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Free Software Foundation Urges Google To Free VP8
jamesswift writes "The FSF have written an open letter to Google urging them to free the VP8 codec with an irrevocable royalty-free licence: 'With its purchase of the On2 video compression technology company having been completed on Wednesday February 16, 2010, Google now has the opportunity to make free video formats the standard, freeing the web from both Flash and the proprietary H.264 codec.'"
Also from the letter: "The world would have a new free format unencumbered by software patents. Viewers, video creators, free software developers, hardware makers -- everyone -- would have another way to distribute video without patents, fees, and restrictions. The free video format Ogg Theora was already at least as good for web video (see a comparison) as its nonfree competitor H.264, and we never did agree with your objections to using it. But since you made the decision to purchase VP8, presumably you're confident it can meet even those objections, and using it on YouTube is a no-brainer."
...a "Free as in Beer" license would be probably sound better.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
The two issues that prevented YouTube from using the Ogg Theora codec still apply.
Many hardware devices already have H.264 decoding built into the chip, ranging from set-top boxes to the iPhone. Moving away would mean losing ability to run on these target devices (or run at an unacceptable frame rate).
The alternative would be to have two versions of the video stored, but they're currently already doing this for Mobile YouTube and regular YouTube, and adding a third wouldn't make much sense.
The cost of transcoding all the videos again is also another issue. Doing this to all the videos at once is somewhat pointless - currently, if you try and watch a video that isn't already encoded for the mobile device, YouTube will attempt to transcode the video on the fly and send it out directly.
I guess this could be done, but while storage is relatively inexpensive, it kinda doesn't make much business sense; the patent licensing cost Google about zilch already, so it'd just cost them more for all these extra "features".
Then again, if they piss off Mozilla, there goes marketshare/traffic/revenue. Put it the other way though, the other browsers (including IE) could just as easily implement H.264 and then gain users from those who can't use FF to play their favourite dancing cat videos.
I hope Google does this. A real, free video system for the internet would do incalculable good. Google could once again take the high road, and show it truly is different than the evil Microsoft!
I hope Google agrees.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
This might make me unpopular here, but the whole letter is poorly worded and written in the wrong spirit. Initially it's ok, but then it all starts sounding a little bit desperate, and by the end it's demanding and almost threatening. Imo.
What about Dirac, the HD codec developed by the BBC? It has at least two Free implementations, and there are probably no patents?
Does anyone here have a pointer to a comparison taking Dirac into account, both for low and high bitrates?
Why not just buy h.264 outright? What's the market cap for the company that owns it? It's got to be a drop in the bucket compared to licencing fees down the road, plus what they paid (1 billion dollars) for YouTube.
moox. for a new generation.
mhhh well now is the time where we can see if Google is here to make the world a better place or just another caitalist company.
Do no evil != Help make the World a better place
BTW, any Slashdot devs online? This website is a fucking pain to use on tiny computers suchas the N900. This is supposed to be a site for nerds .... you know, for people who like to us gadgets.
Slashdot sucks a little more each day, I think it is time to say good bye and never come back.
This nerd is getting of the Slashdot ride, next stop Chandot.org
the reasons they oppose h.264 are stupid for a start, it has about the most generous licensing i've ever seen. hence the reason it has been so widely adopted.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No one company owns H.264. The patents are spread out across about two dozen companies listed on the licensors page. Some of them, like Apple and Microsoft, have market capitalizations close to that of Google.
Video sites are having enough trouble moving away from Flash to H264 streams already... please, please, please (!!!) don't introduce another new video format without ubiquitious hardware decoding support into the fray!
That comparison is known to be flawed, for example, it does not list the instantaneous bitrates and frame types for the respective frames.
it has about the most generous licensing i've ever seen.
But it's the "about" that kills. A software license that includes the H.264 terms will never qualify under Free Software Foundation's definition of free software, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, or Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition.
I'm just sayin'...
Theora as good as h264? Yeah, sure. Sorry, VP3 (which Theora is based on) is previous generation codec, comparable to h263. There is no way for it to be as good as h264 unless you use crappy encoder or wrong settings. I like it how Theora apologists compare YouTube videos encoded to achieve balance between size, quality and decoding speed to Theora on maxed out settings and twist it into "they are comparable". Here is more realistic comparison: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~nick/theora-soccer/ which shows that Theora requires 60% more bandwidth than h264 for similar quality.
