which in turn reinforces the use of these formats in hardware.

Really, the only way out of this loop would be for the big-league device manufacturers - Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc to decide to change format. They don't seem to want to, so the rest of us are stuck with h264...

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#26

Post by IgorPartola »

qjz wrote: post #20
PanMan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nice, but as long as Flash, Silverlight, iPhones, don't support Theora but do support h264, it's not that practical..

But there are no barriers to adopting Theora practically overnight, once the market expresses an interest. Vorbis seems to be well supported after an initial wait-and-see period.

And what if you have around 8 petabytes of video (http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-...) in H.264? What would you do, double your storage? How long would that take to re-encode anyways. The reason why Youtube is using H.264 instead of Theora is because they already have the videos in that format.

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#27

Post by tjogin »

romland wrote: post #10

The problem with these write-ups about how bad H.264 is (or will be in 2011) is that it will not reach the right people in time; the masses. The people who clicked through to an article with H.264 in the title already know about the ins and outs. The companies that implement and support H.264 also know all about the license, and they have most likely gotten some pretty sweet deals for getting this thing as widely dep…

There are obvious problems with H.264, but I don't believe MPEG LA's plan is to sue regular people for not complying with the license agreement when they did that video that one time.

Not because I think they're not evil enough to do it, but because that kind of money-making scheme just doesn't scale.

Also, whenever they've sued one or two people, people's eyes will open and they'll just use an other codec. No big deal.

As a means to make money, that strategy simply sucks. A more likely turn of events is that licensing H.264 becomes quite a bit less good of a deal when H.264 has truly established itself. But even then they're not going to sue millions of people, because that doesn't scale, they're going to sue big vendors and service providers.

Certainly, that's not great either. But no, MPEG LA are not coming after "_you_".

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#28

Post by sailormoon »

DrJokepu wrote: post #9
motters wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the sort of world that we've occupied until now there is nobody who is going to sue you for making a cat video using a particular codec. But I notice that over time enforcement of licenses is becoming more strict, and perhaps eventually license enforcement will be automatic. Using the H.264 standard for video on the internet seems like a dumb decision to me. It's not rocket science to choose some format which does…

Unfortunately, Theora is just simply inferior in every technical aspect to h264. The decision comes down to quality vs price. Choosing quality for a higher price is definitely not a "dumb" decision, surely you too often buy a bit more expensive product that promises a better quality. On the other hand, choosing a cheaper, lower quality product is understandable as well if quality is not that important. Vorbis, howeve…

Sigh. I've recently been doing a lot of Theora encoding as I experiment with HTML5. I agree that Theora is immediately noticeable as worse quality than h264, and it's not a subtle difference. Even when the situation should have tricked me into thinking it was not Theora - for example, I was testing on Mac Safari and it should have been playing h264 but accepted the Theora because Perian was installed - I instantly noticed the unexpected codec because the quality was so inferior. Those people claiming the two are of comparable quality should get their eyes checked.

I hear a lot of talk about how it's "good enough" but quite frankly it's not. If my videos look bad, I look bad. It matters, to me at least.

Frankly at this point I wish the governments of the world would just hand the licensees $100m and annul all the patents for the public good. The cost of worrying about the damn licenses seems likely to eclipse the economic contribution of the IP itself.

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#29

Post by sailormoon »

middayc wrote: post #18

T.F.A. site getting hammered, copy/past ==No, you can’t do that with H.264== A lot of commercial software comes with H.264 encoders and decoders, and some computers arrive with this software preinstalled. This leads a lot of people to believe that they can legally view and create H.264 videos for whatever purpose they like. Unfortunately for them, it ain’t so. Maybe the best example comes from the Final Cut Pro licen…

Why is this being downvoted? The site was down and the parent was just trying to be helpful. I admit the formatting is a bit bad but does that deserve punishment?

edit: parent was at -1 when I posted that.

Re: No, you can't do that with H.264

#30

Post by romland »

tjogin wrote: post #27
romland wrote: post #10

The problem with these write-ups about how bad H.264 is (or will be in 2011) is that it will not reach the right people in time; the masses. The people who clicked through to an article with H.264 in the title already know about the ins and outs. The companies that implement and support H.264 also know all about the license, and they have most likely gotten some pretty sweet deals for getting this thing as widely dep…

There are obvious problems with H.264, but I don't believe MPEG LA's plan is to sue regular people for not complying with the license agreement when they did that video that one time. Not because I think they're not evil enough to do it, but because that kind of money-making scheme just doesn't scale. Also, whenever they've sued one or two people, people's eyes will open and they'll just use an other codec. No big de…

No, they are probably not out to get you and me... Unless you fall into one of the "still to be specified categories". I guess my biggest problem is that there are questions begging for answers.

I admit that I went a bit over the top in the scare mongering with "_you_", though.

(the comments at the end of the article linked above is quite interesting, by the way)

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