Slashdot Mirror
H.264 vs. Theora — Fightin' Words About Patentability
An anonymous reader writes "Thom Holwerda from OS News has penned a rebuttal to claims from Daring Fireball's John Gruber that Theora is a greater patent risk than H.264. Holwerda writes, 'And so the H264/Theora debate concerning HTML5 video continues. The most recent entry into the discussion comes from John Gruber, who argues that Theora is more in danger of patent litigation than H264. He's wrong, and here's why.'"
And the lawsuit goes to...h.264!
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
If you want to get rid off patent risks abolish software patenting of technical standards, embrace open standards.
I'm starting to think that all the Hoopla over Patents, Copyright, and Trademarks is misplaced. Maybe we should all just work within the system?
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I think it was decided that in the end the patent liability for both was near equal. So given that H.264 is the superior tech it makes sense to pick that over Theora.
So before someone starts the whole "which codec is better" flamewar again: someone at xiph thinks theora is better, ars thinks h264 is better, and this guy has a do it yourself kit in the form of a shell script.
Have fun arguing, as the past few articles have been quite fruitful in that area. Sadly few have realized (despite it being the main focus of most of those articles, but hey, who reads those) that quality will not be the merit to win this battle.
In the first part, he takes Gruber's working (submarine patents) too literally. Gruber didn't mean literally patents that are applied for earlier but not granted yet. Gruber misspoke himself. Instead, he means companies who have patents that are already granted and they later will decide applies to new situation and then sue. If Theora becomes successful, it will meet with plenty of these, just as any other software success does now.
In the second part, oddly, given that he rails against strawmen, the argument creates a strawman.
The quoted response veers rapidly from addressing facts (whether Theora is within patent guidelines) to making a prediction 'I predict that MPEG LA may counter that they know groups have been pressured into licensing patents in order to use Theora.' Then it shoots down the prediction and thus claims to counter the argument. But that prediction is just a prediction, it isn't the issue at hand. And countering prediction you made up yourself doesn't necessary counter the actual argument which is that H.264 has a patent defense pool and Theora doesn't.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I do, and so should you.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
There. I said it. Why? Because he counters Gruber's arguments with identical retorts, completely failing to see beyond his own nose, failing to realize and admit that all he is doing is just pulling his end of the rope in this tug of war, instead of coming up with anything worthwhile to consider in the choice of h.264 v theora.
I love Free Software. I really do. I normally piss-off people with my fairly hard-line GNU/RMS attitude towards software. In most cases, I will drop features so I can run the Free version of something, and all of my code is GPL3.
But in this case, the so-called Free solution is the wrong choice to make. H.264 has won, and it won years ago. Now, an argument can be made that making a stand is important. But in this case, there is a pragmatic and strategic reason not to: taking a moral stand with Theora will damage other things, namely HTML5 and potentially Firefox itself.
PNG won out in the end over GIF, mostly, because it had better features. But what enabled that win was that they could both be used at the same time. If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water. Nobody would use it, because the images people already have were in GIF format. Only because both formats were supported could Mozilla be even considered by most people.
Today, people have data in H.264 format. A lot of data. A long list of hardware devices are made that support it directly. This data is not going to vanish, and people will want to play it. Firefox can choose to support that, or they can choose to become less relevant over time. Chrome is getting surprisingly strong uptake, and IE (ack) is getting much less offensive as time goes on. (aside: this competition is pretty awesome - browsers were starting to stagnate for a few years, and the rush for new features has been revived)
Playing people's data and being compatible with most modern and future hardware is the pragmatic reason to support H.264; the strategic reason is that the moral stand is not about video codecs! It's about removing Flash and related proprietary solutions. Playing the SAME video stream (a .mp4 in H.264 format) in flash or the <video> tag is neutral as far as codecs go, but it opens up the idea of a Free player.
The battle over codes needs to be left for another day.
As for how to actually implement it, Mozilla et al needs to take a cue from how distros handle MP3 and other patented codecs - foreign "non-free" repositories. The details on how you do that are highly flexible. Mozilla seems to like over-engineering things, so I'm sure they can come up with a Clever Codec Plugin Scheme to automate this, as long as the actual codec is 1) a separate project, and 2) developed outside the org.
Please - I love firefox, and this video issue is the one issue that could break them in the long-run. People like their YouTube.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
So this person thinks just because it, like any other technology, has the capacity to be sued by patent trolls makes it worse?
Look, it's plain and simple: web technologies should be open and free. H.264 is not, despite all claims of "people can use it" and "well, it's better". That means nothing. Ogg Theora is open and free, H.264 is not. End of discussion, period.
