Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft backs H.264.

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 95 posts

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#51

Post by haberman »

kenjackson wrote: post #39
haberman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The devil you know versus the devil you don't. You don't know the H.264 devil any better. It's just as likely that some lone patent wolf will come forward and go after H.264. It's simply FUD to say that WebM is somehow more susceptible. Just because MPEG-LA makes you pay for their set of patents doesn't mean they're protecting you against patents they don't hold.

I'd say you know the H264 devil a little better. Why? Because its spec and patents have been extremely well documented for a decade (or so), commented on, and implemented (there are at least 10 implementations I know of). Whereas WebM's details first came to light less than a year ago. You're right that it is possible that either still violate some patent out in the wild. BUT if you were to weigh the odds -- a nearly…

What I'd "call even money on" is that patent holders who are looking for a piece of the video decoding royalty pie would have jumped on the MPEG-LA gravy train already. I also would bet that Google's legal team knows what they're doing.

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#52

Post by megaman821 »

contextfree wrote: post #42

The IE blog post in question ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/02/html5-and-web-... ) seems more interesting than the media stories suggest - here's what appears to be the most substantive paragraph: "Ultimately, Microsoft remains agnostic in terms of HTML5 video as long as there is clarity on the intellectual property issues. To make it clear that we are fully willing to participate in a resolution of the…

Microsoft has a really good point here. Google might be fine with phone manufactures getting sued over patent violations in Android, but that is not how Microsoft conducts business. If they included VP8 support in IE9, them and their partners can be sued for patent infringement, so the best they can due is work with Google to make a plugin. If Google offers indemnify over VP8, Microsoft can pass it along.

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#53

Post by ZeroGravitas »

kenjackson wrote: post #43
jokermatt999 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Mozilla and Opera would also benefit from not having to license H264. Other than the lack of license fees, how would Google benefit?

They get to screw Apple. Apple has built an existing HW ecosystem and has a highly tuned sw tools for H264. With WebM Google gets to say, "Throw all that away -- now you're behind us technologically Apple."

Regarding Apple's "highly tuned sw tools for H264", you know that their H.264 encoder in Quicktime/iTunes is abysmal, right?

There's an x264 plugin for Quicktime which is much preferable to the encoders built into most proprietary products, but Apple's is particularly bad.

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#55

Post by kenjackson »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #48
kenjackson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you know the H264 devil a little better. Why? Because its spec and patents have been extremely well documented for a decade (or so), commented on, and implemented (there are at least 10 implementations I know of). Whereas WebM's details first came to light less than a year ago. You're right that it is possible that either still violate some patent out in the wild. BUT if you were to weigh the odds -- a nearly…

It seems to be widely accepted that WebM is a minor variation on H.264 with changes specifically designed to avoid the H.264 patents, which as you mention have been openly published and well documented for years. Since large segments of H.264 were simply dropped for WebM, apparently there's only about 49 H.264 patents total (out of over a thousand) that could even remotely apply. That seems a reasonable number for On…

Your interpretation doesn't match those of people who have analyzed it. The problem with WebM is that it may infringe on H264 patents! And its not clear they have done enough to avoid the problems. H264 has come together to form a very strong patent pool. None of the patents can be asserted against H264 (nor can the partner companies in general), but any of them can be asserted against WebM.

Read JGG's account, which is still the best account to date at: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Some quotes:

"But as noted in my previous post, merely being published by Google doesn’t guarantee that it is. Microsoft did similar a few years ago with the release of VC-1, which was claimed to be patent-free but within mere months after release, a whole bunch of companies claimed patents on it and soon enough a patent pool was formed."

"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". Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents."

"Most importantly, Google has not released any justifications for why the various parts of VP8 do not violate patents, as Sun did with their OMS standard: such information would certainly cut down on speculation and make it more clear what their position actually is."

And not about patents, but the quality of the spec:

"The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code up to and including TODOs, optimizations, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone."

But maybe Google will fix it? Ummm think again;

"Update: it seems that Google is not open to changing the spec: it is apparently "final", complete with all its flaws."

I just don't see how one can feel equally comfortable with WebM.

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#56

Post by nitrogen »

contextfree wrote: post #42

The IE blog post in question ( http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/02/html5-and-web-... ) seems more interesting than the media stories suggest - here's what appears to be the most substantive paragraph: "Ultimately, Microsoft remains agnostic in terms of HTML5 video as long as there is clarity on the intellectual property issues. To make it clear that we are fully willing to participate in a resolution of the…

Indemnification is unheard of in codecs. Microsoft and SMPTE don't indemnify users of VC-1. MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify users of H.264. Google offering indemnification for WebM would effectively be suicide. They'd be painting themselves with a giant target and taunting every money-grubbing patent troll in existence.

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#57

Post by foljs »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #48
kenjackson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you know the H264 devil a little better. Why? Because its spec and patents have been extremely well documented for a decade (or so), commented on, and implemented (there are at least 10 implementations I know of). Whereas WebM's details first came to light less than a year ago. You're right that it is possible that either still violate some patent out in the wild. BUT if you were to weigh the odds -- a nearly…

It seems to be widely accepted that WebM is a minor variation on H.264 with changes specifically designed to avoid the H.264 patents, which as you mention have been openly published and well documented for years. Since large segments of H.264 were simply dropped for WebM, apparently there's only about 49 H.264 patents total (out of over a thousand) that could even remotely apply. That seems a reasonable number for On…

> Since large segments of H.264 were simply dropped for WebM, apparently there's only about 49 H.264 patents total (out of over a thousand) that could even remotely apply.

Emmm, the fact that they dropped stuff and implemented it in a clean house way in no way does guarantee that the new implementation is not patent encumbering.

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#58

Post by foljs »

cgranade wrote: post #10
DrJokepu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, by trying to use the codec that is provided by the underlying operating system. The latest versions of both Windows and OS X ship with a H264 codec.

And what of Linux, and its variants like Android or MeeGo?

Eh, who the * cares about Linux on the Desktop and its puny market share?

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#59

Post by nitrogen »

wzdd wrote: post #20
cgranade wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what of Linux, and its variants like Android or MeeGo?

I'm not sure why Firefox has to support H.264 on all its platforms, but in this case it can, through Flash. Even if it couldn't, why would it be a bad thing for Firefox to support OS-supplied codecs on OS X and Windows, and a set of built-in codecs, such as WebM, on Linux?

OS codecs are an unquantifiable security risk, since their source code is not available to Mozilla.

Re: Microsoft backs H.264.

#60

Post by kenjackson »

haberman wrote: post #51
kenjackson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you know the H264 devil a little better. Why? Because its spec and patents have been extremely well documented for a decade (or so), commented on, and implemented (there are at least 10 implementations I know of). Whereas WebM's details first came to light less than a year ago. You're right that it is possible that either still violate some patent out in the wild. BUT if you were to weigh the odds -- a nearly…

What I'd "call even money on" is that patent holders who are looking for a piece of the video decoding royalty pie would have jumped on the MPEG-LA gravy train already. I also would bet that Google's legal team knows what they're doing.

patent holders who are looking for a piece of the video decoding royalty pie would have jumped on the MPEG-LA gravy train already.

They have... they're called members of the pool. The same ones that came after Microsoft when MS did VC-1. The same ones who will come after WebM.

Post reply on HN