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80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM
An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has an update on the WebM project from a presentation given by Google's John Luther and Matt Frost at the Streaming Media West conference. OSNews writes, 'Earlier this year, Google finally did what many of us hoped it would do: release the VP8 codec as open source. It became part of the WebM project, which combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container. The product manager for the WebM project, John Luther, gave an update on the status of the project (PDF) — and it's doing great.'"
It's all good and all, but at most WebM will now be an alternative for the big guy H.264 which is already widely supported by computers, mobile phones, consoles, tv's... and is the superior format. WebM provides too little too late.
Personally I think making so many different formats will create the same hell that was around the year 2000 with WMV, RealPlayer and so on. We've finally established a single and simple way to embed video in to websites and that is flash with H.264. It has been working great.
For an analogy.. like in Buddhism, maybe we should all tolerate each other. Buddhism has four genders - man, woman, ladyboy and hermafrodites. Just the same way we can have H.264, WebM, Theora and hell, WMV. Lets let everyone be like they are, use them what they want and love each other. Remember karmas law - say something bad about other formats and it will come back to you in the future. Lets support each other and improve technology together.
Available, but in use? Everything I use still seems to get H.264. Who actually gets the WebM?
80% of HTML5 Beta videos are served as WebM. Not 80% of all youtube, duh.
"combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container"
Yeah, I ordered that in a bar once and got really wasted.
Actually, I can't seem to use Youtube in Chrome or Chromium. Specifically, if I log in, I always get "An error occurred..." If I clear cache and cookies I can use Youtube. Everything works fine in Firefox, except apparently I just lost sound recently. I haven't checked cables though. It didn't work in chrome either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why can't I have a button called WebM that I press and all my videos are in webm mode only on youtube. I even tried putting &webm=1 on the search parameters as in the wiki but still just got flash.
Have they managed to improve the quality of the VP8 codec? Last time I saw a comparison, VP8 was way behind H.264.
And don't even give me that crap about "it's free, it doesn't have to be as good" or "it's only a web codec so who cares". If there's a number of big companies supporting the project and they plan on making WebM some kind of industry standard, anything less than state of the art is unacceptable. We'll be using this for years to come, so doing it right is in everyone's best interest.
CC: an anonymous reader
Subject: 80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM
Body: WTF Does that mean? Is WebM a competing website? Is WebM a DVD Archive? From reading comments it appears to be something related to the way the videos play and may or may not have something to do with HTML5. The first thing that came to my mind was some competing web site that has made 80% of all YouTube videos available as an archive for use when copyright infringement is claimed.
Here is a good link that should have been included for geeks like me who don't know everything: http://www.webmproject.org/
Additionally, how does one make a video available in WebM format? I upload videos occasionally and have never seen the check-box for "use HTML5 with WebM format". Does YouTube decide on it's own how and when to make them available that way?
How does the sound and image quality of the WebM videos compare to the versions in other formats?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Reincarnation as you've described it—that one being lives a cycle of lives along a hierarchy of beings, some better positioned to achieve enlightenment—isn't necessarily Buddhist (though it may be found among some Buddhists, as that conception is found in Hinduism, from which Buddhism originally derived). The Buddhist concept of rebirth (which varies between traditions, and even between individuals) is a bit more subtle, suggesting that when a given consciousness passes from life to death, it will become part of a broader set of influences which contribute to the beginning of new consciousnesses. Which is to say that in Buddhism, a life which exists now may not be the same as some previously-existing life, and that a consciousness existing now may not remain intact or unaltered as its existence carries on in other forms. In this conception, an ego is a lot like karma (deed or action), in that in a strict sense it goes on existing, but it becomes a part of the broader world and is subject to all of the same influences that affect and disperse the rest of these phenomena.
As far as your last sentence, I think it's a rare Buddhist (and probably one who has come to their belief as a matter of tradition rather than direct interest) who sees their peers harming themselves and isn't moved by compassion to try to help them cease it. Recognizing that self and ego are impermanent, a Bodhisattva takes responsibility to help to bring all other beings along for the ride, so to speak, toward enlightenment.
Mod parent to funny. Just because the mod who modded this troll can't take a joke doesn't mean everybody else can't
Isn't one of the ideas behind Open Source is that it tends towards technical superiority?
Free software (sometimes called open source software) tends toward technical superiority in the absence of government interference. In its presence, on the other hand, free software routes around it even if the route is suboptimal.
It plays in IE9 and Safari if you install the codec on your system.
You can't install the Matroska, Vorbis, and VP8 components if you aren't root. You aren't root if you're using the PC in the break room. You aren't root if you're using a handheld media player. You aren't root if you're using a mobile phone (unless it's an N900 or an Android phone with CyanogenMod, but neither is mainstream in the United States).
open-source advocates [...] Every single one of those groups can pay.
From the GNU General Public License:
In other words, the GPL requires that the patent be licensed for freely redistributable software. If you were to ask MPEG LA for a price quote on a patent license allowing free redistribution of an AVC encoder and decoder, I highly doubt that MPEG LA would be willing to take your money. Otherwise, the x264 developers would already have asked for such a quote and started a donation drive. How much would it cost to license six billion copies, one for each potential user on this planet?
It is crucial that video creation and video editing for webm be delivered at the same time, if you want it to be adopted.
Theora video-editing/encoding/Firefox-playing is currently supported in ubuntu 9 and 10 in the standard ubuntu repositories.
CURRENTLY webm vp8 video-editing/encoding/firefox-playing is not in the ubuntu 9 and 10 standard ubuntu repos.
As it stands, theora has better support. I can even run theora videos I created on Android using the Rockplayer.
Until then no vp8 for me.
It's Mozilla who is choosing not to support H.264 even though they can do so 100% legally and can do it without changing the terms under which they distribute Firefox.
"[T]he terms under which they distribute Firefox" include permitting redistribution to any third party. So yes, adding an AVC decoder would involve "changing the terms under which they distribute Firefox". Mozilla chooses not to make this change because its leaders feel that this change would not make the web better. You're right that this is Mozilla's choice; feel free to buy an AVC license and distribute your customized iceweasel.
I always thought it was Matroska.
WebKit is Open Source, including the right to redistribute binaries and source, and *it* supports H.264.
How does WebKit support H.264? Is the decoder in the source tree of WebKit itself (not necessarily Safari or Chrome), or does it rely on operating system components? According to this page, it relies on QuickTime on Mac and Windows, and the Linux version relies on gstreamer. Ubuntu does not ship the H.264 decoder for gstreamer in the default install, and it presents a scary legal notice (to the effect "if you live in the USA click Cancel") when installing it from the repository.