It seems to me they are just summing up all the discussions happened on Slashdot after the acquisition, and what almost everyone hoped for/believed.
Do they really have a chance at influencing Google's decision? Plus Google is already known to open source the technologies it wants to push, if only because adopters would be scared of Google's control. So even if they do open V8, was this useful at all?
Or maybe they just want to put their signature in case Google follows their expectation: "See, we made them do it"...
On the other hand it seems that some one at Google follows suggestions from XKCD, so the FSF could be in luck too.
In the United States, x264 is considered warez because distribution thereof infringes a third party's right.
I admit that I don't know a lot about the topic, but it seems like this is something that Google probably already has plans to do anyways. I mean, the acquisition was just completed last week for fucks sake. It takes time for people to go through this stuff to make sure they're fully in the clear before they can do it. Don't be surprised if you see this happening within a month or two. And also the FSF should make sure they don't go patting themselves on the back for something they likely had nothing to do with.
Why write an erudite carefully thought out and well argued letter when they can just bang out one of their usual hysterical Good vs Evil style polemics? I doubt anyone except a few dyed in the wool fanbois or anyone who's worked in the real world for more than 6 months take much notice of what the FSF says anymore, they're just a bunch of single issue reactionaries with little new to say. While I respect the software they've written over the years , their politics is a joke.
"On2 Technologies' VP3 codec is the basis for Ogg Theora. In 2001, On2 open-sourced VP3 under an irrevocable free license. But in the years since, the company has continued to improve its codecs, releasing five subsequent generations."
as a group, we can only operate in a range of about 150 degrees, & most of that must be above 0.
no better time to learn to count... (on some things that we have no concrete understanding of)?
First on the ogg vorbis vs h.264. You cannot compare ogg vorbis to h.264 using youtube as a guide using the methods in the article, it was a very bad test from the start. The youtube encoding engine is not designed for quality of output, it is based on high volume, acceptable quality, non-professional technology as the goal of youtube has never been the ultimate in video quality. Using the youtube encoding engine as the benchmark for encoding to current web standards and then trying to extrapolate that to justification to use ogg vorbis is not only a bad idea (IMHO), it is bad test methodology. Not only is aiming at current web quality for a future requirements a bad idea, there is the bigger question of commercialization at stake here.
On h.264. We are still in the infancy of h.264, there are still lots of improvements that can and will be made in the coming years. The difference between an ogg vorbis, or even vp8, and the work that has been put into and will continue to be put into h.264 should not be underestimated. This is not about the compression syntax, this is about the fundamental algorithms that drive the psycho visual experience and trust me, that takes years of study by rooms of scientists all competing to come up with the best solution. In the past 6 months alone we have seen 10-150% improvement in the best h.264 codecs across all bitrates. This is technology that will commercialized in the next few months. Besides the amount of research being put into improving h.264 (by many commercial interests, universities, and individuals) there is the work being done at the system level with advanced streaming and distribution being a major part of our future viewing experience. These are optimizations that typically happen at a combination of codec,wrapper, and distrubtion engines (servers) that allow large scale or targeted device distribution to happen very efficiently. Smooth streaming (MS) and adaptive bitrate (adobe) are just the tip of the iceberg. h.264 has a lot of legs left and there is a huge amount of ongoing work happening to support it. To get to this level with VPx (or any other codec) is a HUGE undertaking across the board as all of this work would have to be re-invented and the standard itself would have to be re-adapted to fit.
On VPx. It is a decent codec but there are a lot of questions about it's status as non-infringing. Having looked extensively at hundreds of hours of content produced by various versions of vpx, having had a number of discussions with developers, it is not clear to me that there is no risk there of infringement. You simply cannot say that it is not infringing, you can only take the word of on2 at face value and google is probably going through the exercise of digging deeper than that now. If it is infringing then there is the question of commercialization of that patent portfolio and all that entails (getting the patent holders who have a huge stake in h.264 to go along with it).
