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Google to Open Source the VP8 Codec
Several readers noted Google's reported intention to open source the VP8 codec it acquired with On2 last February — as the FSF had urged. "HTML5 has the potential to capture the online video market from Flash by providing an open standard for web video — but only if everyone can agree on a codec. So far Adobe and Microsoft support H.264 because of the video quality, while Mozilla has been backing Ogg Theora because it's open source. Now it looks like Google might be able to end the squabble by making the VP8 codec it bought from On2 Technologies open source and giving everyone what they want: high-quality encoding that also happens to be open. Sure, Chrome and Firefox will support it. But can Google get Safari and IE on board?"
We're all very quick to hit Google when they do something wrong. This one pretty clearly is "do no evil". Thanks Google!
Open-sourcing it alone means next to nothing: there are open-source h.264 codecs. The community still can't use it without a thorough patent examination, a universal royalty-free patent license, and an indemnity guarantee.
its all about the encoders !
google can quite easily make reference but until there is High quality encoders then its pretty pointless
making decoder plugins for IE and mac is actually pretty easy in comparison
hardware reference designes need to be seeded also to the likes of TI and STMicroelectronics before it will even start to be useful after all where do all the camera's now do mp4 come from...
its all about the encoders !
regards
John Jones
I would disagree. The competition locks themselves out by keeping the best quality codecs closed source. If Google can equal the quality of an expensive codec, and make if open source with no royalties paid by anyone to anyone, that's great. But, don't blame Google for locking anyone out! It's still a "free market". Anyone can make an even better codec, and sell it for less!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
oh please. there are plenty of open kernels and open graphics systems available.
this VP8 thing prevents the internet from having to deal with yet another proprietary roadblock.
it was going to happen anyway with h264 in another 10 years. Now we have a technologically advanced codec and don't have to screw around with parasites wanting to milk the internet.
way to go google.
besides, If you really do want to keep the ecosystem going, then start contributing to dirac, and figure out some way to make it work faster on slower hardware.
The problem is, video codecs *ARE* a case of interoperability.
Video codecs end up in *HARDWARE* on mobile devices. Once you put them there, you're kinda stuck with that, and need to buy a new device to change codecs. Picking a good codec at first is generally a good idea there. ;)
Also, let's say people can freely install codecs as they choose. You'll get websites saying you need to download this codec to watch this video, and people will do it. With a standard codec, if a site does that, users can be educated that they shouldn't download ANY codecs.
Considering that H.264 is used in Blu-rays, ATSC, DVB-T/DVB-S2, video streaming services like Netflix and of course, sites like YouTube, I don't think H.264 will go away anytime soon.
"only someone else with equally deep pockets", or a group of someone's who has the time, expertise, and coordination to do it for free. Like, maybe, Open Source?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The whole discussion is moot in my opinion. Hear me out.
What do we need of online video?
Well, it should be ubiquitous. Everyone should have it available, or else web developers will be chasing their tales. FLV was a nice improvement over years gone by where a web developer couldn't predict with any accuracy what video playback facilities would be available to any particular user.
Sites like Youtube, break.com, theonion.com, are almost entirely based on online video and are only possible if most viewers can view the content with minimal fuss.
A codec doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be free as in beer, and everywhere. Flash did it, but it was proprietary and people didn't like it. Ogg Theora is free(in all the ways that matter, shut up Theo), but you'll never get native support for it from Microsoft.
To meet the needs of everyone, Google is giving us all VP8. It may not be the best, but if it's freely available to all browsers(native ideally, or by plugin), then it meets the needs of the web developer community to avoid recreating the wheel for every browser.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Your hypothesis fails the falsification test. Basically no matter what Google does, people like you are going to say they did it for their direct advantage.
To make it a scientific opinion, you have to give an example of an action that Google will take that will convince you they were not evil. Sometime ago, slashdotters were saying that if Google open sources VP8, that would be proof enough. Apparently you want more. So tell us. What do you want?
First, I doubt that it will lock out competing codecs. At best, it will create a common interchange format. There's no reason why software wouldn't continue to support whatever codecs were useful to people. The only thing it might do is make it hard for patent holders on other codecs to get people to pay for licensing fees, if there's a superior royalty-free format available.
I also disagree that video codecs aren't "infrastructure". In my opinion, all file formats are infrastructure and are required for interoperability and compatibility. People can freely dream up new applications while still standardizing the formats those applications output to.
But finally, I disagree with the implication that your "second type of Free Software" should be considered a threat to a competitive ecosystem. Firefox hasn't locked out competing browsers and OpenOffice hasn't locked out existing office suites. MySQL hasn't locked out all other databases. Other FOSS can compete, and they can even start by forking the existing project. If proprietary software is superior enough that people are still willing to pay for it, then people will buy it. FOSS isn't a threat. to anyone doing a good job. It's only a threat to companies who want to rest on their laurels and rely on vendor lock-in to make a profit.
H.264 is in *everything*, even Flash. It's in all the hardware, from smartphones to PC GPU's. Camcorders make it. It's on Blu-Ray and iTunes and YouTube.
This move with VP8 is likely to keep MPEG licensing free from 2016 through the expiration of the patents. It's not going to displace H.264, though. Even if everyone in the world agreed to replace H.264, it would take a decade or more. Even if you don't know it, most of the post-DVD video you've watched was H.264.
.... google can also just implement the new codec on youtube... the whole world will follow.
ensured that only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8.
Not at all. The cheapest and easiest way to surpass VP8 is simply to take VP8 and improve it. Minor investment, not that much to recoup that it's a problem. If you have a problem that needs a better codec, it might even pay for itself.
It's the restrictions of patents and copyrights that make that difficult; they make it harder to engage in mass reuse, necessitating the massive investment of rewriting things from scratch. Copyleft ameliorates the problem, but nowhere near as effectively as outright abolishing intellectual monopoly rights would.
We, the casual pirates, disagree.
We want movies. We don't give half a shit regarding what format it is encoded, in, so long as it plays.
We don't even particularly care about image quality. If anyone cared about the difference between Theora and h.264, blu-ray would be flying off the shelves, instead of slowly trickling out despite major pushes. In terms of media, society has consistently favoured quantity and story quality over "image quality". basically: if you can get more of it, people like it.
We, the casual pirates, dislike region codes, release dates, and "waiting for the dvd", in an age where none of that is necessary. We want to watch movies, and if no one is willing to sell them to us in a format we can easily consume, we will acquire them through other means.
We have never cared what the hell "h.264" means.
You are lying.
The word here is "wrong", not "lying".
You do not accomplish anything by accusing this this person of deliberate misinformation, aside perhaps from making yourself appear a dolt.
Hmm, let's try to put it into a computer software context. If the only optimization level your compiler had was "-Op" which did perfect optimization by doing a brute-force search over all possible sequences of machine code of a certain size (let's assume that the input data distribution is known), but using this compiler option then required several years of computer time to finish the compilation, this wouldn't be "good" (i.e., useful) in most scenarios, and no one would do any optimization at all.
In other words, attaining (or even trying to attain) perfection in a specific goodness metric almost always causes other goodness metrics to give very non-optimal results. Another example of this is the "over-fitting" problem in machine learning.
Also note that perfection is exceedingly rare and tends to be exorbitantly expensive when it is accomplished. Solutions that meet a need well enough for a reasonable cost are usually all that's necessary. A company could go broke or a person could die of old age looking for perfection because they refuse to release a "good enough" solution. Even when seeking perfection, releasing "good enough" early enough and improving from there tends to be much more useful than paralyzing yourself refusing to compromise anything from your perfect solution.
It can have to do with trying to displace a "good enough" solution that's already out. It doesn't have to. If that was the only reason or the saying, it would probably be worded "The enemy of the perfect is the good" instead. Too often, we never see a promising project because some minor drawback we could work around easily delays its launch.
Software development teams often use continuous integration, time boxing, iterative development, and many of those other agile buzzwords to prevent the exact problem this saying codifies. The whole point of "agile" development (as well as lean manufacturing and many other modern productivity boosting systems across industries) is that you pay attention to the quality of the pieces as you build them and put the pieces together rapidly into a quality whole that doesn't necessarily have more than the most essential features. Then you release, then refine both the pieces and the whole, then release again with more features and any bug fixes.
"Agile" methods are opposed to top-down methods like waterfall which involve specifying and developing whole fully-featured projects before release, often with little feedback from the target users between specification and release. A good development team can do good work under a strict release-once mentality, but it's much easier to miss your mark with one big go at it rather than a bunch of refinements.
Open Source has consistently failed to produce anything remotely like a decent video codec so far. The only serious attempt is Theora, and that was commercially developed and donated as open source once it was irrelevant, and then people just polished it up a bit.
Codec design is hard, lots of work, and boring. It's exactly the kind of thing open source developers are bad at.