Opera Supports Google Decision To Drop H.264

An anonymous reader follows up to yesterday's Google announcement that they would drop H.264 support from Chrome. "Thomas Ford, Senior Communications Manager, Opera, told Muktware, 'Actually, Opera has never supported H.264. We have always chosen to support open formats like Ogg Theora and WebM. In fact, Opera was the first company to propose the tag, and when we did, we did it with Ogg. Simply put, we welcome Google's decision to rely on open codecs for HTML5 video.'"

Comments

Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[cpu6502]

It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec and television is using this codec and cable is using this codec and DVRs are using this codec and Blurays are using this codec...... but the internet did not. The web would be the odd man out.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Guspaz]

By 2020, it's likely that we'll be using h.264's successor rather than h.264 itself.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Halborr]

All of those things are consumer electronics. Personal Computers sometimes have non-commercial software on them by the operator's choice.

You don't change the OS on your TV or radio for a reason.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[drinkypoo]

You don't change the OS on your TV or radio for a reason.

If I could change the OS on my TV, I would. It has a USB port that I'd like to be able to use for other things. Of course I'd have to have most of the base functionality. I'd sure like to add wake-on-signal...

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[somersault]

Since when has the web been anything like TV, Radio, or physical media, and why should it be? Much better to use a free codec than have to have your browser developer or whoever waste money on licensing.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike all those formats you mentioned, the internet is free as in speech.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[tixxit]

Really? I'd think a good codec would have a longer useful life. I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs and BDs today and is 15 years old (BD requires h.264 support as well, though). I think you have the law of diminishing returns. How much better can we really do than h.264? It took a while to get audio right, but once it got 'good enough' (mp3), any minor improvements weren't enough to overcome the inertia mp3s had already gained. Same with JPEGs and PNGs. After a certain point, the minor improvements just aren't enough to win over the inertia gained by the previous codec. In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[cpu6502]

You think there's a codec more advanced than MPEG4-derived 264?

It already has the ability to stream VHS-quality videos at dialup speeds (50kbit/s) and FM-quality audio at 90s-era speeds (14 kbit/s). Not sure how much more this lossy codec can be improved? I know technology advances but eventually you knock-up against Nyguist Theorem (or is it Shannon's Theorem) and can go no farther past that point. That's why Dialup has been stuck at 56k for over a decade. I suspect MPEG4 video and audio has reached that point too, and cannot be shrunk any smaller.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[silanea]

Absolutely. Which is why no DVD player can handle DivX, and why MP3 never made the jump to mobile phones and even dedicated devices. And, regarding your choice of time span, which is why we all still use VHS. Right. You do not honestly believe H.264 in its current form will be around in 10 years in any other use than to convert legacy media to its successor's successor?

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the web would be the ogg man out! Ba Dump Tschhhh!

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[cpu6502]

Having lived through an era where TVs and computers were not compatible with one another (except Commodores and Amigas), I'd rather not repeat that. I'd rather have the two using the same standards so I don't need to use two separate CRTs. Moving in a direction that makes them incompatible is a mistake IMHO

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[MtHuurne]

How relevant will TV, radio, Blu-ray etc be in 2020? CD sales are already being replaced by digital downloads and while a lot of people continue to listen to the radio, they often do so by streaming it over the net. I see no reason why the future would be different for video.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

Well, you're correct in that DVB, Blueray and (probably) a lot of DVRs use H.264 (DAB uses MP2, otoh). However, all those are closed systems which is why they rely on a closed, patent encumbered codec. It's a feature.

The web, on the other hand, is a free and open environment with nothing in common with television broadcasting or selling movies on pieces of plastic. The web requires an open, patent-free codec; adopting H.264 is just as bad as when everyone started using flash video or when certain web browsers decided to "adopt, embrace and expand" HTML. I *really* hope WebM wins this as I would like to be able to continue using a free and open web browser in the future.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[CharlyFoxtrot]

All those devices use hardware decoding, which has also made it into modern GPU's. What it comes down to is that either we go back to offloading decoding onto the CPU, forget about this for mobile and its going backwards even on the desktop, or separate hardware will need to be developed which will be more expensive than the h264 hardware because that will have a scale advantage since everybody else is using it. In short if Google gets its way we're in for a real "win" for consumers: either we get choppy playback because of software decoding or we get more expensive hardware ... but it's at least it's "open" (Google gets to drive development and saves on license fees.)

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[lingon]

If Google wins this, we will have choppy playback because of software decoding or we get more expensive hardware but at least the videos can be played anywhere, on any system and you're free to implement it in any product you choose to develop. If H.264 wins this, we will only have video playback on Windows and MacOS X, but at least you'll have your smooth playback. That's not enough for me, though.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Steauengeglase]

It isn't the odd man out, it is simply ahead of the curve.

This is why almost every net appliance failed and cellphones have the lifespan of butterflies. They can exist in that curve or slightly behind it, but they can't keep up.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Halborr]

Um... Pardon me if I'm misunderstanding, but... A TV is a monitor and a tuner (a really basic computer). The PC takes care of all the decoding and just sends a video signal to your monitor. I'm not familiar with how HDMI works, so maybe that argument has some substance behind it with HDMI, but not with CRTs, which you seem to be arguing around.

Moreover, you still hook up your computer to your CRT tv? You can't get someone to give you their old CRT monitor? I just got a ~20" CRT monitor for FREE. They're not that hard to come by.

Dude, usually I'm behind the tech curve as well, but I feel like you're trying to name drop with CRT and VHS, except you're 12 years behind. You're making yourself look outdated.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[somersault]

Well, I haven't looked into it, but it may still be able to offload the decoding to the GPU, just not to hardware designed specifically for that actual codec. That shouldn't be any more expensive, but it would probably use a lot more power.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[eggled]

Compression algorithms (which these video encodings are) have little to do with sampling rates and channel capacity. A better compression algorithm *allows* you to use a higher sampling rate with the same data rate (thereby mitigating the impact of the Nyquist theorem), and *allows* you to send the same data through a smaller channel (mitigating the Shannon theorem). Neither phenomenon has an impact on the ability of a compression algorithm to compress. That said, I still think we're approaching the limits of A/V lossy compression.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[CharlyFoxtrot]

If they (Google) were really concerned about openness they'd spend the money fighting software patents instead which is the real underlying issue here. But there's not much chance of that.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[beelsebob]

I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs

Well done for defeating your own point – DVDs use AC3 (MPEG 2 audio) as opposed to mp3 (MPEG 1 audio)
Similarly, Blurry disks use AAC (MPEG 4 audio) as opposed to either of the above.

MP3 is only about still because alpha geeks can get their finger out their ass and use a modern codec, the rest of us have been encoding in AAC for god knows how long.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[beelsebob]

If you think in 2020 any of TV, radio, DVRs, blurays etc are going to be delivered by something other than the internet, you're deluding yourself.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[alvinrod]

HEVC is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%. A few candidate solutions have been able to get similar quality, at lower bit rates, all while decreasing the complexity. It's likely that by the time the standard is completed, it will be a lot better than h.264.

This doesn't matter as much for disc-based media, but a 50% reduction in bit rate means its cheaper to push it over the web, even if decoding it on the other end takes more time. If it takes off like AVC, then a lot of devices will include dedicated hardware to decode it. A big part of the reason phones, iPods, etc. are able to get such good life on video playback is that they have dedicated hardware to deal with certain codecs.

The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.

h.264 is good, but h.265 of whatever they decide to call it will be even better, especially if it significantly reduces bandwidth consumption.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[spxero]

I'd sure like to add wake-on-signal...

Yes! This would be great to have. I have media centers attached to all my TV's, but still need the TV remotes just to turn them on and off. A wake-on-lan for my TV would keep it down to one remote (or phone, web interface, etc.).

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[m50d]

What's kept us on jpeg rather than jpeg2k is, surprise surprise, patent issues. I suspect that's the case for your other examples too.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Yvanhoe]

Exactly. On internet people download and upload. They "consume" media but produce it as well. A codec that is free only for reading has no place on internet.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it will at all, its almost as if Betamax vs VHS. One expensive with slightly better quality, the other "free" (free of patent royalties) with close enough quality at same bitrates.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[damien_kane]

I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs

Well done for defeating your own point – DVDs use AC3 (MPEG 2 audio) as opposed to mp3 (MPEG 1 audio)

Well done for defeating yourself...
GP said MPEG-2, which is a video codec.
Look at the .vob files on a DVD (any DVD), they are all encoded as uncompressed MPEG-2 video streams.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[lingon]

Yes, you're right but that doesn't mean that we have to use a codec that is closed and patent encumbered. I'd rather take a shot with Google where we at least have a chance to have a free and open codec.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Athrac]

Well done for defeating your own point, smartass. AAC is superior, but people still want to use MP3. That's exactly what the GP was talking about.

And AAC isn't exactly a new codec either like you're implying, which even more emphasizes the fact that old codecs are still used even when better ones are available. There are better alternatives to AAC, and the only reason it's is still used is because alpha geeks like you can't "get their finger out their ass" and switch to modern codecs.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody uses MP3 for audio. With the right encoder and settings, you can easily achieve transparency and they are compatible with everything.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs

Well done for defeating your own point – DVDs use AC3 (MPEG 2 audio) as opposed to mp3 (MPEG 1 audio)
Similarly, Blurry disks use AAC (MPEG 4 audio) as opposed to either of the above.

MP3 is only about still because alpha geeks can get their finger out their ass and use a modern codec, the rest of us have been encoding in AAC for god knows how long.

He actually proved his point.

Since AC3 is "significantly better" than MP3, it was used for DVDs. Nicely done!

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

He's also wrong insofar as AC3 is not an MPEG standard at all, plus it predates mp3 (MPEG-1 Part 3) audio by a year.
By the way MPEG-2 video streams are not uncompressed. The MPEG-2 (Part 2) video compression standard uses a lossy compression method.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[shentino]

The question is, is h.264 good enough to fork over a shitload of royalties for?

