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."

Comments

Not nearly every...

[sznupi]

"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.

WebM is not the solution

[Endymion]

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.