Slashdot Mirror
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."
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).
Yes, but going by that logic there won't be an H.265 either, because the hardware support doesn't exist in current devices.
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.
Actually there seem to be more than just two, AFAIK there's at least fmt=6, fmt=18, fmt=22...
A quick googling reveals this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Quality_and_codecs
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.
I evaluated it for some IPTV software I was working on about 2-3 years ago and it was nowhere near good enough compared to H.264... I suppose it could have improved some since that point but I doubt its competitive.
One other thing is that anything that is competitive with H.264 almost certainly has patent issues... with MPEG patent trolls will have to cut a deal with the MPEG-LA but with a codec that doesn't have an established patent pool (e.g. theora or VP8) they can come after implementers directly.
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.
Not to mention that writing that H.264 is proprietary is wrong.
It's patent-encumbered, yes, and as such non-free, but it is nonetheless a non-proprietary standard as AFAIK the full documentation is available.
BTW, the JPEG standard is also patent-encumbered, which is why only a subset of the features described in the standard are usually implemented (lossless coding, hierarchical coding, arithmetic coding are usually left out of the implementation).
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
"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."
We have this already. We've had it for years. Here's how it works:
1) Install a good media player like VLC or MPlayer. They are free, open source, run everywhere Flash does (and the on many more platforms), and support just about every video format known to mankind. Plus they're real applications, not browser-embedded shit nuggets.
2) A site like YouTube, instead of embedding a shitty Flash player, just provides a direct link to the video. The protocol doesn't really matter, as VLC and MPlayer support the common ones like HTTP and RTMP.
3) A user of that site clicks on the link, it opens the video in VLC or MPlayer, and they watch it without Flash fucking up, or their browser crashes.
It's a much more enjoyable experience.
In that case, downloading a compiled x264 in the United States is still importation, and that's warez too.
And who the hell cares? Does your police really come and bust down your door and shove machine guns into your face if you download "unapproved" software?
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
Neither is the US a free country, since you aren't free to pick up a machete and go on a killing spree.
Most people accept some restrictions on "free" if they benefit society (and hence benefit you indirectly - I assume you don't have to dodge machete wielding morons when you walk down the street)
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
You know that people are going to have to start paying for licenses for h.264 once the current grace period ends right?
Ah, no surer way to karma whore than the old "groupthink will mod this down message" +5 EVERY DAMN TIME
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.
By that standard wouldn't a lot of GPLd software be proprietary, since the copyright on the code is owned by the licensing party? Only public-domain source code would meet a "non-proprietary" standard in this case.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Probably a naive question, but--If we have so much hardware support for decoding, then why are Linux / BSD playback such a problem?
Well, my understanding of technologies like VDPAU is that they accelerate specific parts of the decoding pipeline that are otherwise expensive to do on a general purpose CPU. As such, you still have to implement large parts of the decoder... you just get to use hardware to accelerate the hard parts (IIRC, in the past, this included things like the motion compensation and IDCT operations).
It's useful to think of freedom as "freedom from force." As long as you're not forcing anyone to suffer the consequences of your actions, you're free to do whatever you like. So saying that freedom means hacking your neighbor with a machete is incorrect with this definition, since freedom that allows you to kill is really anarchy.
But I agree with you that the US is not a completely free country, especially considering the topic on hand regarding patents for intellectual property.
No, but the terms for the licensing period starting 2011 were announced last month and they are the same as the current terms.
Regular Dirac (versus Dirac Pro) seems to be pretty comparable to H.264, though it's current implementations are very slow, and still pretty experimenty. Dirac is open AND royalty-free, at least from the BBC's perspective. They did not file any patents on it.
It's not certain to be free of patent encumberance, though, particularly in countries, unlike the UK, where software patents reign supreme. Dirac is based on wavelets, like JPEG 2000 or the commercial CineForm CODEC. There's some claims that it will offer a higher coding efficiency at the same apparent video quality as H.264, others that claim twice the coding efficiency of MPEG-2 for HD, which puts it in the same general ballpark as H.264 (typically 2x-3x), VC-1, Theora, and other modern DCT-based CODECs.
The big problem with Dirac right now is speed.. you need a decent dual-core CPU to get smooth 720/30p playback. Being non-DCT, it's not going to get any help from the typical hardware acceleration on device, but might benefit from some of the low-level graphics card accelerations, or maybe something using OpenCL. And probably just more software optimizations. I've played around with it a bit, but then encoder was slow enough that I didn't get much joy out of it (this was using the dirac-research encoder, which is higher quality than the Schrödinger version, but also known to be slow). Quality looked great. I'm kind of partial to wavelet encoders these days, too. Maybe it's from 20+ years of staring at DCT encoded video, but it just seems to me that, even where there are artifacts, they tend to be more "organic", so you notice them less.
And this is especially profound given how well one's brain adapts... your brain learns to filter out the bad stuff in video you watch repeatedly. When I first got into digital video... ok, it still sucked, back in the 80s. And into the 90s. But after awhile, I could certainly still see DCT blocking (when you run an overly aggressive low-pass filter after DCT conversion, you start to see block boundaries when you uncompress. Try pretty much any VideoCD for examples of this, and it's still visible on DVD and HD sources, particularly HD from satellite or Comcast). But my brain did adapt... both ways. When I occasionally went back to analog, I was amazed... "how did I ever live with this crap" was the usual thought. Of course, if I spent a year watching nothing but old SVHS and Hi8 tapes, I'd start liking it ok again, and then be horrified at my DVDs. Well, ok, horrified by my TiVo Series 1. Anyway, if you look at new basic technology, like wavelet vs. DCT, and it doesn't have big visual issues, that's a very good sign you're onto something good.
Dirac Pro is being poised as a open CODEC for professional work, probably in competition with CineForm, Apple Intermediate CODEC, AVC Intra, and other professionally suited, intra-frame only CODECs. The specs are finalized, and this has been accepted by SMPTE as the VC-2 CODEC. This is not of interest for web video. I use CineForm sometimes for video editing... you need about 50GB/hour for 1440x1080/60i video in Cineform, or about 120GB/hour for 1920x1080/60p video in Cineform. I was actually looking into Dirac Pro as a replacement for Cineform (another is SMPTE VC-3, which is also called Adobe DNxHD, also intended for professional use).
-Dave Haynie