Anyone that disagrees either does not understand the importance of using open and free technologies to power the Internet (imagine what would happen if HTML was patent-encumbered as H.264 is!) or a simple troll that has a motivation for him and/or his company to control the web.
This is a simple, solved issue, but the problem is that the misinformed and the greedy people are dragging it out. End this, make a stand, Ogg Vorbis or you don't get to play. Period.
AC because mods on /. are largely the people I describe, and I don't want these people to drag my karma down just because they don't like the truth.
None of what I just said should be taken as a reason to not use Theora in addition to H.264. Push the Free solution, of course, but in parallel like what happened with PNG.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
Is *everything* caught up in a patent fight and we cant do anything at all?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What ever happened to Dirac?
One of my fears here is that Firefox will be hit as hard by IE 9 as Netscape was with IE 4. Mozilla seems largely oblivious to how ambitious IE 9 is. A hardware-accelerated, multi-process, significantly more standards-compliant browser that supports H.264 out of the box would be just the thing for Microsoft to potentially stop Mozilla dead in its tracks on Firefox adoption.
"Today, people have data in H.264 format. A lot of data. "
And a lot of it totally useless. You see-- full h.264 is so gobsmackingly processor intensive that even a high end multi-core desktop with hardware assist can have a decently hard time of keeping up with it. More importantly some of the features in h.264 are incredibly hostile to fast hardware implementation: For example, the arithmetic coder is purely serial and can't be made to operate in parallel, so the only way to make it fast is to run it at a high clock speed and high clock speed means high power.
Because of this many "h.264" devices, like the iphone, only support an exceptionally watered down profile called baseline. Most of the technical features h264 has over theora are gone in baseline, b-frames and multiple references, the arithmetic coder, adaptive quantization, 8x8 transform, etc.
So when you have a "h.264" file you really have no clue when it will play... and if its a "well encoded" file it probably will not play in many places.
I'm sorry, but I just plain don't see it that way. It is simply substituting one proprietary format with another. In fact, using the "technically better is better, period" argument of the poster above you, because Flash includes more features than simple video, we should be striving against having a video tag and just continue using Flash.
The GIF argument just isn't applicable. When everyone standardized on GIF, there really wasn't a viable alternative that worked nearly as well. There is a viable alternative to H.264. Also, keep in mind that when GIF became a de facto standard, the legal environment surrounding patents was much different. It was a time when there was question over whether a compression algorithm could even be patented, and the chance that anyone would actually sue over it was virtually nil. Now, the sue 'em all strategy is actually a lucrative business model.
Come to think of it, didn't we go through many of these same arguments around 10 years after GIF became the de facto standard? Wasn't the questionability of the patent-encumbering of it a primary driver behind the development of the free PNG format? Didn't it take around like two friggin' decades for PNG to be as widely supported because we didn't really know better in making GIF the de facto format?
Don't you agree it's pretty damned stupid to repeat that exact mistake yet again under the whole "fool me once, fool me twice" tenet?
Adobe has graciously released every single part of flash under a royalty free perpetual license complete with open documentation, and source code for many of the core components (like the virtual machine).
Adobe doesn't make a dime directly off flash, they make money selling authoring tools. Their ability to do so is not diminished at all by freeing flash further.
The codecs are what are keeping flash itself proprietary, because they are the only part that adobe doesn't have the authority to free. ... and the codec patent holders don't share adobe's second-market interest, so they have nothing to gain by freeing the codecs.
You mean like this?
Theora
H.264
Let me guess, you're viewing the videos with VLC?
Thom... stop the astroturfing. Sheesh.
Oh.. and OSNews is a shitty site. So pbhbhtptpbhh.
When Thom Holwerda speaks, I LISTEN.
I had no idea you, um, he was related to E. F. Hutton. Thanks for the update.
They said it will be free to end users and net streamers until 2016. They have not said what happens in 2016. Specifically, they did not say they will seek all users to buy a license in 2016.
The last time the free (end-user) license period ended was in 2010 and they extended it then. They could do the same again. Or maybe not. No one can be sure.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That was a fairly piss-poor rebuttal, especially the opening paragraph, where he sidesteps the claims of outside patent holders. Submarine patents are still possible, they are just less effective. One could stall the application until infringing usage is found, then scurry it along to give grounds for suit. Personally, I don't care. From what I've seen/heard, Ogg Vorbis/Theora are wastes of CPU cycles. Can anyone name any formats that have had issues with patent encumbrances in the past? Oh wait, I can. MP3 and GIF (LZW not RLE). It's too bad that those were crushed by patent suits, they could have had some promise.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
According to the article here, MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn said this (emphasis mine):
In addition, no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free. Virtually all codecs are based on patented technology, and many of the essential patents may be the same as those that are essential to AVC/H.264. Therefore, users should be aware that a license and payment of applicable royalties is likely required to use these technologies developed by others, too.
