211–220 of 358 posts
Next move, suddenly youtube stops encoding in h.264 and youtube won't be able to be played on the iPad. And Android tablets look a LOT better.
If YouTube goes exclusively to WebM/Flash, who wins that game of chicken? Apple or Google? I actually think Apple wins it as someone creates iTube. People will switch browsers. They won't give up their iPad (at least not until there are some better Android browsers on the market).
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> There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders. The very article states that there are hardware WebM decoders, not only that but Google is licensing the technology for free as in zero dollars: http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...
Licensing isn't the (only) issue for asics. Hardware decoders are only reasonably priced if they're being produced at scale. If I'm a device manufacturer and I have a choice between getting h.264 for free because it's on the SoC I'm using and paying multiple dollars (!) for a WebM decoder, not to mention wasting valuable board space and paying for it to be soldered on, which do you think I'll choose?
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And why will that happen? Because people like to pay license fees so much they will be all too eager to pay the fees for both h.264 encoding and flash? Yes, businesses that already use h.264 and flash will probably continue using them. But the bootstrapped websites and startups will opt for the free stuff at least initially, and of all those bootstrapped startups some will be successful enough to make some noise. And…
You're dreaming if you think Apple is going to add WebM hardware decoding support to iPhones. That would basically mean that all previously sold iPhones would be marginalized, it would increase the hardware costs and space/power requirements, and there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.
The thing is that all of those video standards use more or less the same basic math operations, just in a different way. This means that a WebM hardware accelerator would look very similar hardware wise to a h.264 one but would have different firmware.
In practice, I am sure that the hardware companies will make one hardware accelerator that can handle both h.264 and webm through different firmware programs. So you wont need much additional silicon or power to handle WebM. It might cost more, if the hardware companies decide to charge extra for WebM support, but that surcharge will not be much, because (i) they do not need to pay license fees, and (ii) there is a lot of competition in that field.
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And why will that happen? Because people like to pay license fees so much they will be all too eager to pay the fees for both h.264 encoding and flash? Yes, businesses that already use h.264 and flash will probably continue using them. But the bootstrapped websites and startups will opt for the free stuff at least initially, and of all those bootstrapped startups some will be successful enough to make some noise. And…
You're dreaming if you think Apple is going to add WebM hardware decoding support to iPhones. That would basically mean that all previously sold iPhones would be marginalized, it would increase the hardware costs and space/power requirements, and there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.
hristov's entire parent post was about why this sentence should end in "for now."
As a person who encodes video for the web for a living I can tell you we won't be switching to WebM because of iOS and other hardware devices that have hardware based decoding. H.264 is the closest thing to a ubiquitous codec there is and assuming Chrome correctly updates the "canPlayType" javascript function I won't even have to update our players to provide Chrome users with the crappy Flash player. As a Chrome use…
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Well i don't know. What i see : Adobe is gonna support webm. So having only one format is gonna be possible. Browsers who supported or were gonna support H264 : - Safari (5% market share) - IE9 (0% market share right now, probably around 15% in 3 years) - Chrome (around 13 %) Browsers who supports Webm : - Firefox (30% market share) - Chrome - IE9 will probably support it via codecs which is better than nothing The b…
IE8 is at 33% share now. IE7 is about 7%. I expect most on IE6 are still on XP. So I'd expect that we'll see similar uptake rates for IE9, if not more given the HTML5 benefit (IE8 doesn't have much clear benefit over IE7 from what I can tell). So I'd say expect IE9 to be closer to 27% in 3 years. Of course this ignores two big questions: 1) Is IE still hemorraging market share? 2) Does IE9 actually reverse the trend…
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> WebM is probably patent encumbered. We just don't know who owns the patents yet. Actually we do, because Google used the very clever strategy of essentially copying the H.264 algorithm and then methodically working around all the patents. This means that if there are outstanding patents on WebM they are probably on H.264 as well. But the great likelihood is that there are not outstanding patents because any such pa…
Can you support this statement? Because Google didn't even create VP8 - they bought it with ON2. I can't find anything that supports your statement. H264 isn't "an algorithm" its a pretty massive collection of different algorithms. I actually find it a bit difficult its not infringing in some way and this analysis seems to confirm this. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
I don't think your link contradicts what I said - in fact, in a way it gels very well with it: the conclusion is that VP8 is essentially H.264 with all sorts of bits missing and tweaks that in most cases make it worse than H.264. That's exactly what you would expect if someone took a patented algorithm and went through it point by point to work around the patented parts.
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WebM is a relatively new entrant into the encoding field, Only getting opened up in the last 8 months. Ogg has always been a fairly significantly worse codec then H264. "Even the 1mbps Ogg Theora clips are not on par with the 468 kbps h264 clips." [1] Considering that MS and Apple have been working in video for a long time now they chose the codec with the best available experience for their users (who aren't the one…
I must say that the ogg video samples i have seen are not as good as the h.264 samples. But good enough for probably 90% of internet video. Anyway, i think WebM comes very close already (i actually don't see differences): http://www.quavlive.com/video_codec_comparison Instead of embracing the patent encumbered codec we should be thankful for Google to actually buy a codec (VP8) and release it _for free_. I couldn't i…
Then they can use a browser whose creators decide to pay for the license.
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> The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264 You kind of buried this but this is the true deal breaker. There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders. And Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9).
> There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders. The very article states that there are hardware WebM decoders, not only that but Google is licensing the technology for free as in zero dollars: http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...
is that true? how many released mobile devices have hardware support for the webM decoder?