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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

#51

Post by cwyers »

rictic wrote: post #50
cwyers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the plan is for Microsoft to ship Object RTC API in IE, and then to ship some sort of a polyfill on top of that that lets you talk to WebRTC over Object RTC.

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

#52

Post by shmerl »

anon1385 wrote: post #33
shmerl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And even ALAC is now open source and royalty-free. Nothing stops them from supporting FLAC as well except their nasty attitude in general. FLAC is actually used by many services which sell music, unlike ALAC. AAC is nowhere patent free.

>Nothing stops Mozilla from supporting JPEG2000 except their nasty attitude in general. JPEG2000 is actually supported by many image editors, unlike APNG. I think in most of these cases the real reasons are more mundane - spending the resources on supporting extra formats would give them no competitive advantage (and a significant cost in terms of maintenance and security). It sucks, but that's the capitalist system…

> Nothing stops Mozilla from supporting JPEG2000

Patents stop them (JPEG2000 is not a free format). FLAC is not patented. Q.E.D. Apple don't supported it just in order to be nasty to everyone.

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

#53

Post by shmerl »

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…

> This isn't so malicious as it is accepting the reality of the market, sadly.

What about the music market? Apple intentionally avoided supporting free codecs which are not patented. That's malice.

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

#55

Post by gsnedders »

shmerl wrote: post #53
gsnedders wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This isn't so malicious as it is accepting the reality of the market, sadly. What about the music market? Apple intentionally avoided supporting free codecs which are not patented. That's malice.

Yeah, the audio case is arguably far more interesting (enough major companies have shipped Vorbis and Speex that it is likely anyone holding a patent would've sued someone by now). One may speculate that by the time the iTunes Music Store launched (2003) they felt locked in to the set of codecs the iPod (launched 2001) supported natively (the CPU in it is weak, and while it is powerful enough for a modern, highly optimised Vorbis implementation, these didn't yet exist, and one must question running the CPU at almost total utilisation for heat/battery reasons…).

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

#56

Post by shmerl »

gsnedders wrote: post #55
shmerl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn't so malicious as it is accepting the reality of the market, sadly. What about the music market? Apple intentionally avoided supporting free codecs which are not patented. That's malice.

Yeah, the audio case is arguably far more interesting (enough major companies have shipped Vorbis and Speex that it is likely anyone holding a patent would've sued someone by now). One may speculate that by the time the iTunes Music Store launched (2003) they felt locked in to the set of codecs the iPod (launched 2001) supported natively (the CPU in it is weak, and while it is powerful enough for a modern, highly opt…

Well, what happened in the past doesn't really explain why they still refuse to support them today. I really hope mandatory status of Opus in WebRTC will push it into QuickTime framework and it will mean implicit support by Apple everywhere.

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

#57

Post by eridius »

shmerl wrote: post #29
eridius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their historic sickening opposition to open codecs What are you talking about? I'm not aware of any historic opposition to open codecs at Apple. Hell, they're still big into AAC, which is an open codec. And even ALAC is now open source and royalty-free.

> And even ALAC is now open source and royalty-free. Nothing stops them from supporting FLAC as well except their nasty attitude in general. FLAC is actually used by many services which sell music, unlike ALAC. AAC is nowhere patent free.

I can't decide if you genuinely believe that Apple is deciding not to spend resources supporting FLAC because you think they have a "nasty attitude", or if you're deliberately misrepresenting the reasons that lead to such a decision.

Supporting FLAC requires investing engineer resources in doing this, and possibly legal resources as well. It's only something that Apple would do if there's any benefit to them doing it. And there doesn't really seem to be any benefit toward it. None of Apple's hardware supports FLAC natively, so adding support to SO X would actually be rather counterproductive as anyone using it would have to transcode it to some other format to get power-efficient decoding support on mobile devices anyway. And Apple's already had their own lossless compression codec (ALAC) for over a decade. Pretty much the only benefit to supporting FLAC natively would be to make things very slightly easier for the 0.0001% of their customers that acquire music in the FLAC format.

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

#58

Post by eridius »

gcp wrote: post #40
anon1385 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nothing stops Mozilla from supporting JPEG2000 except their nasty attitude in general. JPEG2000 is actually supported by many image editors, unlike APNG. I think in most of these cases the real reasons are more mundane - spending the resources on supporting extra formats would give them no competitive advantage (and a significant cost in terms of maintenance and security). It sucks, but that's the capitalist system…

That analogy seems to ignore that FLAC is literally the lossless format that is used everywhere - except on Apple devices, and has not and never had patent concerns. On top of that, ALAC is clearly based on FLAC but has effectively been worsened. It is pure and 100% literal NIH. The same can't be said for JPEG2000. Not even close. Nobody's complaining Apple doesn't support actual MPEG ALS, for example.

Supported everywhere != used everywhere. In my experience, extremely few people use FLAC, because there's almost never a reason to care about having a lossless audio codec. I'm pretty sure I've seen FLAC mentioned by people coming up with reasons to complain about Apple several orders of magnitude more times than I've actually seen FLAC in the wild.

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

#59

Post by eridius »

shmerl wrote: post #56
gsnedders wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the audio case is arguably far more interesting (enough major companies have shipped Vorbis and Speex that it is likely anyone holding a patent would've sued someone by now). One may speculate that by the time the iTunes Music Store launched (2003) they felt locked in to the set of codecs the iPod (launched 2001) supported natively (the CPU in it is weak, and while it is powerful enough for a modern, highly opt…

Well, what happened in the past doesn't really explain why they still refuse to support them today. I really hope mandatory status of Opus in WebRTC will push it into QuickTime framework and it will mean implicit support by Apple everywhere.

They refuse to support them today because there's no benefit in doing so. Supporting codecs they're not supporting today takes both non-trivial engineering resources, but may expose them to patent risk depending on the codec in question. And pretty much by definition, the people who use these codecs aren't Apple customers anyway.

You seem to be arguing with the assumption that Apple could support these codecs effectively for free, and have deliberately chosen not to do out of malice. That's quite absurd.

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

#60

Post by shmerl »

eridius wrote: post #59
shmerl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what happened in the past doesn't really explain why they still refuse to support them today. I really hope mandatory status of Opus in WebRTC will push it into QuickTime framework and it will mean implicit support by Apple everywhere.

They refuse to support them today because there's no benefit in doing so . Supporting codecs they're not supporting today takes both non-trivial engineering resources, but may expose them to patent risk depending on the codec in question. And pretty much by definition, the people who use these codecs aren't Apple customers anyway. You seem to be arguing with the assumption that Apple could support these codecs effect…

> They refuse to support them today because there's no benefit in doing so

That's nonsense. Clear benefit is supporting codecs which their users can encounter without forcing them to reencode to anything else. For instance, you buy some music in FLAC and can use it, rather than reencoding it first. I.e. interoperability and treating users well, rather than being jerks.

Clearly for Apple "benefit" means screwing users and degrading interoperability.

> Supporting codecs they're not supporting today takes both non-trivial engineering resources, but may expose them to patent risk depending on the codec in question

False pretenses to hide real intentions - retaining lock in and reducing interoperability, which were always Apple's notable goals. Specifcially about patent risks - they are already using a bunch of codecs like AAC, so obviously they aren't concerned about risks when using them. So they can't claim they are more scared with other codecs especially if they are explicitly patent free.

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