When asked directly about the MPEG patent holders:
Ozer: It sounds like you are saying that some of your patent holders own patents that are used in Ogg. Is that correct?
Horn: We believe that there are patent holders who do.
Okay, Horn: Who are the patent holders and what the patent numbers?
Ozer: It sounds like you’ll be coming out and basically saying that to use Ogg, you need to license it from MPEG LA. Is that correct?
Horn: That is not what we said. We said no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free.
Ummmm... You're just spreading FUD and trying to be coy about it. But you just look like a smarmy used-car salesman. I call bullshit.
I have a good deal of respect for people like Monty who get this kind of shit thrown at them day-in and day-out from whatever weak-willed, money-over-morals, cardboard-cutout figurehead the MPEG-LA props up today to go and do their dirty work.
Mr. Horn, your arguments are hollow and your acts of fear-mongering are unbecoming of any man. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call your actions reprehensible had you not graduated from Yale and then gone on to get a J.D. from Columbia. I mean, honestly, is the quantity of cash they're throwing at you so large that you can pile it on top of your morals like steel weights in a flower press, keeping your inner sense of honor pressed down so it doesn't jump up and kick your ass for being a manipulative and deceitful businessman?
Show us the patents or shut up.
coding is life
It really kicks ass when Thom bitches about how horrible software patents are while he makes money from Google's patented software ad network. The excuses he makes for Apple doesn't help his image much either.
And guess what: both of the lossless video codecs you mentioned have prior art. But explaining how would only serve to kill the joke.
If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water. Nobody would use it, because the images people already have were in GIF format.
It wouldn't have been necessary. The LZW patent under GIF was believed to apply only to encoding, not decoding. The editors of the H.264 patents were far more careful in this respect.
Today, there is even more data wrapped up by Flash.
True, OGV is an alternative to H.26x video in Flash containers. But what alternative to Flash do you offer for making vector animations like Badger Badger Badger and most of what's on Newgrounds? True, one can hack something together with JavaScript and SVG, but nobody has made authoring tools for that.
"Internet Protocol lawyering"? You didn't need to correct yourself because "intellectual property" is already not a specific area of law. Patent law is as different from trademark law as it is from real estate law.
Soon lossy compression will be irrelevant.
I demand full resolution video without lossy compression. Screw the compressors.
Bandwidth and storage capacity will soon make lossy irrelevant even at HD * N scales.
I want the FULL resolution that the cameras recorded.
If you don't then enjoy your pixalated movies.
Show us the patents or shut up.
I do agree it would be nice of the MPEG LA members who feel that their patents cover Theora would come out and talk about it, it is unlikely that Larry Horn has anything to do with this. MPEG LA only has to do with these patents in terms of licensing them for use with H.264. They almost certainly don't have any responsibilities (or freedom to talk about the situation) when it comes to Theora.
So it's really up to the individual patent holders to come out. I wish they would do so.
Also, "show us the patents" is probably off base too, because the patents are right here.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avc-att1.pdf
What you seem to mean is show us where the infringement lies.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Like the VHS vs. BetaMAX format war, quality has NOTHING to do with it. It has to do with how a technology is adopted in the marketplace. Whether you like it or not, 'superior' technologies die in the marketplace all the time (sticking with a media theme: record players, reel-to-reel tape decks, 8-tracks, etc.), or are supplanted by newer, superior technologies. Crying over it after it's happened is just pissing in the wind.
Theora may be a really good codec for video, but it's not the end-all-be-all of video codecs, and neither is H.264 (MPEG-4). In a few years there will be a newer, more superior codec that will be introduced that will supplant BOTH of them and the pissing will begin all over again.
"show us the patents" is probably off base too, because the patents are right here. [link to MPEGLA]
While it's possible that one of the patents listed on the MPEG website is what Mr. Horn is talking about, note that he only said that they (which I read as an official stance of the MPEG-LA) believe that some patent holders (which may be one of the MPEG partner groups) hold patents that Ogg infringes:
Ozer: It sounds like you are saying that some of your patent holders own patents that are used in Ogg. Is that correct?
Horn: We believe that there are patent holders who do.
He was about as vague as possible there. Talk about FUDmongering.
They almost certainly don't have any responsibilities (or freedom to talk about the situation)
Sure, the constituent companies may keep him on a short leash, but he can't be stupid enough to believe that making vague statements about Ogg infringing patents isn't going to cast doubt on the use of Ogg, right?
