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Breaking Open the Video Frontier, Despite MPEG-LA
JimLynch writes "Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved? According to Chris 'Monty' Montgomery, nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format. Which means that every software video decoder has to have MPEG-licensed technology in order to process/edit video."
An interesting snippet: "But there's hope on the horizon. Besides the codecs and formats from the Xiph.Org Foundation, the new WebM format announced by Google in May will ideally provide consumers and developers with another alternative. Montgomery has thrown Xiph.Org support behind WebM, because Google's financial muscle (not to mention their free license) will have a real chance to break the hold MPEG-LA has on the market."
"Nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format" - not really, since there's a LOT of devices outputting in MJPEG. At least "still" - since this way of saving video seems to be, for some time now, on its way out in newer ones.
Not saying that the situation isn't suboptimal anyway, of course. And TBH I'm not sure if WebM can change much - Microsoft (yes, them out of all companies...) VC-1 codec was probably also meant to bypass MPEG-LA; didn't really work well.
One that hath name thou can not otter
More bullshit linkbait blog articles from JimLynch. He's been banned from posting in the message bases on a couple other websites (ArsTechnica, Endgadget) due to repeatedly posting links to his poorly written, copy-and-paste blog articles to drive ad impressions. So how long will it take Slashdot to stop taking submissions from this leech?
Or I suppose if I buy a $9.95 "BE AN INTERWEBS MARKETING WIZARD" book at Borders, I can submit whatever crap I want on slashdot too?
Many people in the Free Software press seem to be putting a lot of faith behind WebM. There seems to be this belief that Google can come in and magically make the entire video codec situation go away. WebM might be able to find a home in a few niche markets, but the hopes that it will displace H.264? It's laughable.
I love Free Software, and generally strive to run as near to 100% Free as I can on my own systems. Yet even I can recognize that the video codec war is not one that will be winnable by fiat and propaganda. The critical-mass of users are those that are buying cameras that output H.264 today, and possibly various managers, that are going to be arguing "nobody got fired for using MPEG".
The video codec war is not winnable right now, but the container and codec implementation wars might be. Striving to replace Flash with x264/ffmpeg implementations in the browser is a huge win, and one that can be realistically accomplished. Sure, it'd be great if people used a free codec like Theora/WebM (make it a prominent option! advertise it!), but not supporting H.264 at all will have one effect, and it's not the one we Free Software advocates will like: people will see the player as broken, and move to alternatives that are "not broken". Your parents, boss, and other non-technical people don't care about the alphabet soup of codecs; they just care about "software that works".
So dodge the problem and make codecs an external, OS-level issue like they always have been, and win the battles that actually can be won.
Oh, and if you really want to make a political stand, here's an idea: instead of fighting stupid technical issues about what falls under the various MPEG patents with things that may or may not be infringing (WebM), fight the patent system itself. This whole stupid issue only exists because we stupidly allow software patents. That fight is way more important, and applies to a wide variety of topics, not just video.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
some asshat goes to Texas and files a © infringement case
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Paragraph three, right at the top:
"Very old cams (SD) usually used MJPEG, which is OK. Everything newer is MPEG2 or AVCHD [which is MPEG4]."
This may "provide consumers and developers with another alternative" but what makes them think consumers want another alternative. I think most consumers would rather have everything in a format that all of their existing hardware and software already supports. I certainty don't want to be downloading extra codecs or plug-ins to play a video in a lower quality than what I already enjoy.
The magic time we had when we could possibly have gotten patent reform is past. 10 years ago, this would have been something being done for a non-profit community. Today it would be a grant to Billion-dollar Red Hat and multi-Millionare Mark Shuttleworth, at the expense of inventors. It's going to be really hard to get that to fly politically.
The problem is that Open Source distributions can't license the patents and remain Open Source. So, this is going to be a real killer for Open Source if we let it happen.
The fact is, anyone can install a plugin to play any format they like, and most browser users will, so this is not a matter of whether Open Source browsers support it or not. But browser developers and Open Source projects should continue to lobby for Open codecs, simply to protect themselves from being written out of the market by IP restrictions.