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[squallbsr]

I would rather have an open codec used for the open web. I did find this move by Google to be a little odd, I am wondering if MPEG-LA called Google up and asked for money.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Good luck, you are going to need it. Like Gruber said (about Theora) "Put another way, 'open and better' is a recipe for success; 'open but worse' is a recipe for obscurity." With the current lack of hardware support, especially on mobile devices, the latter looks more likely. Even if eventually it'll be "open and as good", that's probably not going to cut it with so many companies already aboard the h.264 train.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[dave420]

You only have to pay if you are charging for your h.264 content.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[CharlyFoxtrot]

How relevant will TV, radio, Blu-ray etc be in 2020? CD sales are already being replaced by digital downloads and while a lot of people continue to listen to the radio, they often do so by streaming it over the net. I see no reason why the future would be different for video.

Yes, all of those are already being streamed over the net or downloaded ... using MPEG-4 standards.
Maybe Google should be promoting VP8 by bribing release groups to use it :-)

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[lingon]

Of course, that's a risk. However, the two options here are "Google including support for H.264" and "Google dropping support for H.264". With the former, your scenario is very certain. With the latter, there is a chance that Google can push WebM hard enough, given their size and influence.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[cHiphead]

Radio, television, cable, dvrs, and bluray ARE the odd men out when put up against the internet.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[maxwell demon]

It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec

It would be indeed very strange if in 2020 audio is encoded with a video codec :-)

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Guspaz]

MP3 is popular for home use, but is virtually unused in terms of commercial use relative to AAC and other proprietary formats. JPEG remains popular because it reached the point where it was "good enough", with later competing codecs not offering a sufficient advantage to justify the pain of trying to move everybody to a new format. MPEG-2's video codec is still used in DVDs, and is *supported* by bluray, but BluRays encoded with MPEG-2 is extremely rare (pretty much everything is h.264 or VC1, mostly h.264).

Audio and still-image compression is not a field where large gains can be had so easily. If I produce a still-image codec that is 25% more efficient, then maybe I can save 5300 images on my SD card instead of 4000... but that's not going to make much difference. Same in terms of audio; I don't really care if my MP3 player can store 388 hours of audio or 517 hours. Audio has reached the point where we tend to encode everything at the same bitrate regardless of compression efficiency. In fact, uncompressed digital audio isn't exactly rare. CDs aren't compressed, and increasingly movies ship with lossless audio. We've reached a cap in terms of audio quality (more data doesn't help), but storage capacities keep going up.

Video, on the other hand, is a big deal. In terms of streaming, the amount of bandwidth required to compress good quality 1080p video still exceeds the connection speed of most broadband connections in north America (let alone disc-quality). On top of that, there's an increasing trend towards bandwidth caps.

Bell Canada in Ontario has a 25GB cap on usage. If we assume 5Mbps video (enough for 720p, at least), a consumer can only afford to watch about 23 minutes of video per day. If you double the compression efficiency (as the successor to h.264 aims to do), that becomes a *very* big deal. You can afford to stream much higher quality video to those with limited connection speeds, or stream a lot more video to those with limited transfer caps, or store more content on a disc. The impact would be felt enormously almost anywhere video is used.

Getting back to replacing h.264, let's examine a bit about how long it took h.264 to become ubiquitous. It's mostly replaced previous codecs, as it's now the dominant codec for consumer consumption. Your cellphone and video camera record to it, your disc-based movies use it, increasingly your television service uses it, your streaming video uses it, etc. h.264 was standardized in 2003. 7 years later, it's unquestionably the dominant standard. This was even true a year or two ago, so we might stretch this a bit and say that 5 years was enough for h.264 to go mainstream.

h.264's sucessor, HVEC, is scheduled to be finalized in 2012, with a targeted improvement over h.264 of 100% (same quality at 50% bitrate) By 2020, 8 years will have passed since "h.265" was standardized. At that point, I would fully expect it to be the dominant codec in use.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[mfraz74]

Obviously everybody except for me, as I use ogg for all my ripped music.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Kjella]

With everybody clamping down on limits and "excessive" usage, most of North America will need BluRay. Most other places too 50 GB is much cheaper to deliver by disc, not online. Sure, for the urban population in high tech countries moving to an all online solution will work but BluRay isn't going anywhere. That and torrents, until they get their head out of their ass and realize things are on torrents hours after broadcast and anything I like I will watch as soon as it is available, the only question is if they're in the business of making money or not. And with BluRays, I'm at least certain they'll play even if things can't call home to the mothership, I'm not putting any money into a system with a remote killswitch.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Guspaz]

h.264 can't do VHS quality at 50Kbps, especially not if you include audio.

I might agree with 150-200Kbps, but even that's going to have to use special low-bitrate audio codecs like HE-AAC where the upper frequencies and stereo information is sort of faked. It was claimed that WMV9 (the basis for VC-1, which is closer to MPEG-4 ASP than h.264) claimed they could do VHS-quality at 250Kbps, and that was stretching the truth a bit.

As to get back to your original question, "You think there's a codec more advanced than MPEG4-derived 264?", the successor to h.264, HEVC, is targeting a doubling in efficiency, and is scheduled to be finalized by 2012. Doubling of efficiency would mean that the same quality is achieved with half the bitrate.

As was pointed out in other comments, nyquist/shannon have nothing at all to do with perceptual video compression. We'll reach a point some day when throwing more computational power and newer algorithms at the problem won't make much difference, but we're *VERY* far from that point today. There's a huge amount of room for improvement. The fact that we're still doubling efficiency with every codec generation (MPEG-2 -> MPEG-4 ASP -> MPEG-4 AVC -> HEVC each doubled efficiency) should be proof enough of that.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Flytrap]

I'd sure like to add wake-on-signal...

Yes! This would be great to have. I have media centers attached to all my TV's, but still need the TV remotes just to turn them on and off. A wake-on-lan for my TV would keep it down to one remote (or phone, web interface, etc.).

I thought all modern TVs could do this... The last two flat screens I have bought (a 46" Sansui and more recently a 52" Samsung) both have serial ports that can wake up the TV. The Sansui came with a command manual and I used to wake it up whenever my MVix media centre woke up by running a batch file that pipes the output to the com port with the wake up command to the Sansui.

My Samsung did not come with a command manual, so I haven't tried this on it.

I think that you will find that you are probably able to wake up your TV through the USB port... after all it is just a glorified serial port

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[aliquis]

Or maybe they support WebM, because the Internet does!

I think the format issue is a valid one. However atleast any more "professional" video is most likely edited before upload and hence the switch in format probably doesn't matter that much. Even more so considering people who edit their clips may opt to not use H.264 at all.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[N Monkey]

The question is, is h.264 good enough to fork over a shitload of royalties for?

You only have to pay if you are charging for your h.264 content.

Irrespective of that, if h.264 is, say, X% dearer than another codec, but uses Y% less bandwidth, there will be a point where it will be cheaper simply because content suppliers and/or customers will be saving money.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[aliquis]

Well done for defeating yourself...

No, he most likely know that DVD use Mpeg-2 for video.

His claim was for the audio track, where it's true, and if either format lasted for so freaking long why did they switch?

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[tixxit]

MPEG-2 video, not audio. Sorry for the confusion.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[nabsltd]

Similarly, Blurry disks use AAC (MPEG 4 audio) as opposed to either of the above.

Assuming you are snidely referring to Blu-Ray, you're wrong.

Blu-Ray players must support AC-3, DTS, and linear PCM, with the more advanced Dolby Digital and DTS codecs as options. MPEG-4 audio isn't mentioned as even being optional.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

Your numbers on compression improvements are quite exaggerated. By all records, AVC is only about twice as effective as MPEG-2, and ASP is only about 10-20% more effective. In fact, the relatively disappointing performance of ASP is among the reasons it was mostly ignored by industry, though popular in the piracy scene. The most promising current HEVC candidate (Samsung+BBC) is about 20-30% more effective than AVC at significantly higher computational cost (see: x264dev.multimedia.cx).

The primary reason AVC is perceived to be way better than previous codecs is simply because the best implementation, x264, is so far ahead of its competition. Remember that while the standards themselves definitely improved, the design of software implementing said standards was evolving at the same time.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[nabsltd]

Since AC3 is "significantly better" than MP3, it was used for DVDs.

AC-3 was actually chosen because it supported more than two channels and was easy to port the soundtrack from the theatrical version.

For two-channel audio, MP3 and AC-3 are about the same at the same bitrate.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[sexconker]

HEVC is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%.

The problem I have with "subjective quality" is that it almost invariably means "Let's change the color space to something shittier, and sample chroma only on 50/25/12.5% of the pixels!".

While PSNR isn't an ideal measure, at least it's objective. Give me a standard that does full RGB instead of YV12/YUY2 and I'll be happy. And by "standard", I mean on paper, in implementation, and in practice when I watch TV or a movie.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[rawler]

In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.

Should be possible though. It's quite amazing to see how much bit-errors can actually be concealed, meaning there must be some degree of redundant information in there.

For a while, especially in broadcast media, there's been a desire for wavelet-based coding instead, which doesn't seem to improve compression much, but improve error-concealing such that missing information causes blurring rather than blocking, which is much more lenient on the human eye.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[SimonTheSoundMan]

That, and the fact JPEG2000 looks worse than old JPEG.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[bonch]

Google is making a very weird move. It's definitely not about being "open," because they're shipping Flash with Chrome, which encourages dependency on a third-party, proprietary plug-in.

Chrome is a niche player in the browser market, and Opera even more so, so I'm not sure what they think they're going to accomplish here or how it will help anything. H.264 is pretty much already the standard, particularly in hardware decoders. Even Apple never dropped support for MP3s in iTunes and iPods, because it's an ubiquitous format, and H.264 has already crossed that threshold of usage.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[tixxit]

HEVC is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%. A few candidate solutions have been able to get similar quality, at lower bit rates, all while decreasing the complexity. It's likely that by the time the standard is completed, it will be a lot better than h.264.

It sounds very cool, but you have to remember, this still hasn't even been finalized. Blu-Ray just came out and there are tons of players, which means devices capable of decoding h.264 have become commodities. A Blu-Ray player made even 5 years from now can use the same hardware to decode a Blu-Ray and a streaming h.264 (this h/w will also be fairly cheap). Adding all the necessary h/w support to save 50% bandwidth may not be worth it. Especially for the cheap stuff. I'm not suggesting h.264 is the end-all-be-all, i just don't think it'll disappear in a decade.

The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.

