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Does VP9 hardware acceleration automatically include WebM? I'm assuming so because their web site still mentions VP9 all over the place years after WebM came out.

Example:
https://www.webmproject.org/ha...

I seem to remember Google's 2013 license from MPEG LA only covering VP8 and one successor, not what amounts to VP10. From the WebM project's announcement of the license, with my emphasis:

It further provides for sublicensing those VP8 techniques in one successor generation to the VP8 video codec.

uses a codec that is a minefield of patents

Which codec would that be? The same H.264 that Flash used?

HTML5 video also offers the option of VP9 video. VP9 is royalty-free for all use cases and outperforms H.264.

So just use VP9 and be happy.

The main problem with HEVC is the patent licensing. In order to use HEVC you need to get 3 different patent licenses from 3 different patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media).

There are some companies with HEVC patents, like Technicolor, which aren't in any patent pool so you also need to get a patent license from them. Technicolor says they have done this "to enable direct licensing" of their HEVC patents. Sounds convenient.

The patent licensing situation has reduced the x265 developers to begging the patent pools for better licensing terms. I recognise the x265 team is trying to make a buck but I think they'd be better off focusing on building an AV1 implementation than throwing their lot in with HEVC. HEVC's licensing is just not web friendly.

Luckily, the HEIF image format is content format agnostic (presentation and slides). In principle you could use HEIF with VP9 or with AV1. Apple may never support VP9 but I don't think they can avoid adding support for AV1 in future. AV1 will have too many advantages over HEVC (better performance, royalty-free licensing) to ignore.

Google subsidized it.

What's your argument? That Google made it royalty-free? Yeah? And? So? What?

Remember that Google acquired the VP8 codec by buying On2 Technologies for $124.6 million. Remember that Google funded the development of VP9.

Read the licenses. Read the licensing FAQ. VP9 is royalty-free for all use cases.

Like everything else until they get bored and move on to the next thing.

The next thing is AV1.

Google subsidized it.

What's your argument? That Google made it royalty-free? Yeah? And? So? What?

Remember that Google acquired the VP8 codec by buying On2 Technologies for $124.6 million. Remember that Google funded the development of VP9.

Read the licenses. Read the licensing FAQ. VP9 is royalty-free for all use cases.

Like everything else until they get bored and move on to the next thing.

The next thing is AV1.

What evidence do you have that the WebM Additional IP Rights Grant is insufficient to prevent users of VP9 from being "sued out of existence for patient infringement"?

Unlike HEVC, in order to use VP9, Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents (VP9 has a whole patent reciprocity agreement - much like the GPLv3).

Free use of all patents owned by Apple Inc. and its subsidiaries, or only of those patents essential to VP9? The reciprocity provision of the additional patent grant for VP8 and VP9 appears to apply only to patents related to those codecs.

VP9 has a big user base because it's promoted by an industry giant, but it is not an international standard

What organizations qualify to set "an international standard"? If IETF counts, then VP8 is RFC 6386, and standardization of VP9 is ongoing.

Unlike HEVC, in order to use VP9, Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents (VP9 has a whole patent reciprocity agreement - much like the GPLv3).

Free use of all patents owned by Apple Inc. and its subsidiaries, or only of those patents essential to VP9? The reciprocity provision of the additional patent grant for VP8 and VP9 appears to apply only to patents related to those codecs.

VP9 has a big user base because it's promoted by an industry giant, but it is not an international standard

What organizations qualify to set "an international standard"? If IETF counts, then VP8 is RFC 6386, and standardization of VP9 is ongoing.

VP9 contains patented technology (much like HEVC)

The issue isn't patents, the issue is the licensing. Baseline JPEG has always contained patented technology but it was licensed under royalty-free terms so everyone was free to use JPEG. Similarly, VP9 contains patented technology which is licensed under royalty-free terms and everyone is free to use it.

This is wholly unlike HEVC. To use HEVC you must buy three separate licenses from three separate patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media) and then negotiate additional licenses from companies like Technicolor that aren't in any patent pool.

Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents

Flatly wrong. Remember that Intel supports VP9 in hardware. Remember that Microsoft supports VP9 in Edge. Read the license and read the licensing FAQ.

As for AV1... well... among other things, it's not finished:

But as you say, it'll be finished at the end of this year. AV1 also outperforms HEVC and has broad industry backing. HEVC has no future.