I mean if he just said "I can't legally talk about Ogg," or "I won't talk about Ogg because I can only talk about some aspects but not others," then at least he'd have a leg to stand on. He would have drawn a line about what he would talk about so that he wasn't in a position of bashing "the other guy's formats."
But that's not what he did. He opened his mouth and made a comment about Ogg being infringing. And then later he (with the MPEG-LA) replied with "no comment". It just sounds like he's running away and hiding under the coattails of his organization.
coding is life
I think you misread his stance. This isn't like saying <cue italian mafia accent> "Hey, if you sell our competitors products, you *might* find some trouble..." His point is simply that in today's age, all software encroaches on some patent somewhere. He is right about that. Should it scare people away from Theora? Probably not. Theora is still going to be less patent-encumbered than h.264, but it probably isn't 100%.
There are key facts that pop out in the article:
* xiph sent letters and got no responses. They interpret the lack of response to mean a lack of violation. The real world doesn't work that way. Lawyers are deployed strategically, and it may not be in the patent holder's interest to respond to a letter.
* MPEG-LA's credibility is low, because they license patents. However, you could just as easily say that theora's credibility is just as low, because they have just as much incentive to denigrate the claims of the MPEG-LA.
* why the reference to Apple? It's like a gratuitous call-out to apple h8trs. The MPEG-LA is more than Apple. Is Apple really the new M$?
The validity of patents are determined in the courts. You can send all the letters you want, but it's in the courtroom where the rubber meets the road. Your belief, or lack of belief, has no bearing on the validity or lack of validity of a patent.
I see what you mean that he doesn't say it's MPEG LA people who say they have patents on Theora.
As to the 2nd part, I agree him opening his mouth is to line his pockets and MPEG LAs.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Had to read it like 3 times to figure it out... Slashdot editors are the shit all right.
Show us the patents or shut up.
This is one of the big things that needs to change about the patent system. Patent holders are under no obligation to either enforce, or even show, their patents, which lets them get into e-penis fights over IP. It lets them go with non-enforcement of their technology so that it can be better adopted by being free-as-in-beer (you can even give out free-as-in-freedom code for reference implementations, as with what happened with MP3).. then when entire industries require the use of said technology, start litigating and requiring license fees, which people and businesses will have to pay or risk being sued into bankruptcy.
Hell, the MPEG-LA has already even said this will be their strategy.. they won't enforce the H.264 patents for a couple years so it can get better usage among the web, then they'll start requiring license fees. Any system implementer that doesn't pay will be unable to display the majority of video online, making such systems much less viable in the consumer marketplace. It's tantamount to extortion, really.
In addition, they can make FUD claims like "Ogg is patented by us", without giving any proof, so they can get license fees for someone else's work. It's not like Xiph.org can prove it isn't patented (you can't prove a negative), and there's way too many patents to even attempt to look through to even try to break through people's doubt. That's just all kinds of fucked up.
IMO, patent holders should be required to enforce their patents when they're made aware of violations (as is the case with copyright), and any violators need to be shown the exact patent(s) that are being violated. If they don't, then they lose the patent.
The other big thing that needs to change, IMO, is to make it so patents are not transferable. You invent the technology, it's your patent. The "highest bidder" should have no claims at all to those patents, even if you die.
as i am sure at least one person affiliated with osnews would be yelling the typical "h264 should/must be used, as its the codec that produces the best quality video"...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Epiphany has been able to play HTML5 videos in youtube for several months now, and I never understood why firefox was lagging behind. Is the epiphany project vulnerable to law suits? Is the gstreamer project vulnerable to law suits? Which project is breaking the patent?
Hi guys, I've use this software qpsnr to measure PSNR/SSIM of different encodings.
I thought this could be good to share!
Cheers,
All I care is price and if Theora's free nature translates to end product prices like less ads on pages where it's used, then I'll probably watch more Theora content.
If I want better quality, I use higher bitrates regardless of the codec I'm using.
Luis Villa (lawyer who works for Mozilla) also wrote an important rebuttal to Thom's post: http://tieguy.org/blog/2010/03/26/more-patent-101-and-some-patent-licensing-201-advanced-class/
They know their subject, and they know it well
They used to know their subject. Over the past couple of years, they've posted a lot of uninformed drivel, mostly authored by Thom Holwerda. It used to be a site I'd check daily. Now I don't even bother with the RSS feed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Reality is far more than the maths we use. When you make a REAL HARDWARE object you have to use maths to see if it will work and help design, but the maths you use are not reality and you have to work around the reality that stops your model from being 100%.
