Nokia Claims Ogg Format is "Proprietary"

a nona maus writes "Several months ago a workgroup of the W3C decided to include Ogg/Theora+Vorbis as the recommended baseline video codec standard for HTML5, against Apple's aggressive protest. Now, Nokia seems to be seeking a reversal of that decision: they have released a position paper calling Ogg 'proprietary' and citing the importance of DRM support. Nokia has historically responded to questions about Ogg on their internet tablets with strange and inconsistent answers, along with hand waving about their legal department. This latest step is enough to really make you wonder what they are really up to."

Comments

Apple and Ogg

[christurkel]

Apple doesn't support Ogg, which as a Mac user bums me. It shouldn't be hard to add support.

Re:Apple and Ogg

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

But I hope you weren't under the impression that Apple is actually against DRM in principle.

I think you're following a red herring here. Apple is opposed to DRM, from pure selfishness, but that applies as much to Vvideo as it does to audio. Apple implements DRM when they have to and removes it when they can, this is because their goal is to sell hardware. To sell hardware, you need content. If they can only get content with DRM, they'll try to use minimal DRM under their control because their goal is to make things as easy for users as possible, because then more people buy their hardware. If they can do away with it, well that is even easier for users and will sell even more hardware.

No, Apple's opposition to Vorbis as a standard has little to do with DRM, as they could always apply DRM encapsulation for it. Actually I suspect Apple is just heavily invested in the MPEG standard, which is not as open, but is DRM agnostic as well. Having developed a lot of technologies on top of the MPEG standard as well as both pro and consumer tools for creating it, Apple just sees no benefit to them for Vorbis, since licensing costs are not all that significant.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

[Mantaar]

I still don't understand why though.

Apart from it not supporting DRM, ogg has only advantages - it's equal or superior to most other codecs (the widely used mp3 and wma are inferior) and it's open-source w/o patents restrictions...

Seriously, does anyone have an explanation for that?

Reaaallly?

[nmoog]

This document was written by Stephan Wanger who, according to his bio "serves on the Board of Directors of UB Video Inc., a leading supplier of video compression software".

I wonder if this has anything to do with him not particularly liking ogg?

Re:ACC/H2.64

[netcrusher88]

First off, it's actually AAC. And it's not proprietary, at least not to Apple - AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is part of the MPEG-4 standard and intended as a successor to MP3, though like MP3 it legally requires a patent license. Also H.264 is not an Apple codec - it's an ITU standard, also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, or AVC (but again with the patent nonsense).

I think why Apple picked them up is that they are about the best codecs out there (I'm not going to entertain a debate between AAC and OGG quality, please, the reasoning here is that H.264 and AAC are DESIGNED to work together). Also AAC is very good at surround sound, something MP3 has never been popular for, perhaps for the reasons below.

The reason that the community and market have been slow to accept them are that they are more complicated, thus heavier and/or more expensive to implement, as well as the fact that Xvid and Divx (same thing, different encoders - another part of MPEG-4 by the way) can (or used to) produce smaller filesizes for video, and at standard def you wouldn't really know the difference. But as HD content has become more popular, it's become more common to find media in H.264 with AAC 5.1 audio, and as en- and decoders get better (not to mention computers) H.264 and AAC present less of a relative strain on both disk (or bandwidth) and processor, and at HD resolution the hit to speed is completely worth it.

I think this might be way Nokia is pushing H.264 and AAC - they present real possibility for advancement into high-def streaming content, something that other codecs really don't. Please note that I really haven't had any experience with Ogg Theora (which is NOT the same as Ogg Vorbis) in high-def environments, so I can't really say for sure. Also I'm not sure how it is at streaming.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually Nokia has a great history with "open" standards (generally defined as RAND as opposed to royalty free). In fact Nokia's entire current business comes out of it's ability to cooperate with arch rivals such as Ericsson to build open standards such as NMT, GSM and WCDMA. So the question is not "why is Nokia opposed to open standards?". The question is "why is Nokia opposing this standard?"