Having said that, I am all for having a free codec standard but it is not as simple as simply making vpx a free and open alternative. Making it free and open could happen overnight, google could do that, but bringing it to the same level of both engineering and commercial momentum that we have with h.264 today will not happen overnight and it will slow down the momentum and uptake of video over the internet in general. It will force people, companies, and professional interests to take sides and that is not a good thing. It would be far better to reach out to the companies that own the patents on h.264 to try to convince them to continue the 'free for free' use of h.264 in perpetuity.
We use MPEG2 everywhere without problems (including our ATSC television) - we can certainly do the same with H.264/MPEG4. In fact it's the same standard used in European TV and they seem to be making-out okay.
These two codecs are more akin to V.34 or V.92 modem standards - licensed by their respective committees but essentially liberated (free).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Well, all the hardware / processing requirement are moot given it's freaking Google we're talking about. Given the resources they have at their disposal, adding yet another codec to the bunch of other formats in which the video are available isn't going to be such a demanding task (in worst case if they definitely need to free resources, they could kick out one of the older not-used-anymore formats, like Sorenson or whatever).
The main problem is the going to be the hardware support. Specially since VP8 is touted as having potential to be better quality as h264 : consequently it could also be more computationally complex (unlike Theora). But mobile hardware is also making progress in term of advanced programmability : the latest most popular ARM platform include a GPU (PowerVR) whose makers (Imagination Technology) are members of the OpenCL board. And it's not like if Google didn't have the resources to tackle that problem too.
In addtion to that (and unlike Xiph), Google has enough popularity and market significance to leverage in order to persuade manufacturer to consider including a VP8-decoding core to their packages.
I would half-expect that the 2010 edition of Google Summer of Code includes a couple of projects to port the latest Google's VP8 variation onto OpenCL and onto VHDL/Verilog on Opencores.
With late 2010 / early 2011 android phones featuring GPGPU+DSP accelerated VP8 on their OMAPs after updating to the latest version.
And late 2011 with the dedicated hardware VP8 implementation finding its way into CPU packages with ARM Cortex 9 or 10 in the next crop of Google ChromOS Netbooks.
That is all pure speculation, but isn't that much un-realistic and could pretty much happen (though GPGPU-accelerated Theora and dedicated hardware Theora have in fact already happened. But it's just not a popular enough format and there's not a big enough demand to have package manufacturer include such a core in their current crop of OMAPs, Tegras, etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
freeing the web from both Flash and the proprietary H.264 codec.'
Point of order: Flash is not a video codec - it is a rich internet application platform which includes streaming video capability. Flash video is a "container" format which can use a variety of (proprietary) codecs including On2 VP6 and H.264.
So, whatever the other arguments against Flash, on the issue of potential future H.264 patent problems its no better or worse than HTML5+H.264.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
This sort of campaign can never fully solve the swpat problem, but patents on media formats are probably the biggest pain, so this is very worthwhile. The H.264 Mpeg format that Google currently uses is covered by over 900 patents in 29 countries!
Here's info I've gathered about these topics:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Does your police really come and bust down your door and shove machine guns into your face if you download "unapproved" software?
No. But this is true only because ACTA is not yet law.
Making VP8 patent-free won't magically add VP8 hardware acceleration to the millions of iPhone, iPod, iPad, Blackberries, PSP and other devices out there.
H.264 is the current standard, get over it already.
VP8 needs to be at least equal or better than the upcoming H.265 to have any chance of becoming a standard.
Cant google just buy all the rights to h264 en set it free?
If Google opens up VP8, the same thing that happened to Microsoft when they opened up Windows Media as VC-1 will happen.
When MS opened up Windows Media as VC-1 a bunch of companies claimed patents on it (including some that claim they have patents on MPEG4/H.264) and everyone had to join the patent pool and/or buy a license.
Wouldn't this be what Google have in mind anyway? They're better at openness than most (relatively)...
Patent laws are different in Europe, but aside from that, MPEG2 is quite old and most of the patents are expired.
H.264 is much newer so there is a real risk of patent claims.
They want to reencode in four down scale resolutions, not eight Cartesian product of downscale resolutions and codecs.
If you check the size of h264/mp4 SP implemented devices, Android, iPad, iPod like "trendy" new stuff is a drop in the ocean.