Bruce Perens.
Montgomery has thrown Xiph.Org support behind WebM, because Google's financial muscle (not to mention their free license) will have a real chance to break the hold MPEG-LA has on the market.
H.264 licensees include the manufacturers of damn near every piece of video hardware sold on this planet.
The full spectrum of product from theatrical production, cable, satellite and broadcast distribution. Security and Industrial video. Military applications. Home video. The video card. The video game console.
The web is only one small piece of the puzzle.
We are talking companies the size of Mitsubishi.
Philips. Samsung. Fuji. Hitachi. NTT. Panasonic. Pioneer. Sony. Sanyo. Thomson. Toshiba. Yamaha.
If I have focused on the Asian here - there is a reason: Of the 857 AVC/H.264 licenses most are Asian - with a domestic market in the billions - and export markets on the same scale.
They are - collectively - far bigger than Google and no strangers to flexing their own muscles.
The enterprise cap for H.264 licensing is $5 million a year.
Given WebM's resemblance to H.264, the sensible thing to do - from the mega-corp's point of view, at least - would be to throw WebM into the H.264 pool and let it sink or swim as best it can.
MJPEG is insanely ineffective.
Motion JPEG is a good format when storing/transmitting the raw video data is beyond the hardware's capabilities (=often), but you want to do as little as possible post-processing. For example when shooting 30 second clips with a digital camera. Writing that to a memory card might be more power-efficient than including the electronics for an advanced video codec. Also that 'semi-raw' data is better material for post-processing (on PC for example) than video that's stronger compressed at the beginning.
So basically: suited as intermediate storage format. If ordinary consumers don't bother to post-process their videos, that's their business/problem.
> ...fight the patent system itself. This whole stupid issue only exists because we stupidly allow software patents. That fight is way more important, and applies to a wide variety of topics, not just video.
First, I agree 100% that software patents are nonsense (curiously, English has not the word I wanted: contrasense). I suppose there could be a way for a private standards proposer to get some revenue on licensing a needed standard (e.g., copyright).
But what I mean here is: someone long ago devised patents to give inventors some assurance about the marketability of their inventions (e.g., by forbidding others to enter an artificial monopoly).
But this is half-baked, because one forgot to regulate how much the inventor could make, which gave rise to the current situation of big corps buying patent rights and profitting obscene amounts, exactly because software is a kind of cornucopia. So much money can be obtained from it that it can be converted to imense amounts of power (through e.g. lobbies) -- power which then can be used to enslave the masses (by gradually removing their rights and threatening them with harsh punishments).
If the chilling effect of the MGEG-LA patents can be broken, a) I'll be VERY surprised and b) some lawyers didn't do their job right. The only thing that would break them is a judge in a court saying that WebM (or something else) doesn't infringe, and that judgment being upheld through appeal after appeal. By the time a fight of that magnitude was fought to a finish and open source programs were judged "free and clear", the patents would probably be approaching expiration date anyhow. There is a GARGANTUAN financial incentive for these MPEG-LA folks to ensure that no possible video encoding scheme can be regarded as "in the clear". Even a lawsuit without merit is a chilling threat to a small project, and while Google is not small how many resources are they willing to commit to a fight to the finish?
Remember the debate on video in browsers? A lot of the commercial players wouldn't consider any codec that claimed to be patent-free. Was that because they didn't want the risk of an unknown patent appearing and causing trouble? Maybe, but why wouldn't that risk apply for the MPEG-LA codecs as well? They don't claim to cover EVERY relevant patent, just the ones in their portfolio. Do they think the patent-free claims are wrong? Much more likely, but if that's the case why not burst the bubble by identifying the specific infringements (and then insisting people pay up)? Did they want to ensure that they controlled the keys to online video in order to make money with the patent licenses? The cynical side of me tends to think this is the case, in which case no patent-free solution (however legitimate or undoubted) would have stood a chance.