In software, the reality IS the maths. You do not have to work around the parasitc stiction forces of your gearbox, you just increase the divisor to change the "gearing" of your software engine.
Software is maths and your attempts to say "there is less difference between maths and sort-of-maths" does not apply.
When rubber hits road in reality, there are things you never modelled and never COULD model that rear up and put the kybosh on your idea. In software, this never happens.
Apple is important because they are the authors of Safari and they refuse to support Theora.
This is the only site on the Internet that still believes there is a debate here. H.264 has won, and Theora has lost. If your software's licensing scheme doesn't allow you to play H.264 video, it sounds like you have a choice to make:
a) continue running said software (and lack video features), or
b) use different software.
If Internet video is as important to you as you seem to imply it is, I think you'll choose (b) above. Otherwise... have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.
Whether it is linux vs os x, gimp vs photoshop, oggvorbis vs mp3, oggtheora vs h264, the list is endless but the reality is clear: open source as a software development methodology is broken. It produces inferior software and does not support nearly as diverse or health a corporate ecosystem.
That's silly. All the design work and running the simulations together winds up being more expensive that the mask in a lot of cases. (A large part of the expense of the first run of silicon is the lost time to market when you get it wrong.)
Also, you missed the part where I said the risk approached zero because the non-patentable prior art of the simulation showed that the expensive hardware was going to work.
You also missed the part where I said that you can put the exact same "code" (Verilog or VHDL RTL) into an FPGA (and you can buy general-purpose FPGA boards that can be reprogrammed over and over, just like computers can be programmed over and over with software) or into a hard coded chip. Using the FPGA is NOT a simulation; NOT pure math, because you can hook it up to other devices and make it do physical things. Now, you have three implementations -- simulation, implementation in an FPGA via a bitstream that looks just like software, and implementation in gates. (Oh, btw, the tiny little patented part is very small and could be implemented on a multi-chip shuttle run for a couple of thousand dollars in a non-bleeding edge technology.) Oh, and by the way, there is a fourth implementation. You can take either the RTL you are simulating in the computer, and actually hook the computer up to other parts of the final circuit, and now the computer itself (which may be very fast these days compared to the requirements for the hardware you are building) is an actual part of a physical process.
Now, which of these four implementations is or isn't patentable, and why?
We'll come out when the money is good enough.
...and both codecs will be basically used to post on Youtube and Dailymotion:
recordings of dancing kittens, taken with camera-phone, and which have gone through several stage of destructive re-compression set at atrociously low quality levels.
To the point that the result is filled with artefacts. And MPEG-1 could have achieved a good-enough quality on similar bitrate.
In my opinion, the whole debate about codec quality is irrelevant given the current main usage of videos.
It will only become important once HD TV channels streaming HD contents on their websites get *really* widespread.
By then, I really, really hope that some newer, disruptively better and patent free codec emerges. Big supporters of open web such as Google have the technical and financial capability of making such thing happen. I'm still looking in the general direction of wavelets, but perhaps there are other better stuff.
Until then Theora is a good enough stop-gag measure, that will provide a nice alternative for the subset of the market which specifically needs a patent-free solution. Even if that means storing 2 copies of the video media (most websites actually store much more different versions). Even if the second Theora copy is actually at *lower bitrate* than the first "HQ H.264" copy.
Bad quality video (of dancing kittens) is better than no video at all or continued reliance on 3rd party closed software for the open-source crowd.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
He's just some random, snot-nosed kid.
None of this is true:
H.264 can deliver watchable video in less than 1/2 the bitrate...
A fair comparison is more like 10-30% less, depending on the content. The comparisons which show 1/2 the bitrate are for an H.264 profile that most devices can't play (e.g iPhones), and that's not useful.
H.264 can deliver high quality video (at higher bitrates) that Theora can't match AT ANY RATE.
Where did you get that from? Of course it can. Unless you mean truncation artifacts? I'm guessing you didn't
H.264 can be decoded on innumerable devices.
So can Theora. You don't need hardware to decode a VGA 30fps Theora stream on modern smartphones. It'll manage it fine entirely in software.
There are numerous implementations of H.264, and just 1 of Theora.
Is this a point in favor or against? There is only one implementation of gcc. There is only one implementation of Vorbis (actually, I've written another myself). There is only one implementation of WebKit, but hey that powers a large fraction of browsers in the world. What is this supposed to demonstrate?
H.264 is developing and improving quickly, while Theora continues to stagnate.
The H.264 specification is set in stone and won't change. Implementations for both are being actively developed. The Theora spec could change (minor or major version upgrade) just like it could for H.264. This is surely just your opinion and not fact.