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VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

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Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#41

Post by yjm »

shmerl wrote: post #23

I hope Daala will put an end to this mess. But even though Opus is mandatory now, it didn't yet translate into support by Apple and MS for instance for regular music and Web audio. Their historic sickening opposition to open codecs is not easy to dismantle. Apple still doesn't even support FLAC, just because they like to make things messy for everyone. By the way, what happened with Nokia's attacks on VP8? Were they…

For the record VP8 sucks for anyone who needs to support it because it eats up to 7 times more resources than h264 does for transcoding.

Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#42

Post by gcp »

ck2 wrote: post #31

The problem is the minimum level for WebRTC is so low, it makes H.264 useless for regular video decoding (like what you'd find on youtube). So hopefully browsers implement more than the minimum.

It would be perfectly possible for a browser to support H264 high profile in WebRTC and refuse to decode it in a tag, for example due to licensing restrictions, so what you're saying is irrelevant.

Remember WebRTC also covers encoders.

Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#43

Post by gcp »

yjm wrote: post #41
shmerl wrote: post #23

I hope Daala will put an end to this mess. But even though Opus is mandatory now, it didn't yet translate into support by Apple and MS for instance for regular music and Web audio. Their historic sickening opposition to open codecs is not easy to dismantle. Apple still doesn't even support FLAC, just because they like to make things messy for everyone. By the way, what happened with Nokia's attacks on VP8? Were they…

For the record VP8 sucks for anyone who needs to support it because it eats up to 7 times more resources than h264 does for transcoding.

Someone is confusing (crappy) implementations with standards.

Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#46

Post by vetinari »

gsnedders wrote: post #36
vetinari wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? AAC is pay for use codec and Apple receives royalties for its use through MPEG-LA. ALAC was historically proprietary, it was opened only after it lost to FLAC. Apple never supported any codec, that was really free, like Vorbis or FLAC.

There's been plenty of detailed reports concluding for the small number of patent Apple holds, they don't receive anywhere near enough money to cover their own MPEG-LA fees. They aren't doing this out of financial interest — it simply isn't worth enough to them to justify that.

That does not matter, from financial perspective they still pay less, than any non-member of the MPEG-LA would, say Debian or Mozilla.

It also provides them a bit of control over potential competition, that they would not have with really open codec. They also make it inconvenient from licensing/business model to use in some projects, see what trouble these codecs cause to projects like Mozilla/Opera, Linux distributions, XBMC, VLC etc, which does hamper them significantly.

For Apple, that's competitive advantage.

Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#47

Post by coob »

Osmium wrote: post #37
bhaak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the gazillions of dollars they have earned, Apple is really constrained when it comes to software development. They don't have the man power to stray far from their focused feature set. Just look at the mess that iOS 8.0 is. I don't know if they are not willing to hire more capable people or if they just don't care as long as the money pours in (that could bite them in the long term though). FLAC is a niche f…

> That view would put it in competition with iTunes (320kps AAC/MP3 ought to be enough for anybody?) Apple has its own lossless audio codec that's supported by iTunes called ALAC. Created in 2004, it was initially propriety but as of 2011 it is now open source and royalty free under the Apache License. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lossless

No idea why you're getting downvoted, we use ALAC in production workflows. Prior to being open sourced it was also successfully reverse engineered in 2005: http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html

Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#48

Post by gsnedders »

vetinari wrote: post #46
gsnedders wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been plenty of detailed reports concluding for the small number of patent Apple holds, they don't receive anywhere near enough money to cover their own MPEG-LA fees. They aren't doing this out of financial interest — it simply isn't worth enough to them to justify that.

That does not matter, from financial perspective they still pay less, than any non-member of the MPEG-LA would, say Debian or Mozilla. It also provides them a bit of control over potential competition, that they would not have with really open codec. They also make it inconvenient from licensing/business model to use in some projects, see what trouble these codecs cause to projects like Mozilla/Opera, Linux distribut…

The far bigger financial advantage for them is the fact that they hit the maximum fee — so they end up paying comparably little per user.

I'm not sure Apple is even that concerned about the competition from such projects — all their major competitors have no issue with paying the licensing charges.

It's worthwhile pointing out that Mozilla nowadays use H.264/AAC/MP3 support from the platform layer, as does Opera (though, yes, most Linux distributions do not ship such things by default — but that's a small percentage of the market) — and in Opera's case the argument to not support it was always one of philosophy (avoiding giving themselves a competitive advantage that works against a free and open web) rather than one of finance (Opera has plenty of revenue to pay for the license).

When there were all the discussions around HTML5 and mandated video codecs the reasons that Apple publicly put forward seem reasonable from their point-of-view: supporting video codecs that no major company has previously shipped bears a risk of patent infringement cases (and defending such cases is expensive, even if your odds of winning them are good!) that might result in huge fines/compensation. When the majority of the content on the web was already using H.264 (and it seemed dubious that many sites would support more than just H.264 unless everyone dropped H.264 support, which seemed highly unlikely to happen), there was no compelling market reason to take on that risk. The de-facto state was the web already relied on a non-free codec, and mandating a free one was only of marginal benefit if nobody started using it (yes, it provides a free common baseline, but de-facto everyone has to support H.264 as a baseline anyway, however sad that is). This isn't so malicious as it is accepting the reality of the market, sadly.

When almost all browser installs support H.264 already, you may as well use it for WebRTC. Would it be nice if the web didn't rely on H.264? Yes. But we're already at a point of relying on it, so we may as well rely on it elsewhere.

Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#49

Post by [deleted] »

gsnedders wrote: post #48
vetinari wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not matter, from financial perspective they still pay less, than any non-member of the MPEG-LA would, say Debian or Mozilla. It also provides them a bit of control over potential competition, that they would not have with really open codec. They also make it inconvenient from licensing/business model to use in some projects, see what trouble these codecs cause to projects like Mozilla/Opera, Linux distribut…

The far bigger financial advantage for them is the fact that they hit the maximum fee — so they end up paying comparably little per user. I'm not sure Apple is even that concerned about the competition from such projects — all their major competitors have no issue with paying the licensing charges. It's worthwhile pointing out that Mozilla nowadays use H.264/AAC/MP3 support from the platform layer, as does Opera (tho…

[deleted]

Re: VP8 and H.264 to both become mandatory for WebRTC

#50

Post by rictic »

cwyers wrote: post #21
yuhong wrote: post #2

Hopefully this means MS is finally willing to support VP8 and hopefully WebM too.

Seeing as Microsoft is still pushing an alternative to WebRTC, I somehow doubt it.

I came in this thread to say that Microsoft are implementing WebRTC, but when I double checked it looks like it's more complicated than that. There's an API that they want, and may have gotten into the spec called the Object RTC API, but they aren't currently planning on implementing WebRTC as existing browsers speak it: https://status.modern.ie/webrtcobjectrtcapi
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