Companies who actually broadcasts and sells content looks for the size of the market, the share of the market and yes, in that case non smart phones (billions!) are also mattering with the advent of 3G and even EDGE.
Lets say, if you invent a codec which will effectively erase h264 in terms of quality&bandwidth, h264/mp4 and even mpeg-2 will still stay since that device in your hand and connected device to your TV has some kind of impossible to replace chip.
I think FSF and "Free codec" thinks everyone uses the latest device/trendy PC and somehow, Google will magically add VP8 to it. How? They don't even see the real magic thing about H264, it is scalability and compatibility. Most of "Real is spyware" trolls or "MS is dying" people doesn't know it but... H264 and AAC(+) is the first time the entire industry agreed on a single codec. Device manufacturers, software vendors, chip manufacturers, cell phone manufacturers have all said "OK, regardless of our evil World domination plans, there is nothing that can match H264".
For the first time in media history, Real, MS, Satellite Boxes, Apple, Cell phones, Media devices, Blu Ray are all using the very same codec with little difference which makes it extremely easy and cheap for the actual content creators. When a TV professional hears about Linux, he pictures a Da Vinci box (lovely thing based on Linux), not the 1% Desktop... Thanks to iPhone/iPod and actually rising market share, Apple matters but Apple has already decided back when nobody except media professionals and codec nerds knew about it. It is H264.
I know geeks love to try and be as overly literal as possible but it doesn't help your case here. H.264 is NOT a proprietary format, because that's not how the word is used. In terms of formats proprietary means a format owned by a single company. VP8 would be a proprietary format. On2, now Google, owns all rights to it. The decide how it can be used and who, if anyone, will get a license.
This is as opposed to open formats, or open standards if you like, which is what H.264 is. What this means is that the format and all related documentation are open for anyone on equal terms. Anybody who wants the docs can get them for a fixed fee (often free, sometimes not). Also licensing is RAND, reasonable and non-discriminatory. That means that the fees charged are in line with what it does and the sort of thing companies might actually pay. So no "$50,000 per minute of media," sort of thing because that would be an effective ban, even if it was technically licensing. Also they are fixed, the same for everyone, so there's no discrimination where some companies get good terms and some don't.
There are also of course free formats, where there is no charge or license to use them, either because they were made that way or because all the patents have expired.
However, open standards are quite common and are quite well understood as opposed to proprietary ones. Hardware makers and such care about open standards because it means they know they can license it and use it, and don't have to worry about the company who own it cutting them off. They know what it'll cost, and that won't change.
So VP8 is currently proprietary, H.264 is open, Theora is free. See the difference?
They are moving to another container, it has already decided that h264 is way to go.
The company that Google acquired made couple of big mistakes back in H264 take off... Stupid pricing policy, failure to convince chip manufacturers, failure to convince mobile manufacturers, horrible support for anything except Windows including Mac Quicktime Framework (ask Toshiba/MS what happens) so they failed, Google needed a codec that they can control without any patent troll risks so they acquired them. I have originally thought that Google had courage to actually do things FSF imagine but no, it doesn't seem to be case. Perhaps, there may be a good ending and Google could say "That is the idea, we are consulting with thousands of lawyers and IT patent professionals right now."
In reality, there are less than 10 companies and couple of organizations decides where will the video compression on billions of devices/computers will head to. Perhaps, FSF should visit EBU HQ, BBC and ask them what convinced them to plan broadcasting in H264. It doesn't work like "Google has decided, throw away that $2M AVID studio, we are installing VLC and airing in VP8 now."
They should really visit a TV station you know and see how the original content is created, compressed and broadcasted.
Could you replace the CD with something else in 1995? That was when the CD was as old and entrenched as H.264 is now. It's way too late. You should be lobbying MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free after 2016 (like Apple does) not lobbying Google to get a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD thing started. (BTW Blu-Ray is H.264.) Content publishers are even warier of multiple formats than users because it kills media buying.
