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VP8 Codec Coming To FFmpeg
Jim Buzbee writes "Interested in Google's VP8 codec? Well, so were the FFmpeg guys, so they went ahead and wrote their own native decoder in only 1,400 lines of unique code. They were able to keep the line-count low by relying on heavy reuse from the existing H.264 codebase."
Just that is enough. That alone is enough in some cases to even outweigh some disadvantages.
> Can the same be said of VP8?
Not yet. Of course the format is less than 2 months old, and there _were_ several hardware companies who committed to implementing support for it at launch.
Also, note that mobile phones don't support "hardware decoding of H.264". They support hardware-acceleration of operations needed to decode a particular profile of H.264: the Basic profile. The one that has lower quality output than VP8 does.
So if you start bringing the hardware accel issue into the picture, then your quality metrics are suddenly in VP8's favor...
All of which is to say that the situation is complicated. ;)
"Hardware decoding" on these ARM-based devices usually doesn't mean H.264 is implemented directly in silicon. A lot of these codecs with "hardware support" are implemented either on a secondary CPU optimized for digital signal processing, which might even be a GPU running shaders. It isn't expected to be too difficult to port VP8 decoders to these DSPs because, as the article points out, VP8 is so similar to H.264's baseline profile that it has been called H.264 with the patent numbers filed off.
It should be noted that the MPEG-LA specifically does not "take on the responsibility and risk for future patent infringement lawsuits". Your MPEG-LA license covers only MPEG-LA patent pool patents, it does not constitute any sort of promise that these patents are the only ones required to implement the spec, nor does it offer indemnification in the event that you are sued over your implementation of the standard for which you purchased an MPEG-LA license.
Paying your protection money to them does ensure than none of the MPEG-LA members will sue you(at least over any patent that they have contributed to the MPEG-LA pool for the technology in question); but it confers no protection against any nonmember with a patent that they believe is being infringed upon(given that this group includes a little old mom 'n pop operation they call "AT&T" this isn't exactly a theoretical risk)...