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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.'"
flash with H.264 has not been working great. It is hell to work with, both as a user and as a developer, and it don't work on mobile phones.
H.264's patent licensing fees make it a dealbreaker for law-abiding indies, open source advocates and small hardware makers who don't want to pay.
WebM is free.
It's also a good potential "unifying format" for web video codec-wise the same way Flash has been player-wise because we're still in the same codec hell as far as HTML5 video is concerned due to Mozilla foundation's refusal to use H.264.
H.264 licensing fees look reasonable though if products or services are sold at profit. Not sure how it goes though for free software or products that make marginal profits.
http://www.object404.com
Yes it does for mobile devices that support Flash Player 10.1 like them Android 2.2 ones and the Blackberry Tab.
http://www.object404.com
"combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container"
Yeah, I ordered that in a bar once and got really wasted.
...and most of what you got two years ago was Flash, until Steve started his war on Flash.
Somebody's just trying to get the 'standard' fixed on a codec that you can write players for without paying through the nose for.
Wrong, 80% of videos are available as WebM. Most of the html5 beta videos are served as h264, because very few people have WebM support.
Hundreds of millions of Asians would like to disagree with that characterization, you ignorant hick.
Lucky for you, they're Buddhists who honor the precept of doing no harm to others, or they'd probably kick your ass.
For variable definitions of "works". Flash is not a great performer on low power hardware, especially on the battery.
The question is do any go the other way?
My bet is the VP8 folks must have some from older versions that MPEG-LA infringes on.
If you have opted in to use Html5 and website you visit uses iframe to embed YouTube videos you'll see the video without flashplugin. The codec used depends on the browser you are using: Firefox and Opera will play the WebM version, Safari and IE9 will use h.264. I'm not sure what codec Chrome will prefer, but most likely WebM.
It hardly makes sense to attack Google for using this new system because the old system is popular on phones. Google is *owning* phones right now, and is on target to be behind the leading OS in the next year or so. (They're also going to be pushing their new Chromium OS pretty hard soon, so they'll have an interest there too). And Chrome isn't doing too badly at the mo either.
There are a lot of Buddhists who seem to have forgotten that, just like a lot of Christians seem to have missed thou shalt not kill (it doesn't say murder in my bible ta very much). But yes the GP should stick to playing the banjo and screwing his relatives.
hermafrodite
noun
a person or animal having both male and female sex organs, plus giant frizzy hair
With Chrome 7.0.517.44 (latest at the time of writing), I get WebM. Looks pretty good at 720p!
Just another proletarian malcontent.
Does your browser support WebM?
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.
Adobe started the war with Apple by writing shitty code for Flash on the Mac.
Secondly, there's no point in wrapping H.264 video inside a Flash player when the hardware can play H.264 by itself.
Putting H.264 video inside Flash is as stupid as putting a JPEG inside a Microsoft Word document.
Adobe started the war with Apple by writing shitty code for Flash on the Mac.
As opposed to shitty code on Windows. Flash is pretty processor intensive on anything.
Secondly, there's no point in wrapping H.264 video inside a Flash player when the hardware can play H.264 by itself.
DRM. Flash is great for DRM. Don't forget that little 'feature'.
Putting H.264 video inside Flash is as stupid as putting a JPEG inside a Microsoft Word document.
Hasn't stopped anybody I work with yet...
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
geeks like me who don't know everything
Hand in your geek card!
Safari supports H.264 and yet it's free.
But it isn't FREE!
And Mozilla isn't just about making a browser, its about making the web better.
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
Back in actual, as opposed to perceived, reality On2 has been avoiding patent problems for well over a decade. This was made by a company that did nothing but video codecs, if they didn't know what they were doing in regards to patents, they wouldn't have survived.
Here's a better and less ranty writeup if you want to look into the arguments: http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=420
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Fail. Chrome already supports h.264.
Copy paste from google owned youtube:
* Firefox 4 (WebM, Beta available here)
* Google Chrome (WebM and h.264)
* Opera 10.6+ (WebM, Available here)
* Apple Safari (h.264, version 4+)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (h.264, Beta available here)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 with Google Chrome Frame installed (Get Google Chrome Frame)
As opposed to shitty code on Windows. Flash is pretty processor intensive on anything.
But it's significantly worse on Mac, and always has been. For Linux it's even worse, there Flash is almost unusable.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Apparently you don't understand that there are/were already 10x as many iPhones on the market before Android started to take off, but also that iPhones sold more units than Android last quarter. So I wouldn't say google is *owning*. They are far far behind, and they are falling even further behind. That said, #2 in smart phones is still a nice place to be.
Android was outselling iPhone worldwide last quarter. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/8125725/Google-Android-becomes-second-most-popular-smartphone-operating-system.html From the article:
For variable definitions of "works". Flash is not a great performer on low power hardware, especially on the battery.
While it doesn't change the existing speed/stability/security/battery-munching problems of most of the Flash content out there, the performance situation should be somewhat better for Flash content that uses h.264 on hardware with h.264 acceleration. (upgrade to current software, if possible, probably required)
The people that say Flash works fine and those that say it's awful can both be right. It's not consistent.
So that definition of "works" needs qualifiers for old versus h.264 Flash content, and whether certain playback platform features are present.
The way I see it, if one has to replace old Flash content with h.264 or another modern codec to get acceleration speed/power improvements, it might as well not be wrapped in a Flash container.
On VP8:
The question I have is can existing hardware that supports h.264 acceleration do the same for WebM VP8 video, and if not, can that functionality be added fairly easily to future devices?
Support for hardware acceleration is probably a bigger deal, at least on mobile devices, than whatever performance differences otherwise remain.
What about Linux? Flash on Linux sucks and this is entirely Adobe's fault.
$ make available
People always say this. But I can easily watch Flash video in full screen on Linux, and I often do. Just testing a (non-fullscreen) video now, it took up some 35% of one core (Pentium 5300: not exactly top of the range). I don't have a problem with it.
flash with H.264 has not been working great.
Rubbish. Flash with H.264 is fucking fantastic. That's because H.264 is fantastic. Flash is just a set players (just like VLC or QuickTime), which can suck or not depending on the specific player, just like with any media player.
It is hell to work with, both as a user and as a developer
How so? The only way it seems to be "hell to work with" is if you let ideology get in the way.
and it don't work on mobile phones.
The Flash H.264 players don't work on most phones (and the ones it does work on, tends to not work very well), but that's why they come with their own players. H.264 on iOS is the most seamless, easy-to-use, high-quality combo of media format and player out there.
But your post begs one ENORMOUS question: what format is better than H.264? WebM? WebM is poorer quality and far less widely supported.
As a technical curiosity, WebM is interesting, but as a consumer media format it's rather pathetic. Geek tribalism and anti-patent sentiment may get you modded Insightful, but that doesn't change the reality that H.264 mops the floor with WebM (and Theora). Good luck trying to convince consumers that they should choose an inferior solution for theoretical, hypothetical, and ideological reasons. In fact, anyone who thinks WebM should supplant H.264 ought to ponder their motives. Geeks like to pretend they are above fanboyism and that they objectively choose the best tool for the job, entirely unswayed by emotion or marketing. Yeah, right...