Yeah, that's what I meant by inertia. Once everyone has adopted a standard, it is hard to change that unless there is significant improvements. People and companies have a vested interest in the codec, so minor performance improvements aren't going to help much.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs

Well done for defeating your own point – DVDs use AC3 (MPEG 2 audio) as opposed to mp3 (MPEG 1 audio)

Well done for defeating yourself...

Well done for defeating your shut the fuck up with your damn smugness, both of you, and just debate the actual meat of the matter already, you pretentious prancing ponces.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Daniel Phillips]

It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec and television is using this codec and cable is using this codec and DVRs are using this codec and Blurays are using this codec...... but the internet did not. The web would be the odd man out.

All the applications you mentioned are watching the sun go down except for the web, as is evidenced by declining participation hours for all of them including Bluray if you compare it to its predecessor DVD (this is really a self inflicted wound). I don't know about you, but I don't even receive TV in my house and I missed it exactly once this year: wanted to see the ball drop in Times square. Next year I'll be sure to arrange an internet feed for that, I don't doubt I could have this year if I'd thought of it before quarter to 12. Bottom line is, it doesn't make sense to talk about odd man out when comparing to buggy whip industries.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Daniel Phillips]

You don't change the OS on your TV or radio for a reason.

If I could change the OS on my TV, I would. It has a USB port that I'd like to be able to use for other things. Of course I'd have to have most of the base functionality. I'd sure like to add wake-on-signal...

My TV is running Linux, how about yours? I found out about this because LG thoughtfully included a copy of the GPL at the end of their user manual. (I would definitely buy LG again.) It's very likely this Linux is upgradeable, i.e., hackable, which might be fun.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Guspaz]

True. I'll admit that I relied on the stated goals of each generation of codec rather than actual benchmarks. I'd note that the claimed efficiency improvement for Samsung+BBC is 40%, rather than 20-30%. This also obviously doesn't take encoder improvements into effect, as x264 is pretty advanced in thsi regard.

This doesn't really change my overall point, though. If MPEG-4 AVC achieves 2x the efficiency of MPEG-2, and Samsung+BBC is (let's split the difference) 1.3x as efficient as AVC, then we're currently 2.6x the efficiency of MPEG-2. This reinforces the point that there's room for improvement left.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

He's talking about flash player which uses acceleration only for h.264 content. HTML5 is a different story as Google's chromium browser will likely support acceleration for WebM in consideration of this announcement.

And, it is best to get off closed source products, especially those that claim to own all patents related to digital video (as those rights holders have claimed that it is impossible to create a product without infringing at least one of their patents).

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Draek]

So is WebM, with the advantage that we wouldn't have to deal with shady licensing issues for the next 20 years.

H.264's only advantage is that it's the current state-of-the-art, and only a fool would believe that'd still be the case five years from now, let alone twenty.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Idbar]

Your comment assumes complete lack of evolution and support. Back in the day, when I had a 75MHz Pentium processor, have I thought the same way, I'd have said that MP3 would have choppy playback because of software decoding. (In fact I couldn't have any applications open if I wanted to play music on my computer). Yet, I bought my first CD-MP3 player and it was just fine. The fact that you currently don't have the hardware doesn't mean you won't have it. Do you remember the time when TVs, DVD and BD players came with absolutely no applications such as Hulu or Netflix?

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

Why can't they do both?

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

How would that philosophy be applied differently to closed source?

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

Well certainly. HTML5 with WebM on Youtube alone will be a big boost.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

And, you have to start somewhere. If we rely on existing implementation the impetuous will lead us to one codec and one entity controlling all content. We do not need that, just like we don't need DRM. Given that, that entity controls all things and can take over the open nature of the internet closing it for a select few's profit.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[petermgreen]

The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.
Exactly and assuming bandwidth costs continue to trend downwards then at some point the benefit of wider compatibility comes to outweigh the cost of larger file-sizes. This has already happened for audio and still images and at some point in the future I would expect it to happen for video too. Age also brings the benefit of a higher likelihood of being free of patent issues (unfortunately I believe in the US there is still the possibility of a submarine patent that was filed years ago finally being granted).

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

The problem is that once it is in hardware, and if it is the only one in hardware, it will be extremely difficult to overcome, even after decades.

And, if you aren't aware of it, there's a big back story about how Microsoft tried to screw Apple on the container and the formats. Apple ultimately won, but it was a hard fought battle, one that Apple knows how to wage against today's competitors.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[beelsebob]

Everybody except the unwashed masses who use iTunes and the unwashed masses who use Windows Media player, and the washed masses who use FLAC or ogg, meaning... about 1% of people ;)

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[h3]

I lost track of who was defeating which point but I think "uncompressed MPEG-2 video streams" wins it.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[CharlyFoxtrot]

How would that philosophy be applied differently to closed source?

It doesn't that's the point. Open or not, you have to bring a better product to succeed in an established market.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[CharlyFoxtrot]

They can and should, but don't. They are as schizophrenic about software patents as they have been about net neutrality.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[cgenman]

Maybe, but it's not like you can just pipe a television stream into the internet. You're going to have file conversions before getting to the end user anyway. You don't really think 16bit / 44.1 Hz audio is the standard all of the way from the recording studio to the CD, do you?

Also, the problem with H264/MP4 is that it is a patent-encumbered standard that can't legally be included in a lot of distributions. Any free OS, like Google's Chrome OS, won't be able to include it. That basically defines a vacuum, which one way or another some competing and unencumbered standard will be sucked into filling.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

This might sound silly, but to my ears AAC is highly inferiour even to MP3 even at high bitrates. It only sounds better than mp3 if they both use low resolution while mp3 is superior at bitrates of 192kbit or higher.
AAC to me has this metallic sound to it and music also dosent have the same depth as non lossy audio or even mp3.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[garyebickford]

While PSNR isn't an ideal measure, at least it's objective.

.
While I sympathize with your position overall, I have to disagree to some extent, by going somewhat offtopic. I use the typical music scale as my example. In theory the successive notes in a scale differ as 1 to the twelveth root of two (an octave is a doubling of frequency; there are 12 half-tones). However if you actually tune a piano to this measure it sounds like a cat fight. So a piano tuner has to tune the notes slightly above or below the 'standard'.

More interestingly, before the so-called Well-tempered scale was developed, the exact frequency of individual notes in a scale varied slightly according to what key the music was played in. Early harpsichords were tuned to a particular key. Many musicians bemoaned the rise of the well-tempered scale because they felt that it took away some of the best tonality. (A number of other temperaments exist.)

I would argue that while some of this musical question is based on the exact frequencies of such things as fifths and thirds, some of it has also to do with human perception. So I would also argue that a standard should take into account human perception as well as, but not instead of, objectivity. In fact I'll go farther - I have long believed that the standard frequency range used for CDs is insufficient (in several ways), which I assume occurred because the scientists involved did not understand or take into account perception sufficiently.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

I didn't know until recently that they did, haha.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

In the case of AMD and nVidia I doubt we'll have issues getting them to implement a hardware solution.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[tixxit]

I really don't think anyone doubts that there will be better codecs than h.264. However, superior competitors have not stopped mp3 from still being widely used today. The topic of discussion is whether any of these codecs will succeed h.264 in the near future. Given Blu-Ray's h.264 support, you can bet that it won't going anywhere for a while.

Also, this isn't about whether other codecs (eg. WebM) will run alongside the current codec, but whether the current codec will be replaced in a decade. Certainly mp3 has lots of competitors, competitors that are far more worthy, but its still kicking. It's inertia has kept it going, even while being outpaced by others.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's all thanks to your gold-pressed platinum optical cables.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[HermMunster]

Everything today is niche due to monopolistic practices.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[lennier]

It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec and television is using this codec and cable is using this codec and DVRs are using this codec and Blurays are using this codec...... but the internet did not. The web would be the odd man out.

Will the H.264 patents have expired in nine years?

If not, then it's a non-starter for the Web. Patented algorithms are illegal to distribute in GPLed implementations like Firefox or Chromium.

Adopt H.264 as a universal standard, and you can kiss the GPL goodbye. If that's your preferred end-game for the Web, you might as well just say so up-front.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[lennier]

In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.

Good but illegal. If the patent encumbrance that causes H.264 to be incompatible with the GPL's "no further restrictions" clause were to go away today, it would be a done deal. If not, then when the patent expires, then H.264 will be back in the running.

But until then, it's simply illegal to distribute GPL-sourced implementations of H.264, so - it's a moot question how 'good' the codec is if you can't write a decoder for it without breaking the law, isn't it?

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[sadtrev]

still-image compression is not a field where large gains can be had so easily.

JPEG has two significant practical deficiencies which are not inherent in its lossy nature

• firstly it's 8-bit channel depth is not enough to allow any editing without noticeable degradation,

• and secondly, its compression characteristics tend to enhance photo grain and silicon array noise.

I guess that the reason that something better hasn't emerged is the combination of the patent thicket around wavelets, and all the shenanegans the digital camera manufacturers have been playing with raw formats.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. There's been lots of attempts to replace all these formats too: JPEG2000 tried to replace regular JPEG, but no one uses it. Ogg Vorbis tried to replace MP3, but never caught on much outside of Free software fans, and software makers wanting to save on license fees for music inside their games. Fraunhofer even tried to make their own replacement for MP3, called MP3Pro, and I haven't heard anything about that since it was first announced years ago. MPEG4 has been around for quite a while, but did they select that for BDs? Nope. It took ages for PNG to really supplant GIFs, and the only reason it's really succeeded is because regular Joes just don't use 8-bit losslessly compressed graphics any more, so techies (mainly web developers) have mostly moved to PNG for its many superior qualities.

The time to push a free and open codec into mainstream use is early, not after some patent-encumbered codec has gotten entrenched, because by that time, it's too late.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[nschubach]

Sharp also has embedded Linux in their Aquos line. I also thought about this about 2 years ago when I got mine and have since forgotten about it.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Grishnakh]

I hate to break it to you, but digital downloads of movies are going to be extinct pretty soon, and people will be required to use Blu-Ray (or regular DVD, which is still going strong even though it's 15 years old). Netflix will probably be out of the instant-watching business within a few years, at least in the North American market. With all the high-speed internet providers in North America clamping down on downloading left and right, and charging insane "excessive usage" fees, Netflix instant viewing simply won't be economically viable for most consumers pretty soon. With the way our corporatist governments in the USA and Canada are going, they're not going to do anything to stop this clamp-down by the ISPs, and North America will soon be a backwater for internet usage, with high-priced metered usage being the norm.