There are of course technical arguments (h264 is very very good) but why not allow something basic as a "baseline" that everyone could have and target? Basic (ancient) MPEG should either be free or close to it, so why not give it the go-ahead as a baseline with h264 as the better option for browsers that support it? If a website doesn't want the bandwidth hit of supporting patent-free formats, fine - but at least the option to target ALL browsers would be there with basic MPEG if the site wanted to incur the costs.
The MERIT of the video format is almost irrelevant if we're talking about a fully free baseline standard. I view performance comparisons as pretty much moot, as long as we're not talking about something absurdly bad - modern bandwidth and computers can do a lot of decent video using only basic MPEG. Who cares if it is twice or three times the size of h264 for the same quality if EVERYONE can view it? Any free standard would break the hold, which is why I don't expect to ever see one accepted universally.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
File formats and compatibility are the biggest problem created by software patnets.
Patent trolls and silly patents get most media attention, but that's because they cause problems for mega corporations. Those same mega corporations are the ones using patents to impede free software and new companies. So there's lots of money being invested in redirecting public dissatisfaction away from the compatibility issue toward the trolls and silly patents issues.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
The summary uses MPEG-LA and MPEG interchangeably, this is not correct.
MPEG-LA is not affiliated with MPEG, and so if every file were in "MPEG format" as the summary says, it wouldn't be much of an issue (especially to the MPEG-LA!). The concern is that at any given time nearly every video has once been in a format that is covered by the MPEG-LA patent pools.
As another note, has it not escaped slashdot that it is the same person saying this every time? It'd be great to see a notation "another article from the same person who tried to get you excited about the ubiquity of H.264 last time" on these posts.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Fixed those for you.
Thanks for the sour persimmons, Buster.
The first term of the License runs through 2010, but the License will be renewable for successive five-year periods for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions...but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
The H.264 licensors fall into three basic categories: R&D [Fraunhofer,] Operating Systems [Apple and Microsoft,] and Manufacturing [Mitsubishi, Philips, Samsung and all the rest]. These companies - among the largest and richest in the world - make their living by providing the infrastructure on which others will build.
There is no intelligible reason for the manufacturer of 3D television technologies to up the cost of 3D production and distribution. The pennies he makes on licensing isn't worth the dollars he loses on sales.
This is a repeat.
Note that there is an interesting history here concerning the H.264 baseline. According to the JVT that created this baseline there was consensus to have this be "patent free" (or, more exactly, royalty free) :
Regarding Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for the JVT codec, JVT has agreed to the following basic
principles:
The JVT codec should have a simple royalty free “baseline” profile (both on the encoder and
decoder) in order to promote the wide implementation and use of the JVT codec. All implementations
should have such a common baseline profile core, in order to allow minimal interoperability among all
JVT codecs. The above requirement means that all technology applied in the baseline profile shall
have no IPR, expired IPR, or valid but royalty-fee-free IPR (according to Box 2.1 or 2.2.1 of the JVT
Patent Disclosure form, as shown below).
Special, more advanced profiles of the JVT standard may contain patents per Box 2.2 of the JVT
Patent Disclosure form (reasonable terms and conditions).
So, how (besides chutzpah) does MPEG-LA assert licensing rights for the H.264 baseline ? I don't know, but I have heard rumors that the San Diego Qualcomm case had something to do with it :
Qualcomm's Patents Rendered Unenforceable and Qualcomm Ordered to Pay Broadcom's Attorneys Fees, Expenses and Costs
IRVINE, Calif., Aug 07, 2007 -- Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced that a San Diego federal court ruled yesterday that Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) engaged in aggravated litigation misconduct and standards abuse with respect to two Qualcomm patents that relate to digital video technology. The court ruled that Qualcomm has thereby waived its rights to enforce all claims of the two patents and any continuations, continuations-in-part, divisions, reissues, or any other derivatives of those patents. The court also ordered Qualcomm to pay all of Broadcom's reasonable attorneys' fees, court costs, expert witness fees, travel expenses and any other litigation costs reasonably incurred by Broadcom in defending the patent infringement case that led to the rulings.
