Slashdot Mirror
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."
It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
Except, of course, a browser that has Silverlight. :-|
Currently hooked on AMP
...Silverlight
it's just as bad as flash only from an even scummier company.
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.
I wish there was a way to mod the original press release as +5, Epic Troll, because that's what it is with respect to Slashdot - it's going to be way more entertaining than the usual (and already somewhat tiresome) Google vs "do no evil" stories. But Microsoft's Silverlight used to enable support for Theora in pretty much all Windows browsers (and specifically IE of all things), while both Google and Apple stand by H.264 - oh my!
Hold on a second, I've got to fetch the popcorn...
"It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
Other than Silverlight. Gee, that solves the problem.
Ogg Theora won't become relevant until there are hardware decode chips available. Why would I install Silverlight to play Ogg when I can use HTML5 and H.264 instead? Because someone might charge to develop with the codec after 2015?
I don't care because the H.264 standard is open even though it's not free.
> 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...
If they did, everybody could just use that (since it's already on 98% of computers out there) and put a stop to these stupid standards wars.
.jpg/.png editing software.
They probably wouldn't lose much revenue, if at all... I mean, they've always been giving away the Flash plugin for free. They make all their money from selling content-creating software (Flash CS3) right? That wouldn't change if they open-sourced Flash player. Similar to how Photoshop completely dominates the industry even though anyone is free to make
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.
Wow, got a flamebait in record time for that one.
No offense to the OGG crew and developers, but what you're not getting is that the battle is already lost. The future of web video isn't really in the browser. It's on low-powered appliances like XBoxes, iPhones, iPads, Playstations and the like. And that's now. People are already building libraries in h264 and divx because of this. It's an insurance policy against your media not becoming obsolete like VHS and DVD.
Divx just slides in because most devices will play it hardware assisted even though you need to install the codecs on a desktop.
Without hardware decoding on those low-powered devices, and the ability to play your media anywhere you damn well please with no software installs necessary and no transcoding required, you may as well not exist.
OGG's a fine set of codecs, but if I have to transcode out of it to play on anything but a desktop, basically, I have no use for it and neither does the consumer other than the idea behind it is a quite appealing one.
Now, the video is all in ISO MPEG-4 containers, with ISO H.264 video and ISO AAC audio and is playable on Linux in FlashPlayer and WebKit browsers and other players, and the complaining continues. It is disheartening.
The complaining continues because Linux users still cannot play video using FOSS solutions, due to licensing fees associated with implementation of H.264. Given the overall Linux philosophy, it's a perfectly valid complaint.
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...
Theora can be decoded on the cpus of all the devices you listed, at the applicable screen resolutions, in real time. Heck, the arm optimized version of theora can decode HD at a significant multiple of real time on a CPU slower than the one in the 3gs.
All of this craze and expectation of hardware acceleration comes from H.264 being an utter pig. They overestimated how much faster cpus and memory would become by now, and we're only coping by using lesser profiles or adding hardware acceleration.
mpeg-LA seems to be letting broadcasts go free for the next couple of years. Note that is only for the actual broadcast. They can open a can of whoop ass on various licensing fees whenever they feel it gets entrenched.
They can, but you know they will not until 2017 (expires in December of 2016). You can plan around and to a date.
Meanwhile Theora is an unknown patent quantity that may or may not be challenged at any time. It's the schrodinger cat of codecs, so no-one even wants to hold the box much less look inside.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, except with MPEG-LA charging website owners a per-video fee (ensuring most webmasters avoid it) and with both Firefox and Opera refusing to implement it, h.264 already lost the battle as well. It's not about user's devices, it's about websites and no website will pay MPEG-LA's extortion fees and exclude over a fourth of desktop users and a significant part of mobile ones in the process.
It's been Theora or nothing from the very beginning. You argue that it's nothing, then, and I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the idea of h.264 becoming a web standard was dead on arrival. Which is, I suspect, exactly what Microsoft and Adobe wanted from the beginning as the status quo is what benefits them the most.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
The problem is there is exactly zipola when it comes to hardware acceleration for Theora, and you can't just "use moar power!" when we are talking cell phones, netbooks, and mini-tablets. I have gotten nothing but grief for pointing this out, but if Theora is to have a chance it needs hardware acceleration by the big three-Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, and it needs it yesterday.
My GPU cost a grand total of $35 and came with H.26x, WMV 7-9, MPG 2 and 4, all accelerated out of the box. Even the cheapest onboard GPUs nowadays usually will give you H.26x, WMV, and MP4 acceleration out of the box. And building PCs I can tell you it does make a difference, even on powerful machines the playback is smoother and allows for more multitasking without video stutter.
So I would be suggesting to the FOSS community if they want Theora to get anywhere they better look at the specs AMD and Intel have released and start on hardware Theora decoding ASAP. If they get it going for those two Nvidia won't allow themselves to be left out and will get Theora acceleration if for no other reason to have a "me too!" bullet point on the GPUs. Then you will have hardware acceleration covered for most desktops and netbooks, which in turn will hopefully make the cell phone and other small Internet devices stand up and start to take notice.
But just saying Theora runs okay without hardware acceleration on your desktop won't cut it, when so much of the Internet is moving away from simply sitting at a desk all day. Both AMD and Intel have released specs on their GPUs, and isn't that what the developers have always asked for? Give us the specs and we'll take care of the rest? Well here is your chance, we need Theora acceleration if H.264 isn't to become the dominant format.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Firefox is taking an ethical stand by not allowing a situation like Unisys / GIFs to happen where you have to get sign contacts and pay license fees to host some video on your sites. Also Firefox would effectively be closed source if it adopted H.264, just like Chrome is. (Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on, DOES NOT support H.264).
h.264 video outnumbers Theora video on the web by many orders of magnitude. Perhaps you missed the memo, but YouTube, Apple and Hulu all use h.264 extensively. Asserting that h.264 has somehow lost is delusional.
As it stands, h.264 is the dominant web format for new video, only possibly outnumbered by legacy videos (which are very much *not* encoded with Theora).
Claiming that 1/4 of the desktops on the web can't view h.264 is rather amusing given that the vast majority of Firefox installs play h.264 just fine, as they almost universally have the Flash plug-in.
Nah... java applets, trust me, it will WORK! This time...
Reminds me of a comment on a dutch tech site, remarked how much smarter a dutch tv station was, for choosing silverlight over flash, because it was more widely supported, except that particular function just happens to only be available for windows.
Silverlight may or may not be good, but after ActiveX and COM and such, why do people keep building their business model on an MS product? You know that sooner or later they will pull a move that screws you.
It would be like putting a bet on Apple announcing a sensible, non-sexy, non-drool inducing, cheap and essential item. Or IBM doing anything interesting in the consumer market. I don't know about leopards, but I do know companies never change their spots.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.