I also wouldn't be surprised if digital downloads of music (from iTunes, etc.) gain extra fees and surcharges from the ISPs soon. After all, if you're going to use the ISP's bandwidth to download a track from iTunes for 99 cents, why shouldn't you pay an additional dollar to the ISP for the privilege of downloading it? Don't like it? What are you going to do about it? The only other high-speed provider available to you will charge the same fee.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[thegarbz]

Wait what? Who needs state of the art? People didn't drop MP3 for OGG or FLAC despite the improvements in quality. As it is the market in general is having a difficult time shifting to 1080p TVs. For the consumer it's the size of the TV that counts, and a disappointingly large number of people always reply "I can't see the difference".

State of the art will not necessarily win. If H.264 is to be displaced within the next 10 years it will be on the broadcasters side as they try and compress even more content into their shitty low bandwidths. For Bluray you already have 50GB of space to deal with. On youtube .... go ask your sister, or any of their friends if they even know how to get high def content from there.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[silanea]

I seriously doubt that. There are tv's with built-in W-LAN and H.264 acceleration for moderate prices today. Adding one more chip, especially when there are no licensing costs, is not an issue - if there is a market for it. And there will be one within short time.

Re. the Apple/MS episode: I am aware of it. The major difference is that Apple would have to wage war against the content provider on the Internet. If YouTube switched to WebM tomorrow, Apple would implement it today.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell bluray titles are VC-1, not H.264. Bluray only supports a specialized profile of H.264 (which even x264 only got support for a few months ago). The profile of h.264 supported by bluray is not compatible with mobile devices like the iphone, and the profile that works on the iphone will not work on bluray.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Daengbo]

I'd argue that Chrome isn't niche at 10%. If it's niche, then Mac certainly is. Firefox, Chrome, and Opera together, though, definitely aren't niche. In fact, they'e approaching 50% in Europe. Android will almost certainly be WebM, too, by the way.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[cpu6502]

>>>h.264 can't do VHS quality at 50Kbps, especially not if you include audio.

320x240 resolution at 50k? It's doable, although I admit the frame rate must be slowed from 30 to 10. But anyway the point I was making is that WebM doesn't come close. It needs 1.5 more bits to achieve the same quality as h.264 on a limited-bandwidth connection. It's simply not as efficient.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[cpu6502]

If things continue progressing this way, we'll eventually reach a point that existed circa 2000, where PCs could not be connected to living room TVs, because TVs could not handle the VGA signal that PCs were putting out.

Now in the present, our new HDTVs have enough resolution to handle VGA or HDMI, but if we start feeding the TV WebM videos from our computers, or the internet, the TV will say "I don't know what to do with that - I only do MPEG2 or MPEG4" and display nothing. You will have once-more created a separation between the world of computers, and the entertainment box in the living room.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[X0563511]

FLAC here, unless it's already lossy (in which case I will avoid transcoding it at all if I can).

The quality vs space difference is acceptable for me, since my collection is relatively small but my desired quality is higher.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[h4rr4r]

Or want to read the fucking files. You have to pay to license their patents if you write or distribute a player.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[h4rr4r]

But infinity less rate of me being sued for implementing it.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[glodime]

We could start to see ISPs cooperatively owned buy their customers. There are currently a number of municipally owned and operated ISP that are working out quite well for resident/customers. It is unlikely to happen but consumer cooperatives are clearly the best alternative to privately owned monopolies.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[km_2_go]

Niche - You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

you're an idiot. the computer decodes the compressed stream and renders it as video that goes over the vga/dvi/hdmi using whatever protocols that type of connection uses. TV's are just giant computer monitors (albeit with a far lower pixel density) that happen to also incorporate tuners for tuning rf signals from cable/broadcast. you may take your chicken little bullshit elsewhere. kthx.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Grishnakh]

That won't happen: laws will be passed (and have passed in some places already, IIRC) to prohibit municipalities from starting their own ISPs, as this is "unfair competition" to corporate providers. Of course, these laws will be written by the corporations that stand to benefit from them.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[steveha]

I am wondering if MPEG-LA called Google up and asked for money.

Consider the history of MP3. The company holding the patents was lax about enforcing them for a few years; during those years, MP3 became entrenched as the standard way to encode audio. Then the company with the patents started actually enforcing them, and any company whose business depended on MP3 had to simply pay up.

H.264 have been available under very cheap and generous terms. However, there is no guarantee that in future those terms might become less cheap and less generous. And Google, who run YouTube, is on the hook for a lot of money if H.264 becomes essential to YouTube's operation.

If Google uses H.264 instead of WebM they could save some money on bandwidth; but that savings could be totally wiped out if the licensing fees get ratcheted up. WebM will require more bits for the same quality as H.264, but Google will know for sure and certain that their licensing fees are zero and will remain zero. This seems like good business to me.

And I think a fair number of the people at Google want to do this because they want to do something good for the community. I for one would love to have video work perfectly on a fresh Linux install. I'd love to be able to create videos, edit them, upload them, and not have to worry about owing patent licensing fees, so I am cheering for WebM.

I also want to get a video camera that records in WebM to avoid this problem. I am shocked and angered that the H.264 patent holders want to tell me what I can and cannot do with a video camera that I bought, and I am stunned that a $12,000 camera still comes with this non-commercial-use limitation.

steveha

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[4phun]

Really? In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.

Memo:

Uninstall Opera
Uninstall Google Chrome

Repeat for each desktop

We will not have some greedy ad agency tell us that we need to use FLASH and stop using h.264.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[evilviper]

Turn the clock back 20 years, and it wasn't MPEG-2 video on the web, was it? Even though satellite TV, and radio (DAB), and digitial tapes, and DVDs were all using it. The web was still somewhat in the grips of RealMedia's proprietary formats, while gradually switching over to WMV, and nobody said we should all be using MPEG-2 then...

Frankly, I don't see digitial broadcast radio ever taking off. The economics are wrong, the demographics are wrong, and the demand curve for broadcast radio is wrong.

Television broadcasts over the air will continue to use MPEG-2 pretty much worldwide, and will not change for a good 50 years. H.264's impressiveness is at low bitrates. It has next to nothing to offer for high quality video at very high bitrates (though no worse, quality wise) and the licensing and processing costs are a big downside.

For cable, the pipe is big and cheap, and OTA is MPEG2, so they may well stick with the standard... or not. For satellite TV, yes it looks like H.264 will be the standard.

Bluray is an interesting case. Its fascinating just how difficult of a time its having displacing the tired old DVD. Probably a lot DRM related. This isn't necessarily a temporary situation. With VHS, tapes were maybe 1/4th the resolution of broadcast TV, and laserdiscs, SVHS, VCD, etc couldn't knock it off its pedistal for all their technical superiority and added convenience.

DVRs will follow the other standards. For OTA, they'll need to have MPEG2 forever, in addition to H.264. Who knows, maybe WebM will end up in there too.

Finally, what "H.264" are you referring to? The H.264 videos on that Bluray or satellite broadcast wont work on your iPhone, no matter what. So where's the magic advantage to having the internet use the same name codec as broadcasters? And let's not get into lossy versus lossless H.264. In any case, my Divx files aren't going anywhere...

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[evilviper]

MP3 sounded "good enough" right up until SBR (found in HE-AAC) came along and wiped the floor with it on MP3's turf. There's definitely a law of diminishing returns in high quality lossy reproduction, but in the low bitrate stuff, where close is good enough, the playing field is pretty wide open, and MP3 is squarely in the low bitrate camp, as is H.264.

Until we have audio files as small as MIDI files, and videos as small as SVG animations, there's tremendous potential for dramatic improvements in low bitrate encodings... where perceivable but non-annoying artifacts are considered a perfectly acceptable trade off.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Google
* Amicus brief filed for the Bilski against business method patents.
* Offensive patent suits filed during Google's existence: 0
* Patent suits filed against Google: many

For any company with deep pockets, not patenting your own stuff is not possible anymore. You'll get sued just for using what you developed yourself.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

I've bought numerous 42" televisions lately, from Sony to Soniq to Samsung and none of them have a wake-up feature.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

Basic-AVTechnology-Comprehension FAIL. Slashdot should have a "Thread's Biggest Idiot Award" in honour of parent post.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "schizophrenic" you mean "make compromises to make progress in the real world" then I agree.
* First partial net-neutrality agreement with a vocal net neutrality opponent: check
* File defensive patents while not suing anyone offensively, supporting patent reform, and siding against Bilski: check

While I applaud the purity of a FSF-type purist stance, it is hard to live your life that way[1], and nearly impossible to run a large company that way. But, to the person with only black-and-white views, there is no place for compromise, and the actions of a company with a more gray reality may seem inconsistent. To someone like me who runs Linux on his computer, but still owns a PS3, I can appreciate that sometimes you need to pick your battles or make trade-offs.

[1] Try owning any modern car, appliance, or electronics without using proprietary software and software patents.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Jarik_Tentsu]

Processing power is a big thing too.

I mean, h264 would not have been possible 10 years ago since processors wouldn't be able to decode the data in real time. So when we have crazy 1000 core processors in our computers, I'm sure they'll be some crazy complex algorithms made to encode stuff even smaller - and make use of parallel processing in the CPU to decode it in real time or something.

I'll leave it to the Computer Scientists to discuss what that algorithm would be. =)

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Guspaz]

No, there are exactly the same chances of being sued for implementing it: zero. The chances are also zero if you free distribute a FOSS encoder. You only need a license to *sell* an h.264 encoder.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

MP3 is popular for home use, but is virtually unused in terms of commercial use relative to AAC and other proprietary formats.

AAC (MPEG-2 Part 7 and MPEG-4 Part 3) isn't any more or less proprietary than MP3 (MPEG-1 Part 3). Both are MPEG standards, both are patented, both require licensing fees in some use cases.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

Newsflash: Mobiles phones don't have dedicated h.264 hardware, they have a DSP which is capable of decoding h.264, but with the right drivers will be equally capable of decoding VP8 (the video codec in WebM), and for graphics cards the same applies, they don't have a dedicated part of the GPU for h.264 it is just part of the driver which makes the decoding happen on the GPU, so again, graphics cards just need a driver update to support this.