VP9 contains patented technology (much like HEVC)

The issue isn't patents, the issue is the licensing. Baseline JPEG has always contained patented technology but it was licensed under royalty-free terms so everyone was free to use JPEG. Similarly, VP9 contains patented technology which is licensed under royalty-free terms and everyone is free to use it.

This is wholly unlike HEVC. To use HEVC you must buy three separate licenses from three separate patent pools (MPEG LA, HEVC Advance, and Velos Media) and then negotiate additional licenses from companies like Technicolor that aren't in any patent pool.

Apple would have to grant Google free use of its patents

Flatly wrong. Remember that Intel supports VP9 in hardware. Remember that Microsoft supports VP9 in Edge. Read the license and read the licensing FAQ.

As for AV1... well... among other things, it's not finished:

But as you say, it'll be finished at the end of this year. AV1 also outperforms HEVC and has broad industry backing. HEVC has no future.

IOW if Apple wants to use VP9, Google gets free access to all of Apple's patents

No. Read the actual license.

I don't know where you're quoting that from but you should read the actual license and patent grant. It doesn't work the way you seem to think it does.

No one gives a fuck about WebM except FOSStards.

An incomplete list of those "FOSStards" includes:

Adobe, Amazon, AMD, ARM, Ateme, Cisco, Google, Intel, Ittiam, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, NVIDIA, Vidyo, and the IETF.

http://aomedia.org/about-us/

Also supporting/enabling WebM are:

Broadcom, Marvell, Mediatek, MStar, Realtek, Rockchip, Qualcomm, Samsung, SigmaDesigns, STMicroelectronics, Hisilicon, Sony, LG, Roku, HiSense, Philips, Westinghouse, Allwinner, Texas Instruments, and many more.

http://wiki.webmproject.org/ha...

Without hardware support, it will be worse on battery life than H.264.

Hardware acceleration only improves battery life by "up to 36%". That's not terribly significant. - http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

The power consumption of your screen still dominates. And that benchmark seems to be the best-case, with local media. So the savings from a smaller file being received over the cellular or WiFi radios will offer some incidental power savings for the WebM case, cutting even that modest 36% number down by a bit.

It's less about the patents themselves and more about the licensing of those patents. Baseline JPEG is covered by patents but those patents are licensed under royalty-free terms so everyone is free to use JPEG. VP8, VP9, and I suppose WebP (since it's based on VP8) are under a patent license, but that license is also offered under royalty-free terms.

That kind of implies that there are specs available for VP9 that I could go and implement independently from the original implementation. However at the WebM website, I can only find a "bitstream guide" for VP8.

Since you made that claim, I am sure you will be able to point me at the specs or at least a "bitstream guide" for VP9?

Uses more resources? Yep, both CPU cycles and memory, just compare Flash/VP8 to HTML V5 H.264 of the same quality and you'll find its a pig.

Well just use VP8 for HTML5 video then since you claim it's better on the CPU.

when it comes to animation and gaming HTML V5 isn't anywhere as good as Flash

Adobe Edge Animate is good for HTML5 animation. I'm not sure what you mean for gaming. Are you saying that Flash delivers something far superior to HTML5 games like HexGL or AngryBots or DeadTrigger 2? Seems unlikely.

8.13 MiB on YouTube (480p, combined audio/mp4 and video/mp4)
3.25 MiB on Homestar Runner, (flashisdead.swf, application/x-shockwave-flash)

It also depends on the codecs used and the data rates chosen. I downloaded the 720p version of the video (H.264, AAC) from YouTube which is about 18 megabytes. I transcoded it to VP9 and Opus using the encoding guide and set low rate targets for the video (250 kilobits) and audio (64 kilobits). I ended up with a video one third the size at 6.1 megabytes which looked and sounded comparable to the H.264 version. So my VP9 version is less than a factor of 2.

They're working on Thor through the IETF Internet Video Codec working group and committing to royalty-free licensing for those patents. It will be difficult for Cisco to walk back from that. Many codecs make use of patents which are licensed under royalty-free terms. Baseline JPEG does, Opus does, VP8 and VP9 do.

which still is being debated if it really isn't using any patented technology

VP8 and VP9 do use patented technology, which is why they come with a patent license. The patented technology is licensed under royalty-free terms. The issue of whether or not H.264 patents apply to VP8 or VP9 was resolved with the royalty-free cross licensing agreement Google struck with a number of organisations, including the MPEG LA.

which still is being debated if it really isn't using any patented technology

VP8 and VP9 do use patented technology, which is why they come with a patent license. The patented technology is licensed under royalty-free terms. The issue of whether or not H.264 patents apply to VP8 or VP9 was resolved with the royalty-free cross licensing agreement Google struck with a number of organisations, including the MPEG LA.

refusal to compete has made Lunix (which is a fitting title as its run by loonies) so low on every metric other than servers

Linux is probably the most installed and most widely used operating system in the world. It's in servers, routers, smart TVs, mobile phones, tablets, etc. It's massively successful.

name any major sites OTHER than Google that supports WebM?

