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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."
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.
(1 billion dollars)
Muahahahahahahaaaaaaa!
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.
It doesn't have to. The still frames are just a representative sample to get you to download and watch the respective videos. Have you yet?
If you are the nerd you claim to be it would be easy enough to write your own script or apply a css to reformat the page.
You have perl and python available to you they are both on your n900.
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."
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
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.
Probably a naive question, but--If we have so much hardware support for decoding, then why are Linux / BSD playback such a problem? Wouldn't you then be passing the stream to hardware for decoding, thereby avoiding needing a license to process the stream? I figure you would only need the license to decode in software (since then you are actually writing the codecs yourself)...
- Sig
Nothing wrong with either of those.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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
Only for downloading music and video
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Easy -- the web browser itself has no business being a video decoder. It needs to call up the proper OS-resident function to play back the video in question, or fail, should that OS not have the knowledge to play that video format.
Similarly, the web browser does not need to provide a video driver, a mouse driver, an audio CODEC, a file system, a hard disc driver, a keyboard driver. These are all OS jobs. When a web browser takes on any of them, it'll at best do the job poorly.
My desktop PC can play back 1080/60p H.264 using only 12% CPU and the latest H.264 OS-resident CODEC. Why in the world would I bother with a web browser trying to do this internally and sucking up the whole machine just to play an inferior video? This is why Mozilla's idea is so very flawed... solving the video problem is not the web browser's job.
-Dave Haynie