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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.