Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
.... 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.
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.