We don't need new dedicated hardware, just new drivers for the same hardware that decodes h.264. With Google controlling Android, they shouldn't have much problem making on happen on mobiles, and the hardware shouldn't cost any extra. With modern GPUs, I believe AMD and NVidia have made APIs available for running programs directly on the GPU if they aren't interested in adding WebM decoding to their drivers, so that is an option.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[h4rr4r]

If you can't use the encoder I write in a commercial work it is not FOSS at all.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2020, radio, television, cable, dvrs, blurays will be death as we know them now and the Internet will be there giving
you radio, television, cable, etc with WEBM o something better and open.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[dangitman]

Exactly. On internet people download and upload. They "consume" media but produce it as well.

You know, people produce media for TV, film and radio too. Where do you think the shows come from? Robots? They even have these things called "credits" which list people including those with a job title of "producer."

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Guspaz]

*woosh*

Not only did you not read correctly, you missed the point. The "proprietary" label was not applied to MP3 or AAC, but "other proprietary formats". WMA might be an example. And the point wasn't that it was more or less proprietary, but that MP3 had been largely supplanted by newer codecs.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4

[Guspaz]

By whose definition? A FOSS h.264 encoder would still adhere to all four of GNU's freedoms. GNU does not state that you must be free to charge money for it, only that you must be free to run it, free to (re)distribute it, free to study/change it, and free to distribute your modified versions of it to others. Nowhere does it say that you must be free to charge money for it without having to pay someone else.

The GNU certainly states that you must not be required to pay to do any of these four things, but charging money is not one of these four things. The distribution is still unrestricted, and since you can't use FOSS software in a non-FOSS commercial work, the freedom to distribute that commercial work with the h.264 encoder is unaffected.

No news here.

[Quick Reply]

Opera are against everything and everyone, while their actual market share consists only of a hardcore minority. In other words, nobody from the real world actually cares what Opera think, and there is no news here.

Re:No news here.

[Quick Reply]

Also the fine people at the European Commission are not from the real world either.

Re:No news here.

[feedayeen]

Opera are against everything and everyone, while their actual market share consists only of a hardcore minority. In other words, nobody from the real world actually cares what Opera think, and there is no news here.

Opera's user base is only a hardcore minority? You want to take that outside punk?!? Just kidding, not like I'm ever going AFK

Re:No news here.

[MrHanky]

Opera is still the most widely used mobile web browser worldwide, according to Statcounter. But perhaps mobile is irrelevant in the real world.

Re:No news here.

[Jugalator]

Funny comment to make after Opera kindly endorses Google and open codecs (= not against this, rather the contrary).

Against everything and everyone? Is h.264 really that big?

Re:No news here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good question, at least in the web context. I'd be surprised if (after Chrome change) more than 2% of web usage is on a browser that's capable of HTML5+H264...

Re:No news here.

[afidel]

Yes, .264 is that big. It's embedded into just about every consumer electronics device that plays video. All the smartphones have hardware accelerated .264, all the settop boxes have .264, etc. It's not that these things couldn't get WebM support, its that it took 6 years of arguing in committees and standards boards to get everyone to agree on h.264 and then another 3 years or so for a significant number of products to end up on store shelves and then another couple of years before those devices became a major percentage of devices. Basically you're looking at around 10 years to go from codec to ubiquity.

Re:No news here.

[Anonymous Coward]

do you know why the year of the desktop will never come for linux?

because the traditional desktop's future looks pretty stale.

smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks, and other devices will be, or are already, occupying more of people's time.

so whatever you think of opera on the traditional desktop, is not forward thinking, it's not even today thinking.

welcome to 2011.

how many smartphone users are there? how many of them are using IE? is there an opportunity for opera to be a player in the new world of computing?

hint: I never used opera while using linux or mac. but first on my windows mobile phone, and now on my android phone, guess what i'm using?

that's right. opera.

don't be a clueless dipshit.

Re:No news here.

[Anonymous Coward]

your mother was irrelevant, but somebody still thought to put it to her, and you were the result.

irrelevant is as irrelevant does.

quit pissing in your nostrils.

Re:No news here.

[HermMunster]

I agree that you shouldn't become a dipshit. My primary reason is that you seem taken by the notion that the smart phone will replace the PC, which informed people know will never happen.

Sad news for the web

[Guspaz]

Sad news for the web, that we'll be saddled with outdated inefficient codecs that, at least in the case of WebM, are probably just as patent-encumbered as h.264.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Your wheelbarrow is showing underneath your skirts.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Jugalator]

Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264? Google claims no patents at least, so that would in this case be if it's too similar in some regard to MPEG LA patents. But if we are to dismiss codecs on the basis of pessimistic probably's, we won't approve a single modern video codec at all. What matters is that the format has, after scrutiny of the FSF, been endorsed, that Google has irrevocably released all patents of VP8, and that there are signs that On2 made an effort to avoid MPEG LA patents in designing the format. It doesn't really get much better than that. We'll always have the doubters, the pessimists, but we can't base decisions on possibilities, only facts. At least in a world that is moving forward as quickly as the IT world.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Haedrian]

Naah. At least this way we won't go back to the days when to view a video you needed 10 different plugins from 10 different vendors.

Or we could... use... flash, till someone write a proper codec with no strings attached? You know flash? Its that thing the web's been using for a few years now. Yeah I know its proprietry, but the player is free.

Re:Sad news for the web

[mikael_j]

And h.264 is no more proprietary than Flash with the added advantage that the standard isn't controlled by a single company well-known for producing buggy insecure software...

Re:Sad news for the web

[EdZ]

Most 'flash video' you watch now is h.264 in an flv container.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Andy Dodd]

Yup, there is very little evidence other than Google's claims that WebM is really patent-free.

There was a VERY good analysis of WebM from one of the x264 developers (admittedly there could be bias there, but my opinion was that it was high on technical content but low on bias.) - http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

There was at least one component of WebM that the x264 developer felt WAS patent-encumbered. However there is a potential for a prior art challenge on that one.

The WebM/VP8 spec is apparently AWFUL. Almost as bad as, if not worse than, Microsoft's OOXML spec.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Haedrian]

The argument remains that for the end user/browser they don't have to pay the h.264 license. Yeah I would prefer it if we get weaned off proprietary stuff, but for now this'll do

Re:Sad news for the web

[cpu6502]

Even if WebM is completely "liberated" and free of patents, they'll still get sued by the MPEG lawyers (they said they would). And WebM supporters might still lose depending on the incompetence of the judge, who might think WebM is infringing.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep and you can shove that 'flash video' garbage right into the nearest black hole. flash needs to die now. The open format of ogg is the way to go. The ogg codec might be a bit poopy now, but if it is the standard more developers will look at it and begin to add to the project. Next step would be a codec that is better than the h.264 and ogg is open.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Kjella]

Every time this comes up the meme is that they're waiting for someone with deep pockets to sue. Well, Google has extremely deep pockets. If Google can use it with impunity without getting sued, you can be sure this is nothing but patent FUD. And if Google is sued, well at least there will be a real trial on the validity of the patents. Either way there's no reason for Opera or Mozilla or anyone else not to join in as long as Google leads the flock.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Most flash video should be H.264 in a MP4 container. At least that's the container Adobe recommended for use with H.264 ever since they added support for it in Flash 9. Youtube for instance uses MP4 for it's H.264 content AFAIK.

Re:Sad news for the web

[cpu6502]

THANK YOU. I was about to say the same thing. If you're watching Flash, you're watching MPEG4's H264 codec most of the time.

Re:Sad news for the web

[lingon]

So your solution is that we should go with the 100% patent encumbered codec instead? I fail to see how this solves the problem. With WebM, at least we have the possibility of a free and open solution.

Re:Sad news for the web

[mcgrew]

Yeah I know its proprietry, but the player is free

And cross-platform. We just got a big snowstorm here in Illinois, and when I went to look up road conditions, the page informed me that Silverlight is required -- and Silverlight won't run in Linux, nor will it run on any version of Windows prior to XP, or on an old Mac ( just acquired an old Mac a few nights ago).

Re:Sad news for the web

[lingon]

While both have an obvious bias in this, I'd rather trust the word of Google with its armada of IP lawyers than one x264 developer. Especially since Google will take the possible courtroom fight.

Re:Sad news for the web

[fast turtle]

Now the question is, why in hell should my browser support H264 when it's the OS that should support it? That's the exact reason for a Standard. Support by the OS and keep the many software packages as lean as possible and yet everyone is bitching that Opera and Chrome have dropped support when Firefox included it since it's supported by the OS through a plug-in. Windows Media Player for MS and Quicktime for Apple. What does *nix have? Nothing legal that I'm aware of

Re:Sad news for the web

[zeroshade]

Except that a company distributing a flash plugin wouldn't have to pay Adobe a helluva lot of money, whereas a company that distributes an h.264 decoder has to pay a damn lot of money for a license.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Haedrian]

Might help with your silverlight-on-linux problem

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Moonlight_(runtime)

Isn't perfect (far from it), but certain things work.

Re:Sad news for the web

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Naah. At least this way we won't go back to the days when to view a video you needed 10 different plugins from 10 different vendors.

Looks to me like Google by doing this is trying to refragment a market that looked like it was going to be ruled by the one codec to bind them all, H264.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Haedrian]

Except that Firefox already said it wasn't going to support it. So that's 30% of the market fragmented already.

Re:Sad news for the web

[mbone]

When H.264 was designed, a strong attempt was made to avoid any patent encumbrances. (Or, more precisely, to keep the codec entirely royalty free.) It didn't work, and this is not likely to work for the same reasons.

Re:Sad news for the web

[bk2204]

The reason Mozilla gave for supporting certain video formats in the browser instead of using system implementations is consistency. It avoids cases where one system has a codec installed but another doesn't, leading to hard-to-reproduce problems. It also avoids problems where different platforms' implementations are buggy or implement less than the entire spec.