Okay, I've disabled H.264 support in Firefox 38 beta. Let's try some sites and see what works!

Microsoft's Channel 9 supports WebM and works.

Yahoo Screen supports WebM and works.

Yahoo Music supports WebM and works.

Revision 3 supports WebM and works.

Wikipedia supports WebM and works.

Name any hardware OEMs supporting WebM acceleration?

Well, here's a list. It features names like Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Rockchip, Nvidia, Samsung and so on.

Have they bothered to come up with a decent easy to use encoder/decoder?

Well, here's a list. Some are free, some (like Sorenson Squeeze) cost money. VLC can also transcode to WebM. Handbrake does support VP8, but to a Matroska container (WebM is a subset of Matroska).

Technology-wise: In rate-distortion terms, Theora is comparable to H.263-family codecs such as DivX (a popular implementation of MPEG-4 ASP). VP8 is comparable to the baseline profile of H.264. This means the picture can be more detailed at the same bitrate.

License-wise: WebM is distributed under the revised BSD license. As a free alternative to a patented format, it's in a similar position to Ogg Vorbis, for which RMS approved of use of the revised BSD license.

Google holds all of the patents for WebM and WebRTC. They have not released them to the public domain

Nor is Linux "released [...] to the public domain". It is copyrighted and distributed under GPLv2, a member of a class of copyright licenses known as "copyleft". What objection do you have to the way Google licenses its WebM-related patents?

Some do...
http://wiki.webmproject.org/ha...

it's possible that the situation has improved

It has.

There are implementations of both available.

There are various incomplete reference encoders for both, but I'm not aware of a single non-alpha and complete implementation of either. vpxenc is close but lacks things like multi-threaded encoding, which will obviously have an impact on encoding speed.

The hit isn't a very big one:

"with the hardware offload the battery lasted up to 36% longer"

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

And with each faster processor generation, the difference gets smaller and smaller still.

Followed the link but couldn't see where it showed actual power consumption of the hardware decoder they used (their own I guess?) but given that an ARM CPU might consume around 500mW whereas an H.264 hardware decoder doing HD uses 10mW, either the screen is using a huge amount of power or their hardware leaves a bit to be desired.

The hit isn't a very big one:

"with the hardware offload the battery lasted up to 36% longer"

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

And with each faster processor generation, the difference gets smaller and smaller still.

More sources:

Hardware acceleration only improves battery life "up to 36%". That's pretty insignificant to me.

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

Quality improvements have been going non-stop:

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

More sources:

Hardware acceleration only improves battery life "up to 36%". That's pretty insignificant to me.

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

Quality improvements have been going non-stop:

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

More sources:

Hardware acceleration only improves battery life "up to 36%". That's pretty insignificant to me.

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

Quality improvements have been going non-stop:

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

There is no patent-unencumbered video codec worth using.

That might be technically true... Google owns the patents on VP8. But since they've offered an irrevocable perpetual royalty free license to the entire world, it's unencumbered for all reasonable, practical purposes.

When Google open-sourced their hopeless purchase, the extent of the scam became apparent.

VP3 was open-sourced over a decade ago, and no lawsuits ever came out of that. Are you suggesting On2 only RECENTLY started stealing MPEG patents? When exactly? And let's not forget that VP9 was not developed until years after Google acquired On2, and just recently released.

What did Google do? Simple- it used its insane cash reserves to strike behind-the-scenes deals with the patent owners, paying the for right to use those patents in non-disclosure agreements.

All of H.264's patents must be worth many billions of dollars over their lifetime. If Google had paid out anything like that, it would be obvious from stock prices, SEC filings, etc., etc. Instead, Google paid a piddly little amount to MPEG-LA, and it's they who wanted the NDA to save face. MPEG-LA argued for years that they owned patents that covered VP8, yet after years only came up with a very short-list, and still most of that was found laughably irrelevant. H.264 is covered by THOUSANDS of patents, by HUNDREDS of companies. The deal Google entered into only involved 11 of those hundreds of companies, yet that was enough to get MPEG-LA to declare full stop on any harassment of VP8.

