Oh, What a Lovely Standards War

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "You know something big must be afoot when people start to get worked up over video compression standards. Basically, the issue is whether the current de facto standard, H.264, will continue to dominate this field, and if not, what might take over." Related, reader eihab writes "Nuanti, a company that develops Web browsing technologies, has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin. Nuanti's Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with Theora in browsers that have Silverlight. It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."

Comments

Color me ignorant but...

[FlyingGuy]

Video... Back in the day is was an analog signal that was digitized to 1's and 0's and was therefor you could perform the opposite opperation and make it back into analog and it would play just fine, yes?

So now we have camera's that have a light sensitive chip that gets all its charged area's scanned n times per second and therefor we skip the analog part since we directly have 1's and 0's, yes?

So I assume that the amount of data being pulled off the chip is rather large and therefor is it beneficial that it is compressed, aka zipped or some other compression algorithm. This video needs to be in sync with the sound, if there is any, yes?

Now I have had the occasion to work on still images and I would imagine the "raw" format is just those bits uncompressed, yes?

So is it a true statement that all one really needs is a compression tool to make the video file a reasonable size for transmission, yes?

So I fail to understand why this all seems so difficult. Put the collective minds together in the FOOS world, come up with a compression scheme for both video and audio and there you have it. Give the code to the world, and if it works well, will they not use it instead of something that requires a license or some other such nonsense? I am again assuming that all the "containers" everyone speaks of is simply a file type to hold the video, audio and what ever syncing information is required, yes?

Seems like a problem that is easily solved.

Re:Video for Everyone code hack is the solution

[drinkypoo]

Also, note that I said, "For now". It's a 5-year solution. Who knows what will change in the internet world in 5 years. That's like 100 "business" years and like 1000 dog years.

Yeah, in five years I could lose my original videos, and then I'm forced to pay up, or make the content disappear. That's like a total failure. It's all well and good to say I shouldn't do that, but accidents happen, especially during 100 business years or 1000 dog years.

Hopefully Ogg Theora will just take over and/or surpass H.264 and/or MPEG LA will get their patents tossed or that sort of patent will be invalidated globally. We can only hope.

No, that is bullshit. We also have the option not to use H.264, so we don't have to hope.

Perhaps 2016 will be when all the internet broadcasters "pull the plug" and drop H.264 support since Ogg Theora and "open" browsers will be common-place.

But that won't help me if all my content is in H.264 and I'm forced to transcode from it, producing shitty-looking video.

We can speculate a lot about what will be in 2016, but:

...but repeating an unfounded, unsupported assertion doesn't make it true, no matter how many times you do it.