Re:Sad news for the web

[lingon]

I'm curious as to what you base that on. The only thing I can find is that they've promised not to pursue any patent claims against people streaming H.264 video for free, however they will still do it for all others (including encoding for free), so I wouldn't say they've really gone out of their way.

Re:Sad news for the web

[squallbsr]

Anything worth keeping is also worth fighting for. The problem is that a large number of people do not actually do anything to protect the things they value. If you want to see a world without patent abuse, you have to actively engage - donate to the EFF, call your Congressman/woman, educate people on the issues, buy some advertisements, etc, etc.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Kitsune Inari]

That sounds interesting. Source, please?

Re:Sad news for the web

[znu]

The problem with that logic is that it's strategically useful for Google to push WebM even if it does end up requiring a patent license pool.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty much what I've been saying all along. And the clock IS ticking...they've got to sue here pretty quick or get the effectiveness of the patent pool dramatically reduced because they delayed in enforcement. Laches messes up any case, even if you have one. You're not supposed to fail to start the mitigation of your alleged damages in a timely manner- you don't lose the patent, but you might lose damages, or worse, lose the right to enforce against that specific infringer or group thereof. Typically that window's about 3-4 years. Microsoft's going to have to come up with "new" patents if they're going to threaten us with them any longer- they've missed their window.

Re:Sad news for the web

[rjstanford]

Basically, a formal statement of the Not Invented Here attitude problem. Never mind the fact that, say, the H.264 codec installed in all modern OSs is probably substantially better (and properly licensed, if needed) than the one included as an afterthought by your browser...

Still waiting for them to start shipping their own printer drivers, too. You know, in case there's an inconsistency. Because at least as many people print from their browser as watch video in it, so I don't see why the same reasoning doesn't apply - other than the fact that the Mozilla Foundation would rather lock everyone into their walled garden of Correctness, that is.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Pi1grim]

Sadly, only _certain_ things work, and they never are _needed_ things. Anyways, I'd rather boycott this technology alltogether (why in the world, would we need another flash, only from Microsoft, and with a worse cross-platform compatibility?)

Re:Sad news for the web

[Kitsune Inari]

The codec you describe exists. We call it VP8: it's more or less as good as h.264, it's patent-free (MPEG LA denies this, but so far they have refused to provide any evidence) and it's libre.

Re:Sad news for the web

[EdZ]

it's more or less as good as h.264

Nope. A shame, but at least it's better than Theora.

Re:Sad news for the web

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264? Google claims no patents at least, so that would in this case be if it's too similar in some regard to MPEG LA patents.

In an earlier slashdot discussion znu writes:

"But wait!", the OSS fans are saying. "Isn't Google really standing up for freedom and justice, because H.264 requires evil patent licensing?"

No. Expert opinion is that WebM infringes on numerous patents in the H.264 pool, and will need a licensing pool of its own to be set up, just like Microsoft's VC-1 did. So the patents are a wash. This is Google manipulating the market entirely for selfish advantage here, and it's all the worse because they're pretending otherwise. And it's going to be really frustrating watching people fall for it.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to issue a lawsuit, you have to (a) do a patent and technology analysis (which takes time and costs money) (b) believe it to be in your strategic interest to do so, with the chosen target at the chosen time (c) be worth winning (the money question that you raise). You raise a strawman IF the patent owner is only interested in money THEN... but they may have other considerations, particularly strategic ones, alas.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF. We need a +-0 totally ignorant mod.

No it wasn't. In fact quite the opposite. Every company at the table tried to get as *many* of their patents into the spec. Hell the spec reads like a stack of patents.

Re:Sad news for the web

[TheTurtlesMoves]

FUD plain and simple. More users of H.264 have had patent claims leveled against them at the court level than theora and WebM combined.

The list of people that claim they are going to sue Linux this, or webM that is large. Not one after years worth of waiting have done so. Its 100% pure BS.

Re:Sad news for the web

[BitZtream]

See, heres the problem:

From my perspective, and most of the rest of the world, the 100% patent encumbered codec is useful right now, versus the 'free and open' solution isn't.

Anyone that I want to communicate with is going to have a way to play h.264, not true with WebM. I know they'll be able to play it even on their portable devices.

Please name one advantage WebM provides me that h.264 does not.

'free and open' is neither a disadvantage or an advantage for me. The cost of the license fee for h.264 in the products I use is so small and infinitesimal that I just simply do not care one bit.

They can't go back and change the license on products already being sold, so nothing I have or use already will not be effected even if they decide to completely change the rules.

So its not 'open' by your definition of the word. By mine it is, as anyone can use it without regards to what they are using it for. The playing field is level, so its open enough for me. Of course, most people don't even know that as they aren't affected by any sort of 'open versus closed source' politics like 'slashdotters with a cause' are.

I fail to SEE A PROBLEM, as does pretty much everyone else. You're all uppity and excited about something that will literally have no effect what so ever one 99.999999% of the population.

You probably spent more in time and effort to make your post than a normal person will ever pay in h.264 license fees directly or indirectly, I know I most certainly have.

WebM advantage right now: Free and Open, can be implemented safely in OSS software.
WebM disadvantages right now: Lack of hardware support. Lack of software support. Lack of commercial support.

h.264 advantage right now: Virtually ubiquitous hardware and software support. Used by many commercial entities for production work. Massive amounts of content AND content creation gear already made to work with h.264
h.264 disadvantages right now: Patented. Royalties required in many uses cases (not all). Does not fit the 'Stallman definition of Open', as such can not be safely (from a legal perspective) implemented by open source software or hardware.

What they have the same: Both codecs look pretty much the same for all intents and purposes from the user perspective of video quality and bandwidth, neither is 'clearly the winner' in this category though both have individual strengths and weaknesses.

So, the industry could flip around and use an entirely different codec because 'its free and open' or they could just keep going like there were using. Pay the expense to retool and relearn and produce entirely new software/hardware designs ... or just pay a thousands of a percent of your product cost in license fees and let someone define the standard ...

H.264 license fees are just so low that the inertia it has surpasses any perceived savings with going with a open solution at this time. Perhaps the license board will do something silly in the future that will make h.264 not look as good, but its just silly to run off and spend the money to replace what currently works fine with something that could eventually work fine if everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Too bad everyone is already on a comfortable bandwagon.

So really the argument turns into: One is better than the other because it can be used in open source.

Reality: No outside of your cult gives a shit if it can't be used in OSS, whats worse, half the people who love OSS and live by it ... would rather use h.264 now than wait for WebM to become ubiquitous.

Second Reality: Best Demo Ever, also simply releasing close source implementations for a small fee to go along with the OSS you can completely avoid any legal concerns so its really just a matter of principal because of something that MIGHT possibly happen IF the license board decides to cut off its own nose to spite its face.

I guess what I'm trying to say is ... your 'reason' makes a really silly argument if you've got any sort of perspective at all.

Re:Sad news for the web

[TheTurtlesMoves]

And what is the strategically useful position of encumber h.264 folk? To claim patent infringement regardless of a real legal case, or any intent to have a legal case.

Re:Sad news for the web

[amRadioHed]

How is that? Isn't the flash plugin also an h.264 decoder which would be required to pay license fees?

Re:Sad news for the web

[jlp2097]

Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264?

Dark Shikari, a developer of x264, made an extensive analysis of WebM / VP8. Here is his summary regarding patents and VP8 (for details read the blog):

Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. It’s quite possible that VP8 has no patent issues, but until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem. Most importantly, Google has not released any justifications for why the various parts of VP8 do not violate patents, as Sun did with their OMS standard: such information would certainly cut down on speculation and make it more clear what their position actually is.

Re:Sad news for the web

[mikael_j]

...or on an old Mac ( just acquired an old Mac a few nights ago).

I have yet to be able to install Silverlight on my 27" iMac (latest iteration from this summer), the installer just crashes. So as far as I'm concerned Silverlight is pretty much not cross-platform at all, it runs on Windows and that's it.

Re:Sad news for the web

[tuppe666]

One advantage of WebM over H.264 native support in the largest browser share. With Videos in that format from the largest video provider on the net...I think that also covers the rest of the rant too. I'm a little confused by your comments regarding cults Google, Mozilla and Opera are companies who have made these choices based on whether they get to roll around on piles of money...or Steve Jobs does.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Kjella]

I didn't say it was the only reason why they might sue. I said that was a very common explanation for why they don't sue, even though they claim to have patents that apply. Google has very clearly and loudly claimed WebM is patent free, if the patents have any credibility at all now is the time to use them. Google has gone all in, and it's time to either call or fold and there's really no other way to interpret folding than that your bluff has been called.

Re:Sad news for the web

[HermMunster]

As is the case with specialists. We spend time thinking about these issues. We analyze. We influence. It is only a win win for everyone that doesn't. They rely on us. The problem is with those specialists that won't take the time. They won't influence. This change will matter. And greatly, given enough time.

It is best to get off a proprietary product controlled by a company that threatens to sue everyone over patents with most being questionable.

We need to be off one codec and to spread it around. Imagine the market if Intel had remained the only processor supplier.

Re:Sad news for the web

[lingon]

You don't need to be an open source zealot to appreciate a big problem: Not included in open source products means for example "not included in Firefox" (which is what, around 30% of all browsers out there?).

Re:Sad news for the web

[cpu6502]

>>>100% patent encumbered codec instead?

I couldn't give a shit if it's patented. VHS was patented. Ditto CD and DVD and LaserDisc and 3.5" floppies, but I made out just fine. They didn't stop me from enjoying entertainment, and neither will the use of MPEG4 in radio,TVs,blurays,et cetera.

Besides: MPEG4 won't be patented forever. It's only 10 years away from being public domain (like webM). All it requires is some fucking patience.

And finally: WebM is inferior. MPEG4 can create VHS-quality video at dialup speeds, and FM-quality at just 14 kbit/s. WebM doesn't even come close..... like dropping down from 1080p to 720p. I think it's a bad move.

Re:Sad news for the web

[cpu6502]

>>>This change will matter. And greatly, given enough time.