Further, it's only PC's that have a choice of software codec, and even there it comes at the expense of battery life, decoding a non-standard codec on your CPU instead of H.264 on your GPU with more efficiency. On mobiles you have a built-in H.264 decoder only, that's it. The PC as the center of the digital universe is as passé as the CD. Video is what plays on iPods (H.264) and smartphones (H.264) and set-tops (H.264). It is actually pathetic to think that the Web is going to come late to the video game and rewrite history when you consider how Microsoft does not even support the video tag yet.
Start thinking about the successor to H.264, and better yet, start building it, write some code.
Google is firmly behind H.264 because in YouTube they have a video business. YouTube is H.264 in the back end. There's no alternative to ISO standard H.264 if you want people to actually see your content, same as in 1995 there was no alternative to CD.
debacles that get me thinking most codec companies just wont be happy until we gouge our eyes out and retreat to the stone age banging rocks together, or fork over our credit cards for the christgod privilege of the moving image.
my frustrations mount from years of watching codecs go from boom to bust, good to ugly, and seeing things like windows media player needlessly clutter every inch of my hard drive with a compendium of the last decades worth of "heres how to view this our way" dll files. personally i hope the all fail at this point. if vp8 is floss and good, then take it. if its floss and bad, lets take it and make it better. but for god sake, lets stop with the media devices designed to play six million different proprietary formats as a business model.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You're right, H.264 is very much like MPEG2 in this respect, but I'm not sure that's ideal. The MPEG-LA considers that you need a license for every MPEG2 player ($2.50), every MPEG2 encoder ($2.50), plus a royalty on every distributed item (such as a DVD).
This is the reason that most Linux distros don't come with DVD/digital TV tuner playback without downloading a codec from a 3rd party. This may be legal or not depending on your jurisdiction (from the fact you use ATSC, I'm guessing you're in a country that does recognise software patents), but either way the fact it happened for DVD doesn't mean it's a good idea for the web.
The MPEG4 licensing agreement includes a licensing cost for every encoded stream on the internet, but has currently set that rate at zero for much online content (as an introductory rate). This is pretty explicitly a policy to encourage use and then, once it totally dominates online video, profit from it to a greater degree later.
The MPEG-LA is certainly an improvement from negotiating a separate license for every patent (not that anyone can guarantee that all applicable patents are in the pool), but it's not very compatible with open source software and a royalty free codec would be better for everyone.
They should simply use a codec if you have it installed.
The majority of PCs don't run Windows 7 and therefore don't have H.264 installed out of the box.
If they don't distribute anything that violates the h.264 patents then they're in the clear.
Not only do they have to not distribute ffdshow, they also have to not even tell anyone about ffdshow for fear of running afoul of the "inducement" precedent set in MPAA v. Grokster.
Didn't you know that codecs can come in separate binaries, and one for H.264 is already included in most OS's?
"Most operating systems" by what count? As of the first quarter of 2010, two-thirds of desktop PCs still run Windows XP, and unlike more recent versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Windows XP does not come with an H.264 decoder.
Didn't you know that mozilla *already* interfaces with proprietary binary blobs, and in fact one of them can play back H.264?
So how hard would it be to write a Greasemonkey script to turn <video> elements referencing H.264 video into <object> elements using Flowplayer?
Sigh... I wish the fsf hadn't written this for two reasons:
1) it's half-cocked. hardware acceleration for vp8 does not exist yet, and google would still need a massive transcode of its youtube database to any other format.
2) i fear this does more harm than good - google is LESS likely to free vp8 under an mit style license now because they don't want to seem like they did it because of the fsf.
basically i just wish the fsf would go away in favor of some people with less black and white views about encouraging software freedom, and a little more tact and saavy (who the fuck came up with the name "bad vista"??? sounds like the work of a 6 year old)
Summary says:
'The free video format Ogg Theora was already at least as good for web video (see a comparison) as its nonfree competitor H.264'
Except the source linked (at see a comparison) says:
'In the case of the 499kbit/sec H.264 I believe that under careful comparison many people would prefer the H.264 video.'
This is the only comparison statement made versus H.264 in that article and H.264 comes out on top. The article primarily uses H.263 as a reference, stating that H.264 isn't used in mainstream streamed internet video, we all know is no longer true.
It would be great if slashdot at least checked the summaries a little bit.
