No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM • Hacker News Board

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#161

Post by fczuardi » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 10:50 AM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #160

fczuardi wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a strategy in the middle however for google/youtube to make people want to migrate to browsers and devices that supports webm/vp8: all they have to do is to continue serving both webm and h264 versions, but make the h264 version a worst experience. For example: make all h264 encoded clips on youtube become grayscale while mantainig the vp8 ones high quality and in color. People would not be prevented from wa…

Don't forget that more and more video content will be available on iPad from ITMS. And I assure you, it won't be grayscale, and it won't eat as much battery as WebM without hardware support.

Yep, Apple could be the provider of the devices that can play everything! Both the paid, hardware accelerated, hollywood/DRM-ed stuff from ITMS and the free amateur/amazing content of youtube(hopefully harware accelerated eventually too).

Apple supporting both vp8 and h264 would continue to be the company with the best mobile devices, but if they don't embrace the open unemcumbered format that firefox, opera, chrome and youtube uses they will be giving an either/or kind of choice for mobile consumers, they would be making them choose between hollywood and youtube, stating that their costumers cant have both.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#162

Post by statictype » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 11:32 AM UTC

neild wrote: post #76

commandar wrote: post #18

I was discussing this with some people yesterday. I find it incredibly frustrating that the Grubers of the world have spent months attacking Google for supporting the evil, closed Flash, but then manage to spin Google dropping a closed format in favor of an open one as evil and using it as a roundabout way of continuing to hate on Flash. The fact of the matter is that Flash is an entrenched, defacto standard and isn'…

I was discussing this with some people yesterday. I find it incredibly frustrating that the Grubers of the world have spent months attacking Google for supporting the evil, closed Flash, but then manage to spin Google dropping a closed format in favor of an open one as evil and using it as a roundabout way of continuing to hate on Flash. Your argument turns on Gruber hating Flash for being closed. He doesn't: He hate…

Your argument turns on Gruber hating Flash for being closed. He doesn't: He hates Flash because he thinks it's crap

Not entirely:

Let me be clear, though: there is nothing wrong with playing a video in Flash. I mean that seriously, no sarcasm. What there’s something wrong with is requiring Flash Player to play video. That’s the whole point of the HTML5 element: to enable web video without requiring the use of proprietary plugins.

From http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/practical_vs_idealistic

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#163

Post by ZeroGravitas » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 12:34 PM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #139

vetinari wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The x264 developer often cited by H.264 proponents. He wrote, that VP8 is slightly better than H.264 baseline.

Jason GG? Yes. He did. When he agreed with me. He even confirmed my suspicion about 8x8[1]. [1] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Quote from your link:

"VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”

I believe this was written before the update that acknowledges that VP8 has a partial analogue for B-Frames (which aren't present in Baseline H.264).

Another quote:

"The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264"

I guess it's arguable what he actually means because he's not explicit but I read both quotes together (and indeed the whole piece) as saying the VP8 spec is better than the H.264 Baseline spec. Whether that translates in the actual encoders, depends mostly on the particular H.264 encoder.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#164

Post by jarek » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 1:49 PM UTC

marckremers wrote: post #133

But isn't it too late? http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/01/h-264-66-percent-web-video/ This is from May last year, I bet it's even higher now. Say by some miracle that webm takes over, even though it's free, it's a Google run project, and we now that Apple chooses stability over availability (i.e. their rejection of Flash) From my experience building a HTML5 video playback portfolio for a client, playing high quality we…

PNG is not a patented format. In fact, the patent wars surrounding GIF were a major, perhaps the overriding motivation for development of PNG.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#165

Post by evgen » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

sid0 wrote: post #152

evgen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% of the browser market was never going to adopt H.264. That's a fifth of the market cut out from using entirely. 20% and dropping... Should we also stop the train in its tracks because IE6 does not support it?

Dropping?

All lists for browser share that I have seen show FF as having either plateaued or started to drop by small percentages. If you add mobile browsers into the mix then even the plateau becomes a small drop.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#166

Post by masklinn » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 9:35 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #24

masklinn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only because Microsoft and Apple choose not to support WebM. When they made their choice WebM wasn't an option because it didn't even exist yet . Microsoft might be a different issue, but Apple has now shipped almost 150M devices with hardware h.264 support and no webm support at all. > You completely miss the point. GIF is a lesson, and we should learn from it. GIF is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand (or…

> When they made their choice WebM wasn't an option because it didn't even exist yet. IE9 is still in development. They can still choose to support WebM. Apple could still choose to WebM support. The point isn't that Apple and Microsoft can choose. Rather, you can't expect to ask Google to support H.264 and not ask Microsoft and Apple to support WebM. Apple and Microsoft don't want to support it. Fine. Google doesn't…

> Apple could still choose to WebM support.

Not in any meaningful way: as far as I know, there is no hardware decoding support for WebM in production. That leaves 150M iOS devices dead in the water, and a bunch of Macs having to decode HQ videos in software instead of relying on existing, well-supported and well-understood hardware.

> The point isn't that Apple and Microsoft can choose.

Apple and Microsoft also have been investing in h.264 for a long time. They're the least likely players to be able to change and (especially Microsoft) they're not very good at turning on a dime.

> you can't expect to ask Google to support H.264 and not ask Microsoft and Apple to support WebM

Why not? Google already had h.264 support, h.264 is the current leading video standard and enjoys wide support across the board, from hardware to software, from embedded to full-blown computers.

> No, and no. I'd explain more, but I can't follow your logic.

So you'd explain why I'm wrong even though you don't understand what I say? Original.

> No, and no. I'd explain more, but I can't follow your logic.

You'd explain why you disagree with what I say even though you don't even understand what I say?

Uh... right.

It's very simple:

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#167

Post by sid0 » Thu, Jan 20, 2011, 10:40 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #165

sid0 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropping?

All lists for browser share that I have seen show FF as having either plateaued or started to drop by small percentages. If you add mobile browsers into the mix then even the plateau becomes a small drop.

And you really think that going to continue once Firefox 4 and Firefox for Android are released? Firefox is going to be relevant for a long while, so comparing it to IE6 is pretty disingenuous.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#168

Post by technomancy » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 12:06 AM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #159

technomancy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the things I love about my iDevices is that they don't support Flash. You know, they make real computers that don't support flash too.

Can you name a few? They may ship some without Flash player preinstalled, but that's very different from not supporting Flash in the way iDevices don't.

Well, I suppose I meant "real computers that support the feature of not having Adobe Flash installed", but PPC Linux is one I've used that comes to mind. I'm sure there are ARM-powered ones for which that's also true.