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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.
Doubtful. H.264 is still subject to patent trolling and royalties later on. And as long as that's the case it shouldn't be the standard we use. The only made it free in one respect which is streaming. As far as I can tell they didn't make any guarantees about the ways that matter.
H.264 isn't free. Never has been and never will be. It's only free to end users, not to the people that actually produce the software. Meaning that after you paying via the copy of the software you use, they're magnanimously choosing not to charge you again for the streaming.H.264/MPEG-4 AVC - Patent licensing
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.
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.
But it doesn't need to. For one, all you have to do is be "good enough". This idea that every last bit has to be wrangled out of codecs is silly these days. Storage and bandwidth are cheap. So long as it is good enough, meaning performs like similar codecs (AVC, VC-1 and so on) it is fine. Remember that streaming Flash video was VP6 for a long time, and much of it still is.
However what it offers is a free option, truly free. Encoders, decoders, streaming, all have no royalties and never will. That is important. If you think AVC is free just because of x264 all that means is you aren't doing your homework. Go have a look, you have to pay to have encoders and decoders.
WebM is useful, if for no other reason than it puts pressure on MPEG-LA not to be dicks about patent licensing. However that aside, it may well be the smart choice for streaming out web based video (once it gets integrated in to browsers) since you don't have to worry about issues in the future.
So you'll notice that WebM is getting built in to hardware, just like AVC. Means soon portable/embedded devices will be able to decode it too. Ok so just another format right? Well sort of. You have to pay per decoder (up to a maximum) for AVC and VC-1 and so on. You don't for WebM. So a company is developing really cheap devices, they don't want to pay that royalty. It adds unit cost. Maybe they decide not to, 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.
There is no doubt AVC is here to stay. It has good quality, never mind the massive installed base and standards behind it. Professional (and consumer) cameras are using it for shooting video in the form of AVCHD and AVC-Intra. Blu-Rays are by and large encoded in it these days (you have a choice of MPEG-2, VC-1 or AVC) and so on. It isn't going to die. However WebM may become preferable when cost is key. No encoder, decoder, format, stream, or any costs of any kind ever for any application. That's worth something.
If I ran a video website, I'd seriously think of looking at moving to it once browsers got support. It would ensure that I don't get fucked with fees at some point in the future.
Google follows a really interesting pattern. As far as I can tell, all their software is reactive, rather than proactive.
It is the result of saying "Everyone's using X, but it sucks. We can do it better." They then take a very methodical, PhD-oriented approach to solving the problem. A few parts innovation, many parts simple engineering.
Now they have 10000 employees, but the basic formula hasn't changed. Is there software that Google has made that hasn't been a direct response to an existing product?
That said, I think there's definitely a case to be made that Google is the software industry's first adult. Software's awkward adolescent foibles are on their way out. No more 90s, no millions and millions of VC dollars being spent on Pets.com, no more Netscape and Microsoft working furiously on really terrible codebases adding incompatible nonstandard crap to the internet. No more Myspace, no more Geocities. No more paperclips bouncing around asking me if I'm writing a letter; I'm using Google Docs now.
Google approaches software the way a civil engineering firm would approach a skyscraper: they are actual engineers. They collaborate with academia. They write papers. They sit on the W3C and help create standards. They have architects, PMs, devs, testers, and even lawyers to support their projects.
In a way, this is a sad thing. It was a magical time, when a university student in Finland could just sit down, write a simple OS for x86, and watch half the internet run on it a few years later. When a kid from Texas could create a whole new genre of games in a few thousand lines of C. Sometimes I worry that I was born a couple years too late.
Halfway through my CS degree, I hope that the era of cowboy coders isn't entirely done. It would be a terrible shame if CS became just another engineering specialization. At the same time, Google's professionalism is a breath of fresh air.
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.