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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."
... we will need to have every browser installed, because every other website on the intertubes will be using different technologies that are only supported by one browser.
Less choice is so much more convenient for me. I love being forced to use Quicktime/Flash/Silverlight to view online video content.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Does Chrome really have the market share required for this move to have any effect on the decisions of web designers?
I love how they harp on about doing this because they support open standards - They bundle Flash with Chrome!
Double standards or what?
Maybe it's better to weed out all the half-free proprietary stuff now before they have a chance to go all Unisys on you.
The only reason I currently use Chrome is due to Chrome to phone. I can do without.
The move is an attempt to force other browsers to adopt WebM. If you want to complain about "Less choice", than you would have the same complaints against MS and Apple browsers.
The thing is, if Google doesn't do this, and allows both formats, they are contributing to the success of H.264, and detracting from the possibilities of success of their WebM.
You, the consumer are caught in yet another standards-war. Which side will you be on?
AccountKiller
or the reality of "We've decided to stop supporting formats for things that aren't free", would be a more simple answer.
how does x264 get around the patent scheme of H.264?
By recommending that users emigrate from the United States, South Korea, and other countries whose courts enforce software patents, I presume.
I'll be on the side of "screw your video, gimmie the transcript"
'course, I'd be on that side regardless of what format the video is encoded in.
Insert wit here.
Will people please stop citing an x264 developer's rant as an "expert opinion" on the video quality or patent risks of WebM? Next thing we'll indulge the musings of a Coca-Cola Company executive on health issues related to PepsiCo products.
WebM can use many of the same acceleration blocks as H.264, it is a matter of writing the codecs that use the hardware.
Opera doesn't support H.264, and was the first browser to ship a stable release with WebM support (and, heck, the original browser to ship an experimental video element, with Ogg/Theora/Vorbis).
against H.264 in MSIE, Opera
Opera never supported h.264, they are against software patents, shame as I likecd h.264 more than webMsomething :(
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
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. Consequently, it's not supported by Firefox natively nor in any other browser that cares about being sued and can't or won't pay.
Google's motivation is obviously to try to establish an open source, free (as in speech) codec as the web standard for video. That way, we won't have the silly issues you mention above. So why are you not happy with this move?
Keep in mind that browsers like Firefox, Konquerer, Seamonkey, etc., because they are open source, cannot legally integrate H.264 into its browser. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping Microsoft, Apple, Opera, and Google, and anyone else who wants to from integrating WebM into their browsers. It simply boils down to an administrative decision to do so.
So if you want your web-based video to "Just Work," you absolutely must support WebM. Or more precisely, you absolutely must not support H.264 unless MPEG releases it to the public domain or under a free (as in speech) license, which I think there's exactly zero chance of happening.
That's nice in theory, but in practice a lot of devices are going to get left behind. Consumer electronics device vendors aren't always great with updates.
And then, of course, there are all of the devices that don't connect directly to the web, but still stream/play video. Vendors of many of those devices probably won't feel especially compelled to implement WebM at all... but of course it will be a big hassle for content providers if they have to encode everything once for web sites, and then a second time for non-web-enabled devices.
Look, no matter how you slice it, this is bad. The world was finally settling down on a next-generation standard for digital video after more than a decade of proprietary nonsense and terrible cross-device compatability... and now Google has thrown a wrench into the works.
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I am all for nasty work that promotes free (as in from cost, copyright, patent, IP - forever) standards any day. If Verizon promoted a free (as in from cost, copyright, patent, IP - forever) technology, I am all for it. In fact, if promoted a free technology, I would be all for it. I cannot see the evil here, but maybe because I'm looking at the freedom, and not just trying to make a buck at all costs. Bring on the nasty!
The idea that WebM is a "more open standard" is effectively Google propaganda. H.264 was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG), which are standards committees that draw members from industry and academia under the umbrella of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which are (in practice) intergovernmental public/private partnerships. It's is governed by a multi-party governance process representing many different stakeholders.