In time, H264/MPEG4 will be as open and free as WebM. This is a bit like a pyrrhic victory: Given enough time, say ten years, you may succeed in making "open source codec" the internet standard..... but by that point, H264 will be open source too. You could have won the battle by simply sitting on your ass and waiting a decade.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Daengbo]

Do yourself a favor. Don't link to an eight-month-old article on a codec that is seeing constant development in both Google's libvpx and FFmpeg's ffvp8. The results don't mean anything anymore.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Daengbo]

The spec doesn't matter much because there's a BSD-licensed reference implementation. The Internet was founded on such things.

Re:Sad news for the web

[cpu6502]

>>>100% patent encumbered codec instead?

I couldn't give a shit if it's patented. VHS was patented. Ditto CD and DVD and LaserDisc and 3.5" floppies, but I made out just fine. They didn't stop me from enjoying entertainment, and neither will the use of MPEG4 in radio,TVs,blurays,et cetera.

Besides: MPEG4 won't be patented forever. It's only 10 years away from being public domain (like webM). All it requires is some fucking patience. And finally: WebM is inferior. MPEG4 can create VHS-quality video at dialup speeds, and FM-quality at just 14 kbit/s. WebM doesn't even come close..... switching from H264/mpeg4 to WebM is like dropping down from 1080p to 720p.
I think it's a bad move.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Andy Dodd]

"While both have an obvious bias in this, I'd rather trust the word of Microsoft with its armada of IP lawyers than one x264 developer. Especially since Microsoft will take the possible courtroom fight."

See, I just replaced one company with another in your post. Microsoft made the SAME promises as Google did with VC-1 ("It's patent-free! Use it!")

Six months later a bunch of patent holders crawled out of the woodwork and asserted them against Microsoft and there is now a VC-1 patent pool. (Note: Microsoft is NOT the holder of any of these patents. In this case VC-1 remaining patent-free was in Microsoft's business interests.)

Re:Sad news for the web

[zeroshade]

Flash player is free to download and free to develop for. Adobe charges for its own flash development software but anyone can make software for it. Adobe has published the file spec. Thus distributing a browser with the built in flash plugin, as far as I know, does not require payment to Adobe.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't give a shit if it's patented.

So you're volunteering to pay our bills?

-Google

Re:Sad news for the web

[EdZ]

constant development

Unfortunately not. As the article mentions, those are finalised specs: any changes would result in VP8 decoders no longer working with newer VP8 files.

Re:Sad news for the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Specs stay the same. Implementations improve (libvpx and ffvp8 as mentioned).

Re:Sad news for the web

[cpu6502]

>>>100% patent encumbered codec instead?

I couldn't give a shit if it's patented. VHS was patented. Ditto CD and DVD and LaserDisc and 3.5" floppies, but I made out just fine. They didn't stop me from enjoying entertainment, and neither will the use of MPEG4 in radio,TVs,blurays,et cetera.

Besides: WebM is inferior. MPEG4 can create VHS-quality video at cellphone speeds, and FM-quality at 90s dialup speeds (14 kbit/s). WebM doesn't even come close..... like dropping down from 1080p to 720p. I think it's a bad move.

Bad research....

[gQuigs]

The article ends with, "It will be interesting to see if major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari will follow the suit and drop support for H.264."

Re:Bad research....

[Haedrian]

"It will be interesting to see if major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari will follow the suit and drop support for H.264."

Fixed that up for you

Re:Bad research....

[EdZ]

Firefox does not support h.264.

Re:Bad research....

[guruevi]

Both Firefox and Safari have taken a huge chunk of the market. IE is down to 44% market share, Firefox now takes up nearly 30% and Safari takes up 5% + 20% of the mobile share.

Re:Bad research....

[JackieBrown]

I think that was his point. Not sure why he was modded troll.

He highlighted the only browser that does not support h.264

Re:Bad research....

[silanea]

Both Firefox and Safari have taken a huge chunk of the market. [...] Safari takes up 5% [...].

For a very kind definition of "huge". With Apple's market share in the desktop and laptop world somewhere between 4 and 10%, depending on who you ask, those 5% look rather bleak to me. Either they barely manage to keep their few hardware customers from jumping ship or they lose about half of the many Mac users to competing browsers. Neither option sounds much like a success.

Re:Bad research....

[calebpburns]

The article ends with, "It will be interesting to see if major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari will follow the suit and drop support for H.264."

Firefox does not natively support the H.264 codec without plugins (i.e., Flash or WMP Firefox Plugin)

Re:Bad research....

[tverbeek]

There's something fundamentally perverse about developers making efforts to remove features from their products, and/or issue press releases bragging about features they will not offer. It's almost as if they had some agenda other than making their software more useful to end-users and content publishers.

Re:Bad research....

[gQuigs]

You are correct... Apparently I should be more verbose next time...

They can't drop something they've never had.

Re:Bad research....

[gparent]

Good job, you know how to read.

Re:Bad research....

[gparent]

They're helping keep the web open and thus IMHO more useful. Fine with me.

Re:Bad research....

[Anonymous Coward]

These features are patented.
Perhaps they have an agenda of pushing the Internet towards free standards.

Re:Bad research....

[Celarent Darii]

Free as in controlled by one company ?

264 is actually run by a standards commitee.

WebM is from a company recently bought by Google.

Also WebM just doesn't work yet, and patent issues

Re:Bad research....

[Kjella]

Well, you would expect the OS and browser stats of the same company to be consistent since they come from the same http headers. On NetApplications it says 5.02% Macs and 5.89% Safari. I've never heard of anyone using Safari on anything but Mac, so I guess this means most Mac users use it as well as 1-2% that are probably Mac users forced to work on Windows. Not, surprising, since Apple has very little reason to push their web browser on the Windows platform, they're interested in selling Macs.

Re:Bad research....

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops, I thought he was [i]adding[/i] it to the list. My bad for incorrectly RTFA.

Re:Bad research....

[VGPowerlord]

or a very kind definition of "huge". With Apple's market share in the desktop and laptop world somewhere between 4 and 10%, depending on who you ask, those 5% look rather bleak to me. Either they barely manage to keep their few hardware customers from jumping ship or they lose about half of the many Mac users to competing browsers. Neither option sounds much like a success.

OK, so what happens to those numbers when you add iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches to them?

Re:Bad research....

[LynnwoodRooster]

Given that Android phones outsell iPhones 2:1 - and now have a larger installed base than the iPhone - and do not use Safari, I'd say adding in phones wouldn't help your case that Safari has a "huge" base at all..

Re:Bad research....

[tuppe666]

WebM doesn't work!? yes clearly Google/Mozilla and Opera are MAD.

Re:Bad research....

[silanea]

That, and most the i* owners I know run Opera on their devices because they dislike Safari.

Re:Bad research....

[Kitsune Inari]

Please define "doesn't work"

Re:Bad research....

[Celarent Darii]

From their own website [http://www.webmproject.org/about/]

"The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases."

In other words it's still in beta. It is not a finished project. It might even be vaporware or abandonware in the near future. If Google hadn't bought the company it would have no clout whatsoever.

Working means "I can write my software now and expect it to work on a variety of devices". Even better would be "I can expect the implementation to be consistent on all devices adopting the standard". WebM is not an open standard only an open implementation of a supposedly open codec. Note that many of the developers of x264 question the fact that WebM doesn't violate the patents on h264.

Video encoding is not something that is all that easy, and there are many smart people that have worked many hours to come up with the algorithms, and this work is protected. One of the successes of h264 was to group all these patents into one pool making it much easier to access this work.

h264 is owned by a standards committee, not a single company. There is no way to enforce compliance to WebM as a standard, and this will inevitably turn into the mess like with HTML, where everyone will start to introduce their special 'features' that only a few video players will support and we will end up with the anarchy that the web developers have suffered for so long.

Since when do we listen to Oprah about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

She should stick to getting her TV channel up and running, and not meddle in the technical details of how the video is encoded and viewed.

WebM

[jpea]

everyone, get your zencoder instances fired up

I wish..

[js3]

I wish software developers would stop playing politics with software and just deliver products that work

Re:I wish..

[Anonymous Coward]

What, all the megacorps and patents behind the h264 licensing aren't to blame? Your logic is impeccable.

Re:I wish..

[Anonymous Coward]

That can only be achieved with patent free software, like the move Google just did with Chrome. Proprietary software or patented software will always have lawyers stopping the delivery of products that 'just work'.

Re:I wish..

[js3]

what part of the word 'politics' didn't you understand?

Re:I wish..

[Shikaku]

Because then you'd have to pay money to use Firefox in 2014 with h264 support, and Firefox would violate the GPL unless you paid. It would also segregate those that paid and those that did not.

Remember the time when you had to pay money to buy a browser? 15ish years ago?

Citation:
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html

According to the “Summary of AVC/H.264 License Terms,” which you can download from the MPEG LA site (www.mpegla.com/ avc/avc-agreement.cfm), there are no royalties for free internet broadcast (there are, however, royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video) until Dec. 31, 2010 [extended to 2014]. After that, “the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.”This makes royalties payable for “free television” the best predictor of where internet royalties will stand in 2011. Under the terms of the agreement, you have two options: a one-time payment of $2,500 “per AVC transmission encoder” or an annual fee starting at “$2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households, $5,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at least 500,000 but no more than 999,999 television households, and $10,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at 1,000,000 or more television households.”

This isn't just free as in beer, it's free as in free of cost.

Re:I wish..

[Shikaku]

*This isn't just about free as in beer, it's about free as in free of cost.

Fucking typos.

Re:I wish..

[VortexCortex]

I wish software developers would stop playing politics with software and just deliver products that work

what part of the word 'politics' didn't you understand?

::sigh:: I write free software, for free. While I try to "just deliver products that work" by ensuring cross platform compilations work, and adding features users request, I am not always CAPABLE of complying due to patents.

I was going to add support for H.264 encoding and decoding to one of my projects, but I simply can't afford the license fees or to charge the users for each copy.

So, I'm faced with -- use external libs which is not exactly "just works" if you don't have the lib installed, eh?

For the video conference feature I chose to write my own codec to avoid all these "politics", sure, it's re-inventing the wheel, but screw it, I want my product to just work...

As it turns out, H.264 and other codecs have patented such obvious solutions that my "clean room, from scratch, never have looked at any other codec source" code infringes upon H.264 patents...

It would be great to just say, "Hey, I wrote all this code myself, it just works, everyone can use it for free", unfortunately, patents prevent me from doing so.

