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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."
Does Chrome really have the market share required for this move to have any effect on the decisions of web designers?
Or back to the era of having to install a huge number of plug ins. I'm personally, not happy with this move. 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.
And the open alternative to Flash is....? (Other than the subset provided by HTML5/WebM)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Google is obviously betting that WebM in Chrome and Firefox can carry enough weight to compete against H.264 in MSIE, Opera, and Safari.
Google, obviously, has enough web-surfing based data to factor into this judgement call. Whether or not Google is right on this call, one thing is certain: Google wouldn't do this unless they were fairly confident in WebM's chances against the looming patent trolls.
This, I think, is the noteworthy aspect of this bit of news. A patent troll going after WebM will now have to expect to have to deal with Google's well-funded lawyers.
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball asks some very relevant questions about this. The most interesting is: if Google is so concerned about open standards, will they also be dropping the embedded Flash player from Chrome?
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.
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
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.
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
or the reality of "We've decided to stop supporting formats for things that aren't free", would be a more simple answer.
Google would almost certainly like to stop doing this, but they are practical enough to know that this isn't feasible quite yet. However, if WebM became the de-facto standard for web video then Google would be much closer to being able to realistically ditch Flash. In short, this is clearly a step in the right direction. Unless, of course, you happen to believe that we'd all be better off using H.264 to stream video.
What? That page says "Click here to download plugin".
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.
Back? Have you ever tried using HTML5 video? It's completely fucking useless.
No, really, it is. OK, first off, we have the codec issue. If you want to support all browsers, you need to encode to the following formats: H.264+AAC, VP8+Vorbis, and Theora+Vorbis. You're stuck with all three if you want to hit all browsers.
Then there's the part where the HTML5 spec forbids allowing JavaScript to fullscreen the video. Which means that you're stuck with either using the lousy solution YouTube uses (blow up the video to screen size, and assume the user can figure out how to fullscreen their browser on their own), or just dropping the feature all together.
Both suck. Users are used to being able to fullscreen the video, and they do NOT want to jump through the two-step hoop just to get fullscreen video.
Of course, most browsers allow the user to fullscreen the video on the context menu. But that's still really a two-step process: right click on the video, and then click on "Full screen." And to add insult to injury, most HTML5 video toolkits manage to block this option anyway by the way they generate their UI. (Including YouTube, in fact.)
So instead, you just use H.264 and a Flash-based player. Now you hit every major browser including IE, you don't have to encode your video three fucking times, and you don't have to have continuously explain the hoops required to fullscreen the video.
But what all this also means is that by ditching H.264, Google really doesn't lose anything anyway: if you were trying to support more than just Chrome and Safari with HTML5, you were already encoding to at least Theora anyway. So all this does is mean that Chrome will now be stuck with the same crappy, blurry Theora video you already had to encode to anyway to support Firefox. Or maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get the WebM video, which while worse than H.264 at the same bitrates, is still better than Theora.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
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Adobe claims it is a DMCA violation to make software that is interoperable with Flash video. There might be some parts of Flash that are open, but playing video sure isn't one of them.
And as for the other parts, haven't you ever wondered why there is still only one full implementation of this supposedly open "standard"? Either the Gnash guys are incompetent (they aren't), Adobe's implementation is fucking awesome in everyone's opinion and all users are delighted with how great it works and the wide variety of platforms it has been ported to (they aren't), or the claim that it's open is bullshit.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
What makes this decision even more annoying is that Google are part of the H264 patent pool. They have more to lose by removing support for it.
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
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.
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Except H.264 is superior to WebM.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
Or, people can just use the hardware and software they already paid for which supports H.264. There are plenty of programs which use QuickTime to encode and decode H.264 with absolutely no fear of being sued by MPEG-LA. And they get the benefit of using a superior codec, all at no additional cost.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source, but WebM objectively inferior to H.264. Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price? As it seems to me, to do so would be entirely irrational.
And if something comes out as good as Handbrake after Chrome drops h264, I will gladly use it and compliment Google on their foresight.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
>>>a decent browser will have a full screen option.
Way to completely-and-totally miss his point. Yes the browser has a FS option, but it requires users to take a two-step option (first blow video to fill the browser; then make the browser full screen). The Grandparent poster said that's a pain in the ass, and he would be correct. Especially since many of us users don't know how to do full screen in our browsers. The old way was better (a single click via javascript).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>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
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
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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Except H.264 is superior to WebM.
No, it's not. I've seen both in action, and they're perceptually identical. I see this argument a lot, and the people who make it are simply pulling it out of their ass.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source. <bogus claim snipped!> Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price?
What if you want to upgrade that software? And then upgrade it again? And again? That all cost $$$, and as someone who uses both FOSS and commercial software, I can tell you that the difference isn't so "reasonable." What if you are a design studio and you need 100 copies of the software? That price isn't so "reasonable" either.
It strikes me that a lot of people made the same stupid arguments you just did about Linux--especially Microsoft, which stands to have the most to lose if people switch to Linux. "You have this expensive infrastructure that you can't get rid of!" And a lot of stupid companies buy into it, too. To save the $500 thousand it would cost to switch over and maintain the environment after doing so, they spend millions over the course of three to five years.
There's a better way. I know it. Google knows it. Most laypeople don't, and Apple, as the company who sells a lot of legacy H.264 hardware software and who earns royalties from other people who make such things, has a high financial stake in doing their damned best to make sure people don't act in their own long-term financial interest or freedom.
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
Besides which, even if you do live somewhere with software patents then the liklihood is you already have an H264 licence with your OS. It's certainly the case for Windows & OS X users. In fact they have an entire media framework ready and at the disposal of any browser to invoke for content it doesn't handle natively.
The whole situation is absurd. If Firefox / Opera / Chrome don't support H264 out of the box for legal / patent reasons then fine, don't ship it out of the box. Instead open up the video api so it's extensible. Better yet, invoke whatever media framework is on the OS and let that decide if the content is playable or not.
Not providing any convenient way to support other video formats is just stupid. It won't drive people to the open standards, instead it will drive them the other way, using Flash plugins and other hacks to workaround the issue.
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.
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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