It's a real open standard. Does it require patent licensing? Yes. But that's not because (as some people seem to think) it was developed by some company that licenses it out to make money. Rather, it requires patent licensing because it turns out that a lot of the techniques you'd want to use in a modern video codec are patented, so the standard that MPEG/VCEG created ended up infringing on a bunch of them -- about 1000 of them, in fact. As is common with such things, a patent licensing pool was set up to make licensing all of those patents easy for implementors.
It is extremely unlikely that WebM does not infringe on some of those very same patents. It's a very similar codec to H.264. Moreover, this has happened before. Microsoft's VC-1 codec was supposed to be a patent-free alternative to H.264, and guess what? It ended up requiring a patent license pool as well.
So, with H.264 you get a codec that's an actual open standard, with a formal multi-party governance process and with easy patent licensing. With WebM, you get a codec that's not formally standardized, has no formal governance process (and is de facto controlled by Google, because they employ most of the developers), and that has huge 'submarine' patent risk.
And Google has managed to convince people the latter is a "more open standard".
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Yeah, x264 is an open-source project. And we all know open-source projects never attract egomaniacs, and major contributors wouldn't derive significant value from their importance, which would be lost if their project was replaced by a competitor, right?
Oh, wait.
The thing is, if Google doesn't do this, and allows both formats, they are contributing to the success of H.264, and detracting from the possibilities of success of their WebM.
You, the consumer are caught in yet another standards-war. Which side will you be on?
H.264 already is a success, a resounding one. It has been for nearly a decade.
WebM is shit. Theora is shit. Why? Because H.264 is the superior codec, hands down. As someone who uses the codecs, all I give a shit about is the resulting quality/speed/size.
If you don't like it because it isn't free, that's your problem. Me? I like having superior picture quality. If that means some asshat down the line pays for a license, or that 2 cents of every Windows License goes to the MPEG group, so be it.
If that means I can't decode shit with an officially sanctioned codec in Linux because I care more about "free as in speech" than "kittens and boxes on youtube", then so be it.
If that means I can't decode shit at all using a "free" alternative such as x264 (which violates countless MPEG patents) because I ACTUALLY care about "free as in speech", and prefer principles to silly videos, then so be it.
The patent system sucks ass. No question about it.
But if you want to rail against it, you're on your own in this case, fosshats. H.264 is fanfuckingtastic. It's leaps and bounds above basic MPEG-4 ASP, and is well ahead of the "free" alternatives that are Theora, WebM, etc.
The bottom line is that we wouldn't have shit if it weren't for the work of the MPEG group. X.264, WebM, Theora, XviD, DivX, and countless others all have their roots in the hacking and reverse engineering an MS MPEG codec ages ago.
I have no problems with the morality of this - the state of the art was advanced as a result, and to do so legally would have been far too burdensome.
But to trumpet for the "free" options in this case is naive because it turns a blind eye to the origins of the "free" options. To trumpet the "free" options as well as shit on anyone who would dare support both, at their own cost, is ludicrous.
Let's be clear, this is not a war consumers have any say in. Sites will be forced to transcode and keep multiple versions of streams for compatibility with all browsers. And until they're ready with all that, they'll continue to server shit up via Flash.
The browser vendors will have no incentive to change their position, and we'll end up with IE and Safari on one side, and Chrome, FF, and Opera on the other. The end result is that users get their videos, tons of storage and processing time is wasted, and the CEOs will find another topic to get all preachy about.
You won't see a large migration of users to or from any browser in response to this move. This is no different than when Steve Jobs went on a crusade against Flash (which is still around and isn't going anywhere soon).
No, you're citing the understandably angry postings of a developer who im sure is quite talented and recognizes if WebM goes anywhere then he just flushed some amount of years of his life away.
This serves two strategic purposes for Google. First, it advances a codec that's de facto controlled by Google at the expense of a codec that is a legitimate open standard controlled by a multi-vendor governance process managed by reputable international standards bodies. ("Open source" != "open standard".) And second, it will slow the transition to HTML5 and away from Flash by creating more confusion about which codec to use for HTML5 video, which benefits Google by hurting Apple (since Apple doesn't want to support Flash), but also sucks for users.
