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Google To Drop Support For H.264 In Chrome
Steve writes "Google just made a bold move in the HTML5 video tag battle: even though H.264 is widely used and WebM is not, the search giant has announced it will drop support for the former in Chrome. The company has not done so yet, but it has promised it will in the next couple of months. Google wants to give content publishers and developers using the HTML5 video tag an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their websites."
Yes, note that firefox doen't ship H.264 either. In Europe, Firefox + Chrome share is 52.69%, IE 37.52%.
Also, Google owns Youtube and is working to make every video available in VP8.
WebM is opensource (and grants use of its patents for free), so there's a bit of difference here. They're not pushing proprietary technology.
It doesn't get around it. Unless you live somewhere enlightened enough to not allow software patents, it probably isn't legal to use without a license for the patented tech.
Actually, Opera also supports WebM, so using VP8 only will get you Firefox, Chrome and Opera, wich is over 60% of the market.
Either you're trolling, or just ignorant.
Browser market share
Chrome has 13.5%, which is more than Safari, Opera and all mobile browsers combined.
The big 3 browsers are IE, FF, and Chrome, so yes, this is significant.
AccountKiller
Sorry, but Google doesn't have any patents in h.264. They had been a solid backer of it, but never had any patents involved in it.
For those curious, the companies that do have patents involved in h.264 are: * Apple Inc. * DAEWOO * Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation * Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute * France Télécom, société anonyme * Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. * Fujitsu Limited * Hitachi, Ltd. * Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. * LG Electronics Inc. * Microsoft Corporation * Mitsubishi Electric Corporation * NTT docomo * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Panasonic Corporation * Robert Bosch GmbH * Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. * Scientific-Atlanta Vancouver Company * Sedna Patent Services, LLC * Sharp Corporation * Siemens AG * Sony Corporation * Ericsson * The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York * Toshiba Corporation * Victor Company of Japan, Limited
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Huh? You seem to be under the impression that "x264" is some for-profit organization that owns the rights to H.264 or something. That's now how these standards work; H.264 was developed by standards committee, not by some particular organization.
x264 is an open source GPL-licensed H.264 encoder. I'm posting the opinion of an open source developer familiar with the technical and legal issues surrounding video codecs.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
The reason Chrome has Flash integrated is because a significant number of security exploits today are of Adobe products, specifically Flash Player and Adobe Reader. By integrating Flash, Google has managed to integrate it with their silent update system and the Chrome sandbox (sandboxed Flash is in the beta channel). As for PDF viewing, Google wrote their own simple, sandboxed PDF viewer with none of Adobe's issues and shipped it in Chrome 8.
Honestly, this is a lot better than users getting both of these manually and having vulnerable versions lying around.
"Joy is contagious," he said, peering into the microscope.
H.264 is not a free codec and consequently, you have to pay if you wish to encode content in it or decode content encoded with it. They just are gracious enough not to charge you for streaming it.
For...branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one
encoder = "unit"), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty
The maximum bite for an encoder/decoder is 20 cents a unit.
MPEG LA is geared for licensing production and distribution of H.264 video on a commercial scale. They don't give a damn about your wedding videos until you become a national franchise.
They don't give a damn about the geek's freely distributed Star Trek fan-flick.
For..where an End User pays directly for video services on a Title-by-Title basis (e.g., where viewer determines Titles to be viewed or number of viewable Titles is otherwise limited), royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a Title 12 minutes or less) are...the lower of 2% of the price paid to the Licensee (on first Arms Length Sale of the video) or $0.02 per Title (categories of Licensees include Legal Entities that are (i) replicators of physical media,
and (ii) service/content providers (e.g., cable, satellite, video DSL, Internet and mobile) of VOD, PPV and electronic downloads to End Users).
Where an End User pays directly for video services on a Subscription-basis (not ordered or limited Title-by-Title), the applicable royalties per Legal Entity payable by the service or content provider are 100,000 or fewer Subscribers during the year = no royalty
For...where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of Free Television(television broadcasting which is sent by an over-the-air, satellite and/or cable Transmission, and which is not paid for by an End User), the Licensee (broadcaster...) pays...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder..or...annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
The Enterprise Cap for H.264 in 2011 is $6.5 million a year. H.264 is deeply entrenched in theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Industrial and military applications. Home video.
There are over 900 H.264 licensees and collectively they dwarf Google.SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
PNG is a replacement for non-animated GIF only.
Really?
http://www.bradfordsherrill.com/images/animated.png
Might depend on your browser.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
>H.264 already is a success, a resounding one. It has been for nearly a decade.
Technically good, and completely useless legally and morally to an open and free web
>WebM is shit. Theora is shit.
Technically, Theora is fairly bad (but still usable in a pinch), and VP8 is alright. Both are excellent for the health of the free and open web.
That is all that matters.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Furthermore if a certain other company tried this stunt (cough;Microsoft) with their favorite codec (drop all support except WMV) everybody would be up in arms, saying they are trying to gain a monopolistic advantage over competition.
First, to gain a monopolistic advantage, you actually need a monopoly, and Chrome - unlike Windows or IE - is far from it.
Secondly, is kind of hard to gain a monopolistic advantage by distributing an OSS library that you can embed in proprietary software. What advantage?
Monopoly is what the MPEG-LA has over the H.264, using software patents and preventing competing implementations from being distributed without paying them.
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This got modded up? This is just completely wrong on all levels.
Bullshit. Chrome has always supported Theora, as far as I can tell, and Firefox is about to support WebM. In fact, IE is going to support WebM soon, which means by this time next year, Safari will be the only HTML5-compliant browser without H.264.
You obviously mean without WebM, and that's all nice, but like you say yourself, that's next year. My post is about right now, and right now, if you want to use HTML5 video, you need to do three encodes. Two if you're willing to put up with Theora, but Theora looks like ass.
Flash forbids allowing ActionScript to fullscreen, either.
But it doesn't forbid fullscreen entirely. Since there are half a million Flash apps that do fullscreen right now and telling people to just fullscreen their browser when they're used to just clicking the little button below the video is a nonstarter. And F11 doesn't work for all browsers on all OSes.
Speaking of H.264, I've got an H.264 decoder in hardware, in my fucking video card. Where is that feature in Flash?
Standard as of Flash 10 for Windows, and Flash 10.1 for Mac OS X. Since hardware decoding in Linux is a complete mess, who knows when it'll be available under Linux. Wait, didn't you just claim I didn't bother looking up simple facts? This isn't exactly unknown.
So what you're saying is you suck at encoding?
Unless there's a hidden "--suck=no" option in ffmpeg2theora, creating a Theora file at equivalent bitrate from the same source to either WebM or H.264 looks horrid. And, yes, ffmpeg2theora is just a frontend to libtheora, so it's not just a random crappy Theora implementation, it uses the official implementation. As far as I can tell, there are no quality options to trade off encoding time for a better encode. Note that the "video quality" flag in ffmpeg2theora is actually a shortcut to predefined bitrates, as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure, because as I've also mentioned somewhere, the Theora tools are completely horrible, and Xiph apparently has no interest in improving the situation.
So if there's some magic way to make Theora not look like crap, I'm all ears. As far as I can tell, WebM is miles ahead in terms of both tools to create them and in quality.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.