Also note that is a very low-end profile for H.264, any one of you can make a lot better looking version of Big Buck Bunny at 499kbit/sec simply using ffmpeg.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
ACTA isn't just about copy rights it is about patents as well. So patent insanity may be coming to a country near you soon courtesy of the US. Of course if the SCotUS comes back with a ruling in re: Bilski that says "knock it off" before ACTA gets implemented maybe it gets better in the US. In any case it isn't wise to just hope that every thing will turn out OK.
...they bought On2? I mean, is there any other reason? Would they have even gone for it if they had discovered legitimate submarine patents affecting VP8 like (for example Nokia's) claim to affect VP3 (and thus Theora)?
No. On2 have one asset - the codecs. Google have one goal in this - to get an agreed standard baseline HTML5 codec that's good enough for Youtube agreed in all browsers and mobile devices. VP8, or a simple fork of VP8, is the best candidate for that. (Given that Theora might have the Nokia patent issue, and frankly isn't anywhere near as good as H.264, being more at the H.263 level, it can't quite make the grade, which is probably pretty much why On2 gave VP3 out like that.)
If they can get a verifiably free, minimum-grey-areas codec with an efficiency similar to or better than H.264 (and VP8 does fit those criteria - VP8 minimum-profile decoding is fast enough in software that it can be done in hardware devices), then Google can finally submit it to the other HTML5 partners for consideration, and perhaps all parties can FINALLY agree on a codec everyone can implement (Google on the grounds that it's good enough for Youtube, Opera and Mozilla on the grounds that it will hopefully patent-free, Apple will take some persuading but if their devices can do it it well enough and they can be convinced the risk of submarine patents is no higher than with MPEG-LA it should be possible, and MS will eventually cave in sometime around IE10, maybe).
I dearly hope it works out.
I checked out the website and watched the comparisons of their test video vs H.264. I'm sorry but H.264 looks much richer, has more depth, has better contrast and recovers quicker when skipping through the video. OGV looks blown out out, slightly blurry, missing some richness and seems easily susceptible to blocky video.
There is a thing about transcoding. You can't effectively (in terms of professionalism) transcode from lossy to lossy. Well you can but, people won't buy it. H264 took off when everyone got convinced "This is it for next 10 years and it can be extended.". Implementing a new codec is really expensive, time taking. Of course, container may change, like it changed from FLV to HTML5 on Youtube. If you ask me, the real container which deserved to be standard was Quicktime but because of Apple's mistakes, it didn't take off.
Encoding millions of hours again with some Google backed codec (and clearly doesn't have support of ATSC/EBU) and waiting for customers of hardware (chip) vendors to replace tens of millions of boxes while _they already paid_ for h264 is a bit utopic.
Apple is the company which its founder/CEO, SJobs took time at his stage and explain how lovely and scalable it is. One of the rare times he didn't add any marketing, H264 really scales well and scalability is the key for future. They are (as a huge, overlooked media empire) one of the primary backers of H264.
Strange. Youtube does exactly that. Or what else do you think happens when you post them a vid in MPEG2? Or WMP6?
They transcode it.
And "people are buying it".
FSF and free/open source doesn't give any kind of trust either. One day, they wake up, they think Cocoa/64bit is cool and drop support from OS X Tiger (10.4) while Apple, the company making money from OS/hardware upgrades keeps supporting OS X Tiger in sync with the higher versions.
It has a deeper reason, I heard, it is about threads and not being able to "destroy" them but the image they give to ordinary user and some professionals is: Once something new/cool ships, we abandon you and you won't have a word to say since it is free. I know it really sounds immature but people really started to think that way.
As Mac trolls which they unfortunately took serious have give them enough damage, I won't name the media player project.
When I saw a MS developer who is very high level actually tell how great h264 is on slashdot, I said "this is it, h264 will stay."
"Even" MS and Real Networks have decided H264 is the codec. "real video", or "silverlight" is actually h264/aac(+) most of the time. Apple, who is a huge media empire always sticked with standards and proprietary or not, mpeg4 is a damn big standard which entire globe has agreed on.
They should have really consulted with a media professional or academic about the reasons of mass h264/mp4 adoption.
