251–260 of 358 posts
I like Gruber, but he's almost insufferable on issues like these. These questions are "simple" in the least flattering sense. Let's dispatch them: If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why? The premise is that openness is all or nothing. But Google can support Flash and work towards openness, just as Apple can prefer open web standards in…
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1) You aren't going to get H.264 decoder for free. There will be always at least license fees to MPEG-LA. 2) Current hardware video decoders are DSPs. You are not going to "waste valuable board space". It is a program in ROM, it is easy to change H.264 to VP8, you will probably even save some space.
1) Those license fees approach zero as you produce more units. 2) If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
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Multiple companies, including Apple (and Nokia, which ain't exactly a minor player in the mobile market) objected to HTML5 mandating support for a particular codec, largely on the grounds that we don't really know the patent situations of any of the allegedly-unencumbered codecs. Now it's my turn to call bullshit. "We don't really know the patent situations of $x" could be used as an argument against ANY piece of sof…
There ain't no such thing as a free codec. At least, not as long as software patents exist. Does Google want a Free, interoperable web? Then they should take the money they'd spend re-encoding all of YouTube into VP8 and instead spend it on lobbying to eliminate software patents. Then they could just use whatever's the best option from a technical perspective and we could stop having codec shitstorms every six months…
This is what groups like the MPEG-LA want us to think, but I'm not so sure. The Ogg Vorbis codec used for WebM audio has been in use for a decade, and has shipped in dozens of software and hardware products, some from large companies with big pockets. MPEG-LA made the same vague threats about patent pools against Vorbis, but they never followed through.
Xiph.org conducted a patent search early in the Vorbis process, and believes Vorbis does not infringe on any patents. Google has done their homework on VP8 as well. If they did it right, then VP8 is no more vulnerable to unknown patent threats than any random piece of software. (Sadly, any random piece of software is somewhat vulnerable.)
For that matter, there's no guarantee that H.264 is invulnerable from patent trolls who aren't members of the licensing pool. MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify licensees against third-party patents.
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Really? "Disruptive Technology" don't happen? Google drove the cost of smartphone OSes down to as near to zero as patent law will allow. I'd say that is a game changer. How much does WebM cost?
The issue is not whether it's a game changer. Apple's game is to build devices, software, and a highly consistent and polished user experience, irresistable to buyers and app developers, all in an effort to capture maximum profit share. Google's game is to build a similar OS that is irresistible to device makers, all in an effort to maximize market share and the advertising revenues boiling off the free app ecosystem…
Actually the more I think about it the more non-sensical your original statement and this conversation becomes. ;)
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From the bits and pieces that I have read, there are some very real patent questions still looming. Jason Garett-Glaser put together a great comparison of h.264 vs VP8/WebM. Check it out here: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 His summary: the spec is really terrible, the performance leaves a lot to be desired (though, there is a lot of room for optimization), and it 'copies too much from H.264 for comfort'.
Sorry for the downvote but that was a very early analysis and the story has progressed a bit since. There's room for a more nuanced evaluation of WebM which I'd like to hear.
The whole VP8/webm situation reminds me of when Microsoft tried to do the right thing and open-license VC1, but got clobbered by patent holders and had to reverse themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) You aren't going to get H.264 decoder for free. There will be always at least license fees to MPEG-LA. 2) Current hardware video decoders are DSPs. You are not going to "waste valuable board space". It is a program in ROM, it is easy to change H.264 to VP8, you will probably even save some space.
1) Those license fees approach zero as you produce more units. 2) If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
The accelerator units are usually filters that operate over a region of memory while processor is busy computing something else. These can be made fixed function, however most of them are programmable to support multiple steps in codec processing.
I like Gruber, but he's almost insufferable on issues like these. These questions are "simple" in the least flattering sense. Let's dispatch them: If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why? The premise is that openness is all or nothing. But Google can support Flash and work towards openness, just as Apple can prefer open web standards in…
(Edit: bane points out that you can disable Flash in Chrome. My original point still stands, but my wording was misleading.)
As with most things Google does, I don't see this as being in the interest of 'openness' at all. I feel more like what they really want is a format that they can control and add features to (such as, for example, embedded advertising).
In the end, Google is a business, and its business is ads. Everything Google does is about either delivering ads to people (Google Mail), making sure it's their ads that are delivered (YouTube), or about making sure they don't get locked out of a market (Android).
So here's my question: where's the money here? It's obviously far more expensive at this point to use WebM than H.264, so what financial motivation is there for them to push the WebM codec this hard this fast?
Give us the tags to support it but leave it up to a plugin.
I know that multiple developers can focus on different parts of a browser's codebase at once, but it still doesn't make sense to me that a browser codebase should maintain a video codec as advanced as H.264 which constantly has room for performance/quality improvement.
Sorry google, but I own an iPad. :(
HOWEVER, I'd like to raise a couple of points.
One is that the x264 devs, easily some of the most codec-knowledgeable people in the world, have raised questions about VP8's patent exposure. It's fair to say that On2 didn't have to worry about getting sued over implementation details of VP8 as long as its design was hidden and proprietary, but I'm quite confident that google is going to get shaken down over webm, a lot like Microsoft did with VC1. Unlike Microsoft and VC1, Google will settle and license the patents in question, with indemnification for webm users, because webm is more important to them than VC1 was to MS. But it's going to cost them.
Second, anyone serving video now has a nice low-resistance path that means encoding exclusively in h264 - served up via the html5 tag for iPhone and newer browsers, and served up inside flv with a flash plugin for older browsers. H264 isn't going to go away anytime soon, so google wants everyone to start encoding 2x now - with h264 and VP8. Or I guess you can just start using YouTube...?