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New VP8 Codec SDK Release Improves Performance
An anonymous reader writes "Google released a new version of the VP8 codec SDK on Thursday. They note a number of performance improvements over the launch release including 20-40% (average 28%) improvement in libvpx decoder speed, an over 7% overall PSNR improvement (6.3% SSIM) in VP8 'best' quality encoding mode, and up to 60% improvement on very noisy, still or slow moving source video. In other WebM news, Texas Instruments has a demo of 1080p WebM video playing on their new TI OMAP 4 processor, in both Android and Ubuntu."
MP4 is not free. Its encumbered by patents.
WebM/VP8 on the other hand, Google says its not encumbered by patents and the MPEG people say it is patent encumbered.
Until such time as the MPEG people can show proof that WebM/VP8 is in fact patent encumbered, I not inclined to believe them.
Neither is SSIM: the unfortunate truth is that all the current objective and quantifiable measures of encoding quality have only a vague relation to the subjective visual quality. There is no reliable metric for comparing the quality of output between two encoded files other than a large sample size double-blind test. All those 'quality' graphs you see in encoder comparisons aren't very useful except in the most stark cases.
MKV and mp4 are containers, not CODECs (and neither are they encoders or decoders).
Everyone? FireFox can't use it, because it requires a "paid" license and they're a "free" browser.
That they didn't make the announcement on no royalties until AFTER WebM hit the scene. Before that, there weren't royalties, but it was a "grace period" thing that they could rethink the license terms every 5 years. They can still do that with regards to license costs for encoders and decoders.
That this happened after WebM came out is not a coincidence. They finally had some competition. The plan was likely to try and make AVC the one and only standard, then start charging more streaming royalties (there were streaming royalties when it first came out). However they realized if they kept that ambiguous, WebM might take over.
Also initially I think they figured they could brow beat Google in to playing along, because they are under the belief they have patents that cover all video compression. However you know Google did their homework both before they bought On2 and after they got the technology and before they released WebM. They checked, and Google is precisely the organization that is good at the data mining and searching needed to determine if any patents applied. They likely either found that none did, or that if any did they were subject to prior art, or that Google had patents that they could use against AVC.
Whatever the case, AVC is now free to stream forever, but not completely free. So now we have two choices and that isn't a bad thing. For commercial software/hardware, AVC is probably the better choice since it seems to be higher quality. You buy the license, life is good. For free software, WebM is the way to go as the license is explicit that you can do as you please, no royalties.
One year, in fact. The MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2 and 3 algorithms were all published in 1991. Patents last at most 20 years, so the last ones will be expiring in 2011.
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It is "free" in that sharing a file that has been encoded is free. Encoders are most certainly not "free." Decoders are not "free." So "everyone can use it for free" is simply wrong.
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Well, MKV has been around for a while, and having an Xvid file within MKV was very common before being used to encapsulate h264. I really don't care what the public think when the discussion becomes technical. Being accurate never hurts, and if you want to look dumb when trying to have a tech conversation about digital video that's your problem...
...and instead use WebM because it doesn't cost anything. Sure it saves only a few bucks per unit in licensing but that can add up to $5-10 when you are talking sale price and that can be a big deal in cheap devices. Maybe they sell streaming kiosk/info devices that are $40 where the best a competitor does with AVC is $50 or $60
That's a nice theory but it's not how stuff actually works.
Take MP3 for example. You want MP3 decoding in your device? Well, you'll have to pay licensing fees. If you want something free use Vorbis. So according to you there should have been some companies that produce cheap media players that support Vorbis and maybe WAV/PCM, FLAC, Musepack, ect., but no MP3 and no AAC. Remeber how that didn't happen?
Why? Because if your player only supports niche formats it won't sell. Sorry, you can't listen to that audio stream on our device. No, you can't watch that Let's Play either.
Furthermore you can't really cut costs that much by cutting licensing fees. I don't know about audio formats, but with video you won't save a few bucks per device by not using AVC and VC1 your are going to save $0.40 and that only if you somehow managed to fall into the maximum licensing fee bracket for both formats. If you include all popular video (AVC, ASP) and audio formats (MP3, AAC, AC3) that are commonly found on the web in your device you'll probably pay less than a dollar extra for licensing. More likely you won't actually use your own decoder where you can easily select what formats you include. You'll buy some dedicated multimedia chips from Sigma Designs or some other company that will decode every format that has seen wide use in the last 20 years, so whether you use it or not the manufacturer already payed the licensing fees and is passing them right on to you.
What will actually happen is that all devices that support WebM will also support AVC. The number of devices that support the latter, but not the former will depend on how popular WebM gets. I personally expect that WebM will have wider support than Vorbis, although Apple will probably not support it unless there is a large number of sites that use it exclusively. There might be an app for that.
> after H.264 became eternally free for streaming
Except it didn't, except in some limited cases. Please read http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/08/27/free-as-in-smokescreen/
Actually, due to a hole that existed in patent applications before 1995, some of the patents don't expire until 2017: http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Of the 27 H.264 licensors, at least half half are global giants in manufacturing:
Apple, Cisco, JVC, Mitsubishi, LG, NTT, Philips, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and so on.
The 901 H.264 licensees reads, for all practical purposes, like the Fortune 500 and Asian Fortune 500 lists in global tech. H.264 licensing for the mega-corp counts for less than your own pocket change. It's the price of a diet Cola from the vending machine downstairs.
H.264 is a professional/theatrical production standard. It is a distribution standard. It is Blu-Ray. It is important in broadcast, cable and sattelite distribution. It is deeply entrenched in security and industrial video. In mobile devices. In home video. From the $150 HD Flip pocket camcorder to the $5000 pro-sumer market.
WebM is - just WebM. The transcode from other formats you play in YouTube.
When they say they can't use it, they mean they can't ship it with their web browser.
Here you make the mistake again. There's a difference between "implement" and "support". Implementing H.264 would mean shipping code that decodes it. Supporting it would mean the former or using codecs installed on the system.
They have never said they can't leverage the installed codecs. They've said it's not the way to go for several reasons.