"Isn't Google really standing up for freedom and justice, because H.264 requires evil patent licensing?"
You say "patent licensing" as if it was just signing a legal agreement. Their license requires significant royalties to be paid and which we must all pay. We all pay a MPEG LA tax when we buy any of the devices or software that has to decode H.264.
While those that despise Adobe Flash are desperate to see it replaced all I know is I've never had to pay a penny to use the Flash plugin.
I have no problem with the standard being controlled by Google since they are making it available gratis. Apple / Microsoft and the big players could have paid off the smaller vendors in the patent pool and made H.264 available for free as well, but they want their share of the tax and are pushing this very expensive "Open Standard" to shut out smaller competitors.
I imagine Google will eventually be sued over the codec but I think this would takes years to resolve and possibly this would be a way to break the MPEG LA tax.
Except H.264 is the best codec. Google didn't choose WebM because it's better, they chose it because they own it and (purportedly) because it's open. They did not choose it for being a high-quality codec, they chose it for entirely meta and political/ideological reasons.
I agree. He is an expert in video compression, not patent law. I think his argument as to VP8's patent status is flawed. He claims that VP8 is likely covered by patents because it shares many features with H.264. However, I suspect that these common features are those that are covered by known patents. A list of all known H.264 patents is available on MPEG-LA's website; therefore, it is public knowledge what features of H.264 are protected by known patents. However, nobody has been able to name a specific patent that VP8 violates. On2 surely must have reviewed this list when designing VP8, and borrowed all those features of H.264 that are not covered by known patents.
H.264 already is a success, a resounding one.
And still an illegal one if you live in the USA and want to distribute an encoder/decoder built using GPL source code.
Any media playing solution which requires getting arrested is not really a 'success'.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Except H.264 is the best codec. Google didn't choose WebM because it's better, they chose it because they own it and (purportedly) because it's open. They did not choose it for being a high-quality codec, they chose it for entirely meta and political/ideological reasons.
Yes. The chief of those meta issues being that distributing any Free Software implementation of H.264 in the United States of America is illegal due to software patent law.
I don't know about you, but where I come from, not getting arrested is a pretty good driver of technology choices, and yes, does tend to trump 'quality' issues. A slightly higher-quality video codec, distribution of which breaks the law, is not even a starter. It simply cannot compete with WebM in the GPL-derived software market at all.
It's certainly very sad that the makers of H.264 have deliierately put their product outside the realm of rational economic choice by using the big patent gun to make its distribution in GPL-compliant form flatly illegal, but, well. Destroying a whole class of potential users of their own product was their choice, even if it wasn't a sane one.
Google, however, have only one economically rational law-abiding choice left open to them if they want to distribute a GPL-derived media player, and that's to use anything but H.264.
I admit I find it rather strange that you consider legality to be a mere 'meta' issue. Do you regularly break the law in your daily business life, and expect others to?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
It's short term vs. long term thinking. We can have a slightly better codec thats got a thousand patents on it or we can have one that isn't patented. We are talking about a very slight difference in quality here.
Yes the patented codec may be slightly better now, but if an open codec becomes the standard then in the long term we're better off as it will be easier for people to make improvements to it.
With a patented codec we have to pay. Sure it may be cheap now, but further improvements to it will also be patented which means it will never be free. And over time the price will rise and it will become less likely anyone will be able to come up with a codec to compete with it, not because no one else has the skill to do so, but simply because it will be illegal because of the patents.
We have an opportunity to get free of all of this. Yes we have to sacrifice a small amount of quality today. And it is a very small difference in quality we're talking about. But if WebM becomes the standard then you'll have a lot of companies working to improve it. if H.264 becomes the standard a lot of companies will work to improve it. The difference is that one will be patented and the other won't.