Reading through the document, it's actually much more reaonable (DRM should be possible, but shouldn't be mandatory) than implied. The OGG thing, however, is very interesting. To me it almost reads like they know someone who has a fundamental patent on OGG. A fundamental patent is one which can't be avoided to implement a standard and thus guarantees control of the standard. However, give that Xiph.org have done a patent search and claim that OGG is patent free and nobody has contradicted them, I can think of at least two more likely things here.

a) the recent Microsoft / Nokia WMA licensing agreements have seriously crippled Nokias freedom to operate with different formats.

b) they are afraid of the fact that whilst OGG is open, control of how the standard evolves is "proprietary". By this they mean not under control of an "open" standardisation body that they can join. Looking at it; Xiph.org seems to have too much industry independence.

Make no mistake, though, the Nokia of five years ago is probably not the Nokia of today. Where old Nokia was trying to deliver devices to let you do whatever you wanted to do, new Nokia is trying to become a media company and that means is almost certainly joining the dark side.

They are right though

[halk]

Ogg Theora is a product of a single company. It has not been standardized by any recognized standards organisation. That indeed makes it "proprietary".

  The company, On2 Technologies, has disclaimed all patent right on the technology. However, as far as I know they are not a significant holder of video compression patents. I don't think any actual big video patent holders has commented about Theora. This means that there is a significant risk of submarine patents.

According to the paper Theora is comparable in performance to the old H.261 codec. H.261 is about 20 years old so all patents on it have most likely expired. H.261 is widely implemented and if the performance claims are true, it makes Theora rather pointless.

Re:Well, isn't it obvious?

[Zeinfeld]

Not as funny as the only person in this thread that actually read the article, which was about Nokia's complaints over Ogg+Theora as a video standard getting modded troll for pointing out that all of the other random drivel about the superior audio format is completely irrelevant...

Well thats par for the course here, slashy tends to be more of a fanzine.

I read the Nokia paper, the summary seems to misrepresent it. Some of the points were actually ones that I had made at the W3C AC plenary: Some of the older audio and video formats are comming out of patent soon, it might be nice to know precisely when. I would like to see an unencumbered standard CODEC that all browsers support, that does not necessarily have to be Ogg if MPEG2 and AC3 are due to expire in the near future.

I know that ACC and H.264 offer better compression and in fact I expect them to be used to deliver the bulk of Web content. The trick is how to ensure that the cost of using these technologies is proportional to the value of the bandwidth that they save (a few hundred million dollars) rather than the value of the applications they enable (a few hundred billion dollars).

One of the somewhat frustrating problems here is that useful comparisons of compression quality are pretty hard to come by. One comparison I read disqualified Ogg Theora because it did not compress The Matrix to fit on a CD. In other words a totally arbitrary cut off point. Why choose that movie, who cares about the capacity of a CDROM?

Quite a few MPEG2 patents have expired already, it would take a lot of work to find out when they all expire though. Main question would be what happens with submarine patents at this point.

The reason I prefer this approach is that I just don't think that anyone can invent a new video compression scheme and be sure that it is unencumbered. We thought that GIF was unencumbered when we made it the standard image format for the Web, turned out that we were wrong but there was no way we could have known at the time. I don't like chosing Ogg for the same reason, I would prefer to be absolutely sure we have an unencumbered spec which means choosing something obsolete.

Yes there is

[Sycraft-fu]

Non-discriminatory doesn't mean "Doing whatever anyone wants," it just means being consistent. In the case of a license it means two things:

1) The license must be available to all comers. You do not get to choose who gets a license, anyone who pays the fee gets a license.

2) The fee must be fixed. One person can't get a sweetheart deal and another get the shaft.

You meet those criteria, that is a non-discriminatory license, you aren't discriminating.

Take a situation where I own a bar. If I have a night where I sell beer to any customer for $2, that's a non-discriminatory special. Whoever you are, you get to have beer for that price. However if I run a special where only girls in tight shirts get $2 beers, that's a discriminatory special. I am dictating who or what you must be or do to get the pricing.

Trying to redefine things just because you don't like how it works doesn't change how it really is. You aren't being discriminated against just because someone won't give you something for free. You are only being discriminated against if they will give it to someone else for free, but not you.