The reality:
"This agreement is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8. The purpose of this agreement is meant to provide further and stronger reassurance to implementors of VP8."

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archi...

In fact, the MPEG-LA's posturing was being investigated by the DoJ as anticompetitive behavior:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Google NEVER denied its video codec purchase was a rip-off (and a bad one at that) of H264.

Yes they did. They even did so in court, and they unequivocally WON:

http://blog.webmproject.org/20...

1) Google's fake free codec uses insanely more amounts of energy to decode and display video.

This is straightforward to disprove.
An x264 developer said of the first version of libvpx decoding:

"the current implementation appears to be about 16% slower than ffmpeg's H.264 decoder"

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...

But since then, numerous performance improvements have been performed:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...

2) Google's fake free codec has the tiniest fraction of hardware support than is enjoyed by H264. Every modern device decodes H264 in efficient hardware

Actually, hardware acceleration isn't a big deal. The difference between VDPAU and software decoding of 1080 video on my PC is just a few percentage points. When my phone switches from hardware to software decoding (you can force this with "Mobo Player"), the performance and power difference is very small, and goes almost completely unnoticed. Hardware acceleration mattered a lot when mobile devices ran with 35MHz CPUs, but today, it makes a very tiny difference.

For the same quality, x264 video files are less than HALF the size of videos produced for Google's fake free codec.

Back in 2010 when comparing the just introduced an

Google much?
http://www.webmproject.org/code/

Theora uses a BSD-style license.

http://www.theora.org/faq/#14

WebM also uses a BSD-style license.

http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/#licensing

IMHO, if you are trying to make a standard for media encoding, it just makes sense for the reference code to be BSD-licensed. The point of GPL is to make sure that people can't lock users in to a proprietary code base, with no way to make changes; with a media format, the users can always grab their own copy of the reference code. (And a proprietary version that is incompatible with the reference code will be incompatible with the media standard. Users will shun it.)

libvpx contains BSD-licensed VP9 codec (here) which is not infected by patents. VP9 is the VP8 (the current WebM) successor, HEVC level competitor. But Google has not paid for slashvertisement so no article about VP9 here.

Regarding Musepack (MPC), that is an obscure format that was generally on par with Vorbis back in the day (but Vorbis has been improved a few times since then while Musepack has not).

I'll re-iterate my first comment:

"temporal domain codecs can outperform any frequency-domain codecs" (at high bitrates)

Vorbis is a frequency domain codec. Musepack necessarily beats it at high bitrates, every time. Don't like Musepack? Okay. Pick another temporal-domain codec, and it'll beat Vorbis, Opus, AAC, and any other frequency-domain codec you can come up with. It's not a debate, there's no listening tests required. It's provable. I believe the oldest one still around is MPEG-1 Layer II, which again will always necessarily beat AAC, Opus, Vorbis, etc., at high bitrates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1#Quality

We don't seem to be getting quality listening tests for higher bitrates any more. Everybody is obsessed with super-low bitrate

That's because the earliest standard codecs like MP2 came extremely close to the theoretical limits of Perceptual Entropy. Musepack did even better, and is probably right at the limit. You can't possibly do any better. The only place there is much room for improvement is in non-transparent audio, ie. low bitrates that don't need to sound perfectly like the original.

(Google noted VP9 was ~7% behind h.265 in Q4 2011)

They've more recently claimed VP9 beats HEVC across the board: "we've produced a codec that shows video quality that is slightly better than HEVC (H.265)"

http://blog.webmproject.org/2013/07/vp9-lands-in-chrome-dev-channel.html

or perhaps wait for Daala or some Dirac-like wavelet codec to come out of left field

Xiph,org has a shoddy history with video codecs. They royally screwed up with VP3. When released as open source, it outperformed all the standard codecs available at the time, but they sat on it for a decade, and finally released something that wasn't any better than VP3 long after H.264 had gained a solid grip, and could vastly outperforming it easily. VP9 has some hope of getting somewhere, in large part because Xiph doesn't have their hands in it.

At this point I'd throw wavelets in the bucket with fractal compression, and all the other theoretical methods that never worked-out in reality. Things we later find out weren't really efficient or perhaps even theoretically possible.

