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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.
P2P with the new version of Flash? Yupp thank-god for Flashblock.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
OK, I get that Ogg and Theora and Vorbis, etc., are interesting geek in-jokes. They are also horribly crappy product names. You and I might have no problem with them, but I guarantee that 95% of non-geeks will dismiss "Ptalarbvorm" as stupid and confusing without ever evaluating it. Pro-tip: if you need a pronunciation guide, then you desperately need to pick a better name. Yes, better, as in "the current one sucks and should be taken out back and shot".
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So if you want to see who is watching a given YouTube (or porn site) video, just watch it yourself, and then watch your network while the flash player is still active.
Unfortunately the patent system is so broken there just is no way to authoritatively declare anything patent-free.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The trouble is even that wont give you an authoritative answer under this screwed up patent regime. So yes it's a fair assumption that both Theora and WebM have been thoroughly checked out by legal. It's also a fair assumption they found some patents that might appear to apply to them (this will be the case for anything you do) and that legal concluded those patents were invalid and would be defeated in court were they asserted. It's a fair assumption that the holders of those patents would have already asserted them if their own legal teams did not concurr that the risk of invalidation was high. But until and unless they actually go to court, no one can know for sure.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
On the one hand we have a detailed point by point analysis of the spec and screenshot from an upcoming encoder comparison featuring different video formats with encoders set up to provide maximum quality that can be replicated by anyone. On the other hand we have On2 marketing material.
Seriously you want me to believe in the latter?
I would take the X264 dev's opinion over the company that originally designed the format... The X264 dev also posted screenshots of their results, and VP8 did not turn out very impressive.
Not to mention, On2 (who again, designed VP8) offers no technical analysis, while the X264 dev did a code level analysis.
I'm not saying the X264 folks won't have bias, but at least they're more neutral and did a spec level review.
Well, if streaming media has proved *anything* over the years, it's that the general public doesn't care if the compression ruins the work as long as they can play it for free.
Reference the following:
* RealMedia
* Most Youtube videos, "fan reposts" aka re-encodes, and re-re-encodes
* Low bitrate MP3
* JPEG (ok, it's not streaming, but still - "needs more JPEG artifacts")
* Screeners, cams, and foreign translations from the DIVX Discount Theatre
* Webcams
* Most QuickTime videos
* Most AVIs
* Most streaming video on Flash today
* Cable and satellite delivered HD content
Really, the only thing you need to say is "free" and people will at least give it a try.
I guarantee that 95% of non-geeks will dismiss "Ptalarbvorm"
People won't call Theora 1.2 "Ptalarbvorm" any more than they call Windows Vista "Longhorn". Referring to software products by their version codenames seems to be restricted to Debian (e.g. lenny), Ubuntu (e.g. Lucid Lynx), and Mac OS X (e.g. Snow Leopard).
I just want to point out 2 things more or less relevant to this thread:
First, google paid over $124 million for this codec, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say they dropped a penny or two on legal to figure out just what they were getting before they made the check out.
Second, they are using this codec themselves (in chrome, on youtube, etc). They have a vested interest in defending it from patent suits, if those suits should arise.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Most video codec patents revolve around implementations of the discrete cosine transform, Huffman coding, chroma sub-sampling, and bilinear interpolation. All of these techniques are older than the patent examiners who approved the patents and indeed the judges who will try the cases. It's all mathematics, every last bit. These patents are all essentially equivalent to patenting the tetrahedron.
There is nothing the USPTO will not give a patent for. As such, there is absolutely nothing in the universe past or present which can be declared patent free wherever the authority of the USPTO is recognised.
May the Maths Be with you!
Paragraphs next time, please.
Yes, of course.
<video> is semantic - it has a specific meaning, unlike object or embed, which could be anything. Then there are the attributes and the DOM interface that go with the <video> tag, which allow direct control and integration with the page. Plugin-based systems are just a big black box sitting in the midst of all this native web content, with minimal interaction between the two. <video> makes video a native, interactive, first class citizen of the web.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html
The video decoding could still be handled with an external process, BTW. Nothing in the spec prevents that.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
If you're one of them most powerful technology companies in the world, one patent probably isn't too much of a problem, but many patents, and potentially major ones, could certainly be a problem. And VP8 hasn't seen any real usage yet either and there's already been possible problems with regard to patents identified.
Well, Google certainly seems to be willing to risk it as they're moving YouTube to it. That is rather confidence-inspiring. I understand that there are no guarantees either way, but I'd trust a major corp to do a thorough legal analysis before making moves like that - especially when patents have been part of the story all along - over a few random guys with blogs proclaiming imminent doom.