Citing the misconduct of Qualcomm's employees, witnesses, and counsel before, during and after trial, the court found that "Broadcom proved this to be an exceptional case by clear and convincing evidence based on (1) Qualcomm's bad faith participation in the H.264 standard-setting body, the Joint Video Team (JVT); and (2) the litigation misconduct of Qualcomm through its employees, hired outside witnesses, and trial counsel during discovery, motions practice, trial and post-trial proceedings." According to the court, "Qualcomm closely monitored and participated in the development of the H.264 standard, all the while concealing the existence of at least two patents it believed were likely to be essential to the practice of the standard, until after the development was completed and the standard was published internationally. Then, without any prior letter, email, telephone call, or even a smoke signal, let alone attempt to license Broadcom, Qualcomm filed the instant lawsuit against Broadcom for infringement of the '104 and '767 patents."
This experience seems to have left a bad taste in the mouth of the video standards industry concerning royalty free patents. This is shear speculation, but I also have to wonder if this has something to do with MPEG-LA's reluctance to date to charge royalties for the H.264 baseline.
I do know that x264 looks better to me than other codec's at a given bitrate, but I've only compared a few. I would love for an open codec to match (or improve) on x264...
Another, potentially more important aspect is the container format. From my experience the MKV container seems to be the best (most flexible; introduces the fewest limitations). I was shocked to learn that a standard MP4 container does not support any multichannel audio other than basic stereo. But after thinking about that, I realized it was left out very purposefully...
What about Dirac? Might that have a chance of being the in-camera format? Good compression, open standard, and there are already hardware implementations...
> Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved?
That's the whole idea with open standards. Did you know nearly every photograph has been, at one point or another, in JPEG format? Duh. All the camcorders make MPEG-4, which is a standardized QuickTime container. All the editors edit MPEG-4. All the players play MPEG-4. That is the whole idea with MPEG-4. That is why Apple gave the container away. Before MPEG-4, it was the QuickTime container that was universal in that same way. It was standardized not just to make it vendor neutral, but also because it was practical and possible to update media and tools and players that used QuickTime containers to use MPEG-4 containers. It's not practical to switch to another container. That would be like trying to replace Unix on the Internet. No, we cannot even switch to WebM. That would be a bigger project than the Great Wall of China. WebM is not even standardized.
The codecs are a separate issue from the container. There are licensing fees for some commercial use of H.264. In theory, H.264 could be displaced as the consumer codec by something like Google VC-8. However, in practice, the patents on H.264 will expire before that could happen, and VC-8 is vulnerable to submarine patents which are much worse than H.264's patent pool.
Professional content producers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's what is in all the tools, and consumers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's in all their still and video cameras, and they're going to upload it directly and share it directly from the devices without transcoding, and they're going to watch it on their smartphones and media players and tablets and set-top boxes which all have hardware H.264 decoding and which cannot support software codecs. And they're going to watch it on their PC's, which even though they can support software codecs, also have hardware H.264 decoding in their GPU's and so get 10 times the battery life playing H.264 as any other codec. All of the activity I just mentioned is totally 100% royalty-free. Even the professional creatives and producers pay no royalties at all. It's only the sellers of video like Apple with iTunes and the sellers of video encoders like Apple with QuickTime Pro that pay royalties, and the royalties are very small and cannot go up more than 10% every 5 years, and they do not go to patent trolls, they go directly to the people at many different organizations who created and standardized the codec.
So in short, no matter what your politics, you are I and everyone else is stuck with MPEG-4 containers, that is all that has existed since the dawn of digital video. They just used to be called QuickTime containers. They are not going away any more than Unix is going away. And no matter what your politics, we are all stuck with H.264, because that is what was deployed as the consumer standard for video codecs 10 years ago, and it has universal deployment and it's how most Web video is displayed today and for some years now, even if you view it in FlashPlayer. It's all of YouTube and iTunes, it's Netflix and Hulu. It's Canon SLR's and Flip camcorders and iPods and Droid phones. It's WebKit and IE9. It's Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu. The small costs associated with some commercial use of MPEG-4 H.264 (selling video, selling encoders) are well worth what we get for it.
To ignore copyright for the better good.
---- Booth was a patriot ----