Don't blame the developers. The users aren't willing to foot the legal bills and chance getting sued by Apple, MPEG-LA, etc, neither am I. Software Patent's Suck!

Re:I wish..

[mcgrew]

It's not the developers, it's the corporations that the developers work for that are playing politics.

Re:I wish..

[BitZtream]

Yea, its not like the money Mozilla makes from google and other advertising that they couldn't spend a little bit of that on a license for the codec or anything.

Don't confuse personal agenda and bullshit about why someone is/isn't doing something with reality.

H.264 is dirt cheap, they most certainly could work out a licensing deal to suit Mozilla.

There is no doubt in my mind that doing so would be about 6 billion orders of magnitude more productive than most of their other retarded projects. Tell the CEO of your fanboy club to cut his bonus this year and you'll pay for h.264 licensing for the next 20 years.

Re:I wish..

[Alrescha]

That link has been superseded, in that free H.264 on the Internet is free in perpetuity, not until 2014:

http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/mpeg-la-announces-no-royalties-on-free-internet-videos---ever.html

A.

Re:I wish..

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox would violate the GPL if they provided actual h.264 support in any manner other than a user-addable plugin for it. Simply put, they're going to HAVE to find some other way- because that quote you're referring to is not in perpetuity, places restrictions on the code using it that the GPL doesn't allow, and quite simply can change at any time. Not a good answer to rely upon there.

Re:I wish..

[Celarent Darii]

Just curious, what is your program and how did you reinvent the wheel ?

Having done some programing in video, encoding is not all that evident. I would be interested in seeing the source code.

Re:I wish..

[rjstanford]

Serious question - why not just use the OS libraries, available on all major platforms, supporting every single codec the users already have installed and not supporting the ones that they don't have installed? Using a subsystem is not quite the same as seeing if a random shared library is on the machine somewhere, after all.

Re:I wish..

[Pi1grim]

I'd rather have them spend the money on something usefull. Even if they buy the license, they will not be able to transfer it to any other products, that will be based on mozilla.

Re:I wish..

[rjstanford]

Firefox would violate the GPL if they provided actual h.264 support in any manner other than a user-addable plugin for it. Simply put, they're going to HAVE to find some other way- because that quote you're referring to is not in perpetuity, places restrictions on the code using it that the GPL doesn't allow, and quite simply can change at any time. Not a good answer to rely upon there.

You mean like installing the codecs already on my machine and exposed by my OS's graphics subsystem? Nah... that'd never work. Next thing you know, they'd be using the OS to print documents, too.

Re:I wish..

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Even if they spend the money it still would not be legal. Since GPL requires that others have redistribution rights, and patent licenses violate that. Its not just the fee, its what you have to sign to pay the fee.

Re:I wish..

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Its only free in the sense that you don't pay to stream it to someone under specific conditions. You still have to pay for encoders and decoders.

Re:I wish..

[Shikaku]

Honestly, if they can change the time back to when someone would have to pay even if it never comes, they probably would backpedal and charge say right now if there's billions of dollars worth of money they are missing out on. I wouldn't put it past anyone simply because of human nature.

Re:I wish..

[BitZtream]

Okay, so they buy a license for 'web browser plugin to support h264' instead of firefox.

Its just another plugin, its own separate product that other browsers are welcome to use as well.

This isn't rocket science really, its not even new. Hell, on my systems all it has to do is allow the use of any native video codec and it'll work. I already HAVE NATIVE h.264 encoders with my OS or as products I bought on the side.

Re:I wish..

[Alrescha]

"You still have to pay for encoders and decoders."

True, which costs me ~$0.10 per device that I purchase. That is nothing to pay for best video codec available to me.

A.

Re:I wish..

[Draek]

Agreed, pity Apple decided to pull their little political stunt with the W3C last year rather than just deliver a working Theora codec (or just bundle the Free one) and calling it a day, we could've avoided this whole mess from the start.

Re:I wish..

[Anonymous Coward]

Developers are also to blame when the UX sucks so bad that people give up when reading installation instructions. When I download something for my business, I do not want to spend time hoping that it will find the right libraries, and if not spend hours trying to tweak it (almost guaranteed to happen IMHO). Dependency hell is called that for a reason. Fine, the OP may be a poor programmer, but at least he/she's realised that a lot of folk don't want to mess around.

Re:I wish..

[h4rr4r]

And how much for a license for unlimited copies and redistribution?

Re:I wish..

[TheTurtlesMoves]

And how much for a license for unlimited copies and redistribution?

QFT

Its not just the fee. Its the licenses conditions you have to agree to pay the fee.

Re:I wish..

[__aailob1448]

For the video conference feature I chose to write my own codec to avoid all these "politics", sure, it's re-inventing the wheel, but screw it, I want my product to just work...

You're joking, right? Please tell me you are joking and not insane!

Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

For good or ill, this is Mozilla's fault.

Mozilla were the first ones to take a stand, even when theora was the best free option. Opera agreed and followed suit. It's only afterwards, now that Google has proven WebM code and hardware available that they are growing a pair also.

I think in the short term this will push many sites back to flash video, in the medium term it will be good for the web, and in the long term patents don't matter, so H.264 is probably a better choice.

How you feel about this greatly depends on the timeframe you reference...

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[Anonymous Coward]

All video sides I know of still do largely, if not solely, Flash video. Of course, I'm using Firefox, so this may be why I'm seeing it this way.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[calebpburns]

Mozilla is not to blame here. Firefox cannot support the H.264 codec legally in patent encumbered countries without licensing it. Licensing H.264 is royalty free at the moment but it expires in 2016 and the future fees associated with it have not been disclosed. A non-profit organization such as Mozilla cannot hope to spend as much on licensing fees as Apple or Microsoft. So it is simply not viable for Firefox to support H.264.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[Celarent Darii]

Going back to flash good for the web?

Making all sites return to a proprietary solution when there is an open standard already existing ?

BTW H.264 is run by a standards comittee, not just one company. WebM is owned entirely by Google.

Google wants to be the new flash.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

Strangely enough, Flash manages in a free product.

Mozilla could afford the licensing fees, but they don't wish to. They can't pass on their license to other Mozilla partners like linux distros who build their own packages, and think it's worth either the monetary cost or the cost to the ecosystem.

http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/

They estimate it would cost $5mil, and they had revenues of $104 mil in 2009. They could afford it if they deemed it necessary.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/annualreport/2009/sustainability.html

BTW, I think Mozilla, opera, and now Google did the right thing for the web ecosystem, as I have the mid-term view in mind. I just think it's worth examining the likely outcome in the short term and long term also..

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

If my post wasn't clear, I think the short term outcome of not supporting H.264 in HTML5 is bad for the web, in the medium term it is good for the web, and in the long term it is neutral to slightly bad.

I'm mostly trying to have people consider that things can be bad for a time and still be good overall, and perhaps that this is even the most common case in legal matters. Also I wish to help people make their arguments about this topic more clear by naming and focusing on the timeframe they think is important.

H.264 is an open but not free standard. The patent grant is both costly and non-transitive. WebM is a closed standard, with a libre and transitive license and patent grant and libre reference implementation.

H.264 High Profile is without question technically superior, but WebM should be able to come near to the quality of H.264 Main Profile.

That's a whole lot of trade-offs to consider, and I fully suspect that others will disagree with me on whether this is a good thing or not in any particular time frame. Personally, I think Mozilla, Opera, and now Google are doing the right thing in terms of both programmer and end user freedom for video on the web.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[maxwell demon]

Strangely enough, Flash manages in a free product.

Adobe's Flash player isn't Free in the sense of Free Software. Flash just doesn't cost the end-user anything.

Mozilla could afford the licensing fees, but they don't wish to.

If they included it in their browser, they'd either violate the patent licensing conditions, or the code licensing conditions.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

Strangely enough, Flash manages in a free product.

Adobe's Flash player isn't Free in the sense of Free Software. Flash just doesn't cost the end-user anything.

Flash is a free product, just not a Free or libre one. RMS does not define the word free.

If they included it in their browser, they'd either violate the patent licensing conditions, or the code licensing conditions.

Source?
They could have decided to provide it linked in their official downloads, but not in the free version, much like Google did with Chome(included H.264) and Chromium(did not). They just decided that was the wrong thing to do from the perspective of freedom on the web.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Mozilla cannot legally include h.264. Its the law. How can that be their fault?

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

[citation needed]

Mozilla could certainly license H.264 and distribute Mozilla binaries with H.264 if they chose too, they just couldn't do it under their current tri-license stream.

Currently, Chrome ships with H.264, but the open source Chromium does not.

Mozilla could do a similar thing, they just don't think it fits their project goals, and would harm projects like Wikipedia and downstreams like Linux distributions who would like to rebuild from source themselves.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[Celarent Darii]

If "Freedom" means surfing to 15 different websites to download and install yet another plugin then that is an enormous step backwards. The web should just work without these hassels - go to an address and get your content. The plug-in installing is also a big step backwards as far as the security of the net is - you have more and more users using outdated and insecure software, installing stuff they don't necessarily understand except to see something and I think we can see that this is just a disaster ready to blow up.

What this is doing is simply fragmenting the video codec space for absolutely no positive gain. No developer is going to waste time coding for another codec when flash already supports all their needs and it is more ubiquitous than WebM will ever be. So in the end everyone just codes it in flash like before as getting another tool to make video just isn't worth the effort, especially since it is technically inferior.

Also WebM is a completely closed standard which means you depend entirely on the good will of Google. They could very well decide tomorrow that your video streams now have to support an advertisement stream or be prepadded with extraneous "enhancements for the user experience" like we have seen happen with flash.

Plus the odds of hardware support for a closed standard is pretty close to nil. This is why we don't see video cards with hardware support for flash, but plenty with hardware h264 decoding. This means that thanks to this your computer will now be dog-slow like with flash.

"should come near to the quality" is fundamentally a step backward as it is not superior.

The only thing this has done for me is to remove Chrome from my computer. The information gathering tactics of Google and now this shows that they only have the intention of dominating the internet, firstly by data mining and now by controlling even the codec video is placed in.

Completely nasty move on their part. They claim they want freedom - but only if it is theirs.

A more reasonable approach would simply open the video tag api to allow for the OