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."

Comments

Re:Problem still remains

[Tapewolf]

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

[tepples]

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.

Theora vs h264

[qbast]

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.

Re:Theora vs h264

[qbast]

Please, read again what I said about YouTube videos being intentionally encoded with lower settings for better decoding speed. Or if you don't believe me, download that YT clip from comparison you refer to, open it in MediaInfo and see codec parameters. This is freaking Baseline profile! It does not even use B-frames not to mention more advanced features like CABAC, new modes of motion prediction or B-pyramid. All this 'comparison' proves is that you really need to cripple h264 for newest and greatest version of Theora to match.

Now let's see what Theora supports: http://wiki.xiph.org/Theora . Oh my, not even B-frames are supported. Hello guys, 90s called and want their codec back.

Theora is dead end. No matter how much tweaking they have done in Thusnelda it simply cannot change the fact that h264 is at least generation ahead.

Re:It's the "about" that kills

[monkeythug]

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)

Re:N.264/MPEG-4 is no more proprietary than MPEG2

[tolan-b]

You know that people are going to have to start paying for licenses for h.264 once the current grace period ends right?

Way too late to displace H.264

[gig]

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.