You say "patent licensing" as if it was just signing a legal agreement. Their license requires significant royalties to be paid and which we must all pay.
And more importantly, if a patented piece of software requires payment of any royalties whatsoever, it instantly violates the "no further encumbrances" section of the GPL. If that software derives from or includes any GPL components, poof, it instantly loses the right to be distributed.
So if you want video on a Free Software system at the moment you must choose one of the following four options:
1. Abandon the GPL and any dreams of having a fully free desktop system. Just bow, accept that The Market Has Spoken And Freedom Is Dead.
2. Abandon the USA as a market for a regime which doesn't recognise software patents, and hope international treaties don't impose US-like silliness on the world.
3. Abandon the law. Resign yourself to breaking the law and either living like a fugitive, accepting the penalties or trying to make a test case out of your lawsuit.
4. Abandon the known patent-tainted H.264 for a (hopefully) non-patented alternative like WebM, or one for which the patent imposes non GPL-violating encumbrances.
(or, as a temporary solution, sequester the video-rendering component in third-party "dirty" code, like a Flash plugin, written using no GPL libraries, while you initiate a proper project to replace it).
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
It's a real open standard. Does it require patent licensing? Yes.
And therefore, by doing so, instantly it violates the GPL. Because of the GPL's "no further encumbrances" clause, it becomes illegal to distribute any software which both implements H.264 and derives from GPL code. The "ease" of patent licencing doesn't matter. It is flatly illegal at that point.
It takes a very strange cast of mind to translate "illegal to be distributed as free software" as "open".
Of course, if you don't care about freedom of software or even, pragmatically, about using any GPL code - then sure, "open but nonfree/illegal" is close enough, if you squint a bit and don't look closely and also happen to be in the proprietary software or device manufacturing game - anyone but a hobbyist with a Linux box.
However, some of us want to be both Free and Legal, and H.264 has simply taken itself completely out of the running in that game.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I'm one of your fans on here. Here's why I don't like H.264, for starters I run Linux on a few of my systems and there's no Quicktime available on it. On my Windows systems I don't install Quicktime because it's bloated. It tries to run ALL the time by default, seriously what a ridiculous thing for a media player. Not to mention that it installs a bunch of unrelated junk - like Bonjour.
I've used H.264 for quite a while. I was thrilled when it became available as a streaming format under Flash.The superiority of H.264 is debatable however, just like the debate between Ogg/Vorbis and MP3. End users can't tell the difference anyway. Google has a huge monetary cost associated with using an inefficient codec - YouTube. That cost would dwarf licensing costs by a long shot.
I think we're literally seeing intelligent people at Google advocating a technological change which ultimately is in the public interest. You can't support open source software while proprietary systems like H.264 are in use. It creates an artificial barrier into entry in the market to free software by causing unwitting users to entrust their personal information to a format they must pay to use. There's no positive for ordinary people with H.264, none. Google has just gained a lot of points in my book.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
...which is absolutely meaningless in the real world. He has the knowledge and he has the skills. And gets paid for it. What do you do? Oh, right, you post on slashdot. Believe it or not, when it comes to software, an expert can be pretty much any age.
RTFM
Thanks for proving the GP's point but, just so you know, "cheap" isn't "free" and it most certainly isn't "Free".
But hey, if you like paying through your nose for watching and uploading videos just so you can feel "popular" go right ahead, I'm sure MPEG LA will be happy to sell you a license. Or prosecute you for breaking the law.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Pure FUD. The per-decoder license fee for H.264 is $0.20, capped at (IIRC) $4M/year. Firefox could simply pay out of the pool of cash it collects from search engine referrals, or, even more sensibly, avoid the entire problem by using operating system libraries to decode H.264.
And, once again, why are you arguing as if WebM is actually unencumbered? This is extremely unlikely to be the case.
Incidentally, by damaging the prospects of HTML5/H.264, Google is effectively promoting Flash/H.264. All the same patents, except with a proprietary closed source browser plugin thrown into the mix as well. Not exactly a victory for freedom.
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