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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."
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution. Works on Firefox, Opera, and Chrome natively with Ogg Theora, and Safari natively with H.264, and Internet Explorer with Flash (loading the H.264 content).
Naturally the best solution would be that everyone implements Ogg Theora as a standard fall-back solution, and use their "better/proprietary" solution when available.
If you're assuming browsers will directly support video playback without a plugin why would they not support H.264?
Free software that decodes H.264 cannot be distributed in countries that recognize MPEG LA members' patents. Slashdot is operated and hosted in one of those countries.
> It would be very ironic if Chrome running under proprietary Windows and OS X could play
> Theora, while Chrome on Linux would only support H.264.
Chrome supports Theora out of the box natively, so I'm not sure what you're talking about...
MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant.
Matroska (.mkv) is not a "H.264 variant". It's not a codec at all! It's a container format, which usually contains an H.264 video stream these days, but this has varied historically, and is not in any way standardized.
By virtue of the de facto status, it seems like anything that the majority of people use will never be superceded by anything that barely matches or only slightly improves on the de facto standard. From what I've read [reddit.com] Theora is quite bare-bones compared to H.264 and hasn't been designed with hardware decoding in mind.
And if you actually read what you linked you'll see it immediately debunked. Theora is up to scratch and has been designed with hardware decoding in mind. It's slightly behind H.264, but come on, we're not talking double the bit rate or anything. It never stopped MP3 being the defacto standard when better stuff was around. Universal availability trumps technical excellence always.
Nuanti has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft's Silverlight
Hardware accelerated H.264 is in the 10.1 Flash Beta. Silverlight 4 will support Chrome. The "high performance" H.264 player will be everywhere and in everything in the next few weeks or months.
Not at all! H.264 continues (as it has in the past) to require license fees to be paid for _every_ encoder or decoder.
The recent news from MPEG-LA is about fees for distributing CONTENT - which they may charge for in the future, but have announced that that's remaining free for now.
Don't be deluded into thinking that this doesn't require you to pay for H.264 though - it's just that the charge is on the production and consumption ends, rather than in the middle.
Mike
MKV is a container. OGG is container. H.264 is a codec.
Basket vs Fruit.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The price of admission is sending people to the four times a year MPEG meetings. The chips are the patentable intellectually property. The game is to get your IP into the standard by any means possible. When you are in the standard then you get profit participation in the MPEG-LA revenue stream.
When I was involved, the Japanese had a notorious reputation for sending lots of people and stacking the meetings. They would use procedural methods to extend the meetings into late night and then after others left they would use their numbers to force through their proposals.
Of course other players had other ways of stacking the deck. Remember that big corporations can afford to employ people full time to chair committees and that gives the extra clout (MicroSoft, apple, Sun, Philips,...).
This all means that smaller independent groups, like the one I worked for, had a very difficult time making any headway. No matter how good the technology, political considerations had a lot more impact.
The trick is that while MPEG is an open international body that supports "open standards", MPEG-LA is a foul black pit full of zombies, orcs and lawyers. In fact, the orcs and zombies are at the bottom of the heap, because the lawyer are the bad asses who run the show.
How are licenses fees set? Nobody knows. How are revenues divided? Nobody knows. How much is spent on MPEG-LA costs? Nobody knows. How do they decided to engage in legal action and who do target? Nobody knows.
It is a completely independent body with no oversight by any of the international standards bodies, or any government for that matter. It is only constrained by the software copyright rules in an individual jurisdiction.
It is a closed black box that can charge as much as it wants, and because it is an "international standard", it is almost impossible to compete with it based on cost or quality, and and you can't go after it using the legal system. (This one reason is why Ogg Theodora is not looked at as a meaningful option by the big players; it is not a standard, so it gives big companies headaches. Who is responsible if there is any trouble? What happens if a key person is hit by a bus? Having access to the source does not fully address all these legal issues.)
The reason that this such a bit deal is that large amounts of money are involved. I Googled around and I couldn't get a clue about total amounts, which is suspicious in itself. Remember, from the corporate viewpoint this is "free money", because the initial investment is small; a lab with some computers, some PHDs, a travel buget and some lawyers and the cost of their shark tanks. Very high rate of return over a long period of time.
And a shout out to all you libertarian morons out there: THIS IS A TAX!!! It is a tax collected by corrupt self serving insiders who have subverted the legal system. It restrains trade and stifles innovation. It is not subject to competition. Those who are taxed have no say in the matter. It is arbitrary, and you cannot escape it by taking your business elsewhere. It is all the things you claim to hate about government. How come you this behavior is good when done by business for greed and bad when done by governments, which are more accountable to the people?
Why is Snark Required?
Chrome is not open source. Chromium doesn't have H.264. It's you, who is "not even remotely accurate".
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
As for Mozilla, the stated reason for not using gstreamer/quicktime/directplay is the potential for security exploits in those frameworks
Not really. They made that argument specifically for DirectShow, but it remains a very weak one. Meanwhile, they've added GStreamer support to Fennec, but still refuse to add it to the desktop version, and the reason explicitly given for this is purely political in nature:
A solution that seems logical on the surface is to simply expose each platform's underlying media playback engine through the HTML 5 video element—DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux, and QTKit on Mac OS X. This would make it possible for the browser to play any video formats that are supported natively on the user's computer.
From a purely technical perspective, this is not an impossible problem to solve as there are already existing libraries that do this and provide a cohesive abstraction layer on top. One prominent option is Nokia's Phonon library. It could also possibly be done by using the Quicktime and DirectShow plugins for GStreamer.
Mozilla strongly opposes this approach because it would heighten the risk of fragmentation. Allowing content providers to use any codec that is available on the user's computer might undermine the advantages of the HTML 5 media element because there would be no consistency guarantee and content would not be able to work everywhere. That is, however, arguably the situation that already exists as a result of the impasse in the codec debate.
Do we have to play words? We both know that, at the very least, a considerable proportion (I dare say, a majority) of Linux users prefer FOSS over non-FOSS, and at the very least, open standards unencumbered by patents (and associated fees) to closed ones. The fact that many of them still use proprietary software (and hardware with such) - NVidia drivers, Android etc - does not change that. It just means that sometimes, pragmatism outweighs purism. It's not black & white, after all.
It doesn't mean that they like that state of affairs, however. Back when GIF was patented, I haven't heard of anyone disabling that code in their browsers - but there was, nonetheless, a big campaign in support of a switch to PNG.
Replying to myself, but holy crap.
FORTY SEVEN PAGES JUST TO LIST THE PATENTS.
Yeah, you're gonna need an army of lawyers for the "work around the H.264 patents" technique.