There may even be SVG animation tools as you say
May be != are.
and there certainly are numerous Ajax solutions for building GUIs, plus the canvas element, animated gifs and other bits & bobs that could easily handle 80-90% of what Flash is typically used for.
Do you mean 80%-90% by bandwidth, or by face time? Specifically, how many of the cartoons and games on Newgrounds.com can HTML 5 replace?
Ogg Theora is never in a million years going to supplant h264
H.264 supplanted MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 and QuickTime Sorenson and WMV somehow.
MPEG-2 is covered by 640 patents (which ought to be enough for anyone, if you are unlucky enough to live where these are valid). Only a few of them have expired.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm all for Theora and I think it should become the web standard. But it doesn't come close to H.264 qualitywise. Maybe it never will, because the format is frozen and has less features than H.264, so there's a limit to future encoder optimization. From my experience, Theora is better than H.263 and on a par with MPEG-4 ASP. It needs about double the bitrate of H.264 for comparable quality.
Even Greg Maxwell, author of that (methodically flawed for reasons I needn't repeat because it has been thoroughly criticized here) comparison doesn't pretend it's "at least as good as H.264":
- "some" meaning the H.263-encoded files!
How does "many would prefer A to B" equal to "B is as least as good as A"?
Many hardware devices already have H.264 decoding built into the chip, ranging from set-top boxes to the iPhone.
There are 762 corporate licensees for AVC/H.264 Licensees is 762 - and the list just keeps on growing.
Canonical is here. Apple. Google. Microsoft.
The big names in OEM manufacturing. In networking [Cisco].
In brand-name consumer electronics. [LG and Samsung] In military hardware [Lockheed Martin]. In cable, broadcast and satellite television - most visibly those based in China and Japan.
Why not just buy h.264 outright? What's the market cap for the company that owns it? It's got to be a drop in the bucket compared to licencing fees down the road, plus what they paid (1 billion dollars) for YouTube
The following is an abridged list of licensors of patents included in the AVC patent pool:
Apple
Bosch
Columbia University
DAEWOO
Dolby Laboratories
France Télécom
Fraunhofer
Fujitsu
Hitachi
Philips
LG
Microsoft
Mitsubishi Electric
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone [NTT]
Panasonic
Samsung
Siemans
Toshiba
AVC/H.264 Licensors
FSF has a background of being considered a liberal, damn near terrorist group by politicians and corporate leaders. The FSF has many good sides, but is politically is known for attempting to bully corporations and political leaders into seeing their way of thinking. I can't think of specific examples of threats, but Richard Stallman has been known to berate political leaders (his attempted encounter with the French president comes to mind) for not permitting him to sidestep the song and dance which makes politics politics.
When loud mouthed critics start making big stinks about political issues without taking the time to recognize how they are in fact deterring the exact causes they are "fighting for" they do more damage than good. Leaders of companies and governments are highly dependent on cooperation from political opponents and possibly hostile board members that would like nothing better than to label them as "liberal pussies who shouldn't be in charge of anything". There were somewhat legitimate conspiracy theories that the Vietnam War could have ended sooner if the politicians didn't have to worry about looking like they were "Doing what John Lennon told them to" when he would immaturely berate them publicly for their stupidity.
Richard Stallman has gained Michael Moore status. Meaning that leaders have to wait a certain period after they've had their tie raids before doing the things they had intended to do anyway. Before they can support a cause, they have to do damage control to detach the cause from the loud mouthed buffoons that insist on making the causes political death traps before they can support the changes.
Google is a company that has been very supportive of open source in the past and more than likely will be. They might be able to launch VP8 under a free license now by saying "Well, we were planning on doing it when we bought the company". But the FSF needs to learn when to fight for things and they also need to learn when to just sit back and wait a while before making too much noise.
This is an excellent example of a time where it would have been best to let Google have a chance to breath. After all, before committing VP8 to the open source, they need to let a pile of patent attorneys find out every possible portion of the code which could be considered patentable and then perform patent searches to try and eliminate the possibilities of VP8 being hit by submarine patents. Now that Google owns VP3, it's entirely possible submarine patents will surface, but it would be far more intelligent to let VP8 out into the open and make it an integral part of the web first. Google then can have a chance, after letting the suits find submarine patents to produce a VP9 codec which avoids them.