Theora Development Continues Apace, VP8 Now Open Source

SergeyKurdakov writes "Monty 'xiphmont' Montgomery of the Xiph Foundation says the latest action-packed, graph- and demo-clip-stuffed Theora project update page (demo 9) is now up for all and sundry! Catch up on what's gone into the new Theora encoder Ptalarbvorm over the last few months. It also instructs how to pronounce 'Ptalarbvorm.' Ptalarbvorm is not a finished release encoder yet, though I've personally been using it in production for a few months. Pace on improvements hasn't slowed down — the subjective psychovisual work being done by Tim Terriberry and Greg Maxwell has at least doubled-again on the improvements made by Thusnelda, and they're not anywhere near done yet. As a bonus Monty gathered all Xiph demo pages in one place." Also on the video codec front, and also with a Xiph connection, atamido writes "Google has released On2's VP8 video codec to the world, royalty-free. It is packaging it with Vorbis audio, in a subset of the Matroska container, and calling it WebM. It's not branded as an exclusively Google project — Mozilla and Opera are also contributors. Builds of your favorite browsers with full support are available." An anonymous reader points out this technical analysis of VP8.

Comments

First in-depth technical analysis of VP8

[Anonymous Coward]

Analysis can be found here. Comparison pictures to other codecs are included.

Re:First in-depth technical analysis of VP8

[marcansoft]

Most probably include some sort of DSP, but it's not guaranteed to be externally programmable (the firmware might be in ROM), and key portions of the decoder are implemented in hardware. Sure, it might be a DSP, but not a general-purpose DSP.

IE9 Will Support VP8 Playback

[Radhruin]

Read the blog post. Needless to say, this is astounding.

Re:IE9 Will Support VP8 Playback

[ircmaxell]

They've already said they'll support any codec installed on the machine.

Actually, no. What they said was that they would support EMBEDDING of any format using the <embed> or <object> tags. The <video> tag was going to be H.264 only (no matter what you had installed on your machine).

So that implies the question, did they mean "support" by means of the embedding, or support by means of the <video> tag...

Re:IE9 Will Support VP8 Playback

[Your.Master]

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/04/29/html5-video.aspx

Right here buddy.

Honestly, what makes you think you can ask others for citations when you obviously didn't even try to provide your own (seeing as it was factually wrong).

Re:IE9 Will Support VP8 Playback

[shutdown -p now]

So far as I can see, this is the end of HTML5 codec wars - if IE, Firefox, Chrome and Opera are all going to support it, it has the critical mass to become a de facto standard

Alright, so this is the final nail in the coffin, for sure - Adobe has announced support for VP8 streaming in Flash. This means that providers can switch to VP8/WebM completely, using HTML5 for newer browsers, and Flash as a fallback for older ones.

Re:And there was much rejoicing !....

[Qzukk]

How will be the HTML5 standards organised

The HTML standard just says "play video here" just like the image tag just says "show picture here" it's up to the browser to decide how to do this, and up to the web developer to use a file format that's supported by people looking at their website.

Re:Welcome, our new open codec overlords!

[gehrehmee]

Is H264 incumbered by any patents not held by the MPEG-LA? Their argument is that if you pay to use their codec, you're in the clear patent-wise, but there's no guarantee that another 3rd party won't pull out a patent they're infringing.... and the MPEG-LA has stated they're going to start charging everybody for access to H264 anyways.

Theora and VP8 are in a better position patent-wise anyways. They both have tearms that have done searches patents (i believe VP8 has, I *know* Theora has), and they've publicly said that you're not going to get in trouble for using their stuff, EVER.

The 3-clause BSD license

[tepples]

The WebM license consists of two portions: a copyright license and a patent license. The copyright license is identical to the 3-clause BSD license, which is already OSI approved.

Re:Welcome, our new open codec overlords!

[hkmwbz]

IE9 will not support it directly. IE9 will, however, play it if the user installs support for it.

Re:Welcome, our new open codec overlords!

[Anonymous Coward]

Newer research is in intraframe coding and interframe prediction. VP8 uses the same methods as x264. VP8 will most likely infringe the same patents. Google does not hold these patents.

Read this take from someone who is without a doubt an expert in these matters.

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377

Re:And there was much rejoicing !....

[unix1]

How will be the HTML5 standards organised

The HTML standard just says "play video here" just like the image tag just says "show picture here"

That's just not true - try here and here. While W3C doesn't mandate certain formats, they give everyone specs for some. Besides, all generally useful image compression formats are freely available to anyone without any restrictions (as "freely" as it can be with any software these days).

None of the above is true with video.

Re:And there was much rejoicing !....

[unix1]

Yet, there is no W3C endorsed/created video standard.

Claiming HTML5 video tag is "just like" the img tag is deceiving at best:

with images:
- W3C provides standards for some useful formats
- virtually all other generally useful formats are free/unrestricted
- all generally useful formats are supported by virtually all browsers "out of the box" (no plug-ins, no 3rd party software)

with video:
- W3C provides no standards whatsoever
- virtually all other generally useful formats are patent-encumbered*
- the only consensus between major players (minus Mozilla) so far is to support the patent-encumbered H.264 format*

* unless you think VP8 will change this landscape, which is why this is a very important announcement