VP9 produces video about the same size and quality as H.265 (Google I/O talk on VP9, though they of course weren't using x265 to compare), VP9 support is already in Chrome (with Firefox and Opera likely to follow soon) and the reference VP9 implementation is BSD-licensed. What's the advantage of H.265 over VP9 and what does x265 in particular offer over this new version of WebM (VP9+Opus)?

Google themselves have backed off from the VP8 claims, so it's not so easy to find the original claims anymore. Any places where I recall them making the change are either gone, or have had their focus shifted to WebM in general or VP9. One remnant of the claims can be found here

http://www.webmproject.org/about/

The claim here is that VP8 is the highest quality format for real-time video delivery.

VP9 is still a work in progress, so no hard numbers as yet. One of its goals is to achieve 50% better quality with the same bitrate compared to VP8. Another goal is to provide a better encoding efficiency than H.265 which has the same approach on achieving a better quality around 50% compared to H.264.

Google actually did a direct comparison between VP9 and H.264 on a sample file at its recent I/O event and showed off a 63% reduction in file size. As for the quality, see the pic for yourself.

As for the licensing issue, Google cut a deal with the MPEG-LA consortium that controls H.264 to licence their patents for VP8 and VP9. So there is low possibility of any user of VP9 of being bogged down by patent lawsuits.

Why should you care? Unlike H.265, VP9 is free for commercial use . If your use is non-profit, there is no difference between the two.

VP8 Hardware codecs are up to generation six, freely licensed also - to 80 chip companies so far, and in production by many major vendors. So there's that.

Google is still firmly on WebM, while Opera and Firefox is all over Theora/Vorbis and Ogg

Opera and Firefox support WebM (VP8+Vorbis in a subset of the Matroska container).

IE 9+ still natively supports MP4 only in H.264, I think. And Safari does QuickTime too.

IE 9 supports WebM through a plug-in.

and still provide a Flash fallback for older/incompatible browsers

For IE 8 users, what benefit is there to using the Adobe Flash Player plug-in over the Google Chrome Frame plug-in?

webM has it on their roadmap only. AT the very bottom

http://www.webmproject.org/code/roadmap/

oh, if only there was a patent-free video codec available for general use instead of that horrible h.264 system that evil companies like Microsoft want to force other companies like Google to use.

oh, wait... umm. Well, at least this gives Google some ammunition to prove that they should convert all of Youtube to WebM before they get sued by, umm. errm... oh lord, it's so difficult to know which way's up in the world of IT now!

Google acquired WebM only a couple of years ago and specs for it were released then. It takes YEARS before it'll start to come out.with hardware decoders. (I remember dealing with h.264 encoded files back in what, 2004? When practically nothing played it, and DivX was the popular codec of the day). WebM in hardware will probably start happening around 2013-2014 at the earliest (as in - you can buy devices with webm support).

I would say the years have passed and the hardware is coming out this year: http://blog.webmproject.org/2012/03/webm-gaining-momentum-in-hardware.html

Yes, to be precise we must have actually meant VP8 vs H.264, but good point about the subtitles. WHATWG / W3C RFC will release guidance on subtitles and other overlays in HTML5 in the near future.

My impression of the relative compression performance is that there is only a small difference. Not enough to get me excited personally. Like many, I value the free and open aspect far more. And it has Google pixie dust on it, how could that hurt?

And finally some, like Skype are simply legacy users that were using this codec before it was open sourced (V7 in this case) and have since actually partially moved away from it (h.264 for HD chat).

Rather than moving away from it, Skype has been adding support for VP8 over the last year:

http://gigaom.com/video/skype-vp8-video-conferencing/
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/08/one-to-one-vp8-video-calling-now.html

If H.264 Baseline is not offered under a royalty-free licence before the 15th of March 2012, then VP8 will be the required video codec for WebRTC. See the the Video Codec Requirements section of the WebRTC IETF draft: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cbran-rtcweb-codec-01. This is why semiconductor companies are keen to promote their WebM support:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/verisilicon-releases-new-generation-of-hantro-video-ip-products-to-promote-webm-and-webrtc-2012-02-22

Of course, it's unlikely that H.264 Baseline will be royalty-free before the 15th so VP8 will likely be the required video codec. Still, it could happen and if it does then everyone can implement support for H.264 Baseline in their browsers without issue.

WebM supporters: Free Software Foundation, Participatory Culture Foundation, Xiph, Android, Codecian, Collabora, CoreCodec, Digital Rapids, FFmpeg, Adobe Flash Player, Flumotion Services, Google Chrome, Grab Networks, iLink, Inlet Technologies, Oracle Java, Matroska, Moovida, Mozilla, ooVoo, Opera, Oracle, Harmonic Rhozet, Skype, SightSpeed, Sorenson, Telestream, Tixeo, Ucentrik, VideoLAN, Wildform, Winamp Media Player, Wowza Media Server, XBMC Media Center, Allwinner Tech, AMD, Anyka, ARM, Broadcom, Chinachip, Chips&Media, C2 Microsystems, DSP Group, Freescale, GeneralPlus, Hisilicon, Hydra Control Freak, Imagination Technologies, Shanghai InfoTM Microelectronics, Leadcore Technology, Logitech, Marvell, MIPS, MStar Semiconductor, nVidia, Qualcomm, Rockchip Microelectronics, RayComm Group, SEUIC, Socle Technology Corp., ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Verisilicon, Videantis, ViewCast, ZiiLABS, ZTE Corporation, Anevia, Brightcove, Delve Networks, Encoding.com, EntropyWave, Flumotion Services, HD Cloud, HeyWatch.com, Kaltura, Media Core, MetaCDN, ooyala, Panda, Panvidea, Sorenson 360, thePlatform, VideoRX.com, VMIX, YouTube, Zencoder

Nobody really offers indemnification against anybody but themselves. That's the way things are - a license is just permission to use the IP you have, not a guarantee that a specific implementation won't violate somebody else's IP. This indemnification thing was a huge part of the anti-Linux FUD during the SCO case, and we all know how that turned out. Now it's a part of the defense against WebM, and I expect it to work out the same.

WebM hardware acceleration has been integrated into ARM SOC designs. It's proven in silicon and had 20 licensees already a year ago. The license terms are quite agreeable. A year from now it will probably be ubiquitous - some inexpensive webcams and videocams and phones will probably record in it by default, and there's no reason not to include it as an option in the premium webcam or recorder that also does H.264 (unless the H.264 patent pool decides to be bitchy about licensing their engine to multi-codec devices, and we all know that's going to the Justice department for monopoly regulation). And since WebM software encoding and decoding is free, it's a no-brainer to put your content in that format. It's dumb to not include it because it's free and almost all of YouTube and many other sources can use it.

No, I really think WebM isn't going to have trouble gaining traction. That was quite the point of Google buying On2 technologies in the first place. To liberate video from the clutches of MPEG and the H.264 patent pool so we could all be free to record our kids' birthday parties without the threat of being sued, to develop our own video capture devices or streaming services or conversion software in whatever way we may choose without the hindrance of somebody trying to prevent it unless they're paid, and preventing free solutions from using video. And that's just one of the reasons why I'm a big Google fan: moving pictures with audio is a technology that should be as plain as tapwater at this point in history. It's only the deliberate efforts of folks like the H.264 patent pool who have prevented it from being available to all to date, and that era is ending now. The H.264 patent pool has relented now on decoding, but on encoding they're holding the line and so will pass into history.

H.264 members like Microsoft stand to benefit if no competing solutions can record and stream video have held this progress back. That's a prevention of progress they seem to crave but can no longer achieve. So thanks Sergey and Larry! I know opening things up like this serves your commercial purposes, but they serve my personal purposes too - and you didn't have to make it this open. You're working your magic in myriad other ways like wireless spectrum and last-mile fiber Internet and I thank you for those things too!

SuperKendall, you wield this lack of indemnification like a club. You imply a threat that OEMs who deploy WebM might be sued - without specifics. Are you going to sue somebody? Who and why? Are you serving at counsel for somebody who might, or guiding lawyers who might do so as an executive? Or are you just blowing hot air, warning folks about boojums and goblins in the dark? This is exactly the type of IP terrorism I was talking about in my original post. It's counter to progress, mongering Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. It's part of why people hate prevention-of-progress companies like Microsoft and Oracle. If you've got some claim to rights against WebM, or know somebody who does - name them. Otherwise you're just full of shit, spinning tales of ghosts that aren't there. Nobody has ever made a claim against WebM that stuck and until they at least make a claim it's just vague empty threats you don't even dare come all the way out and say. It's less than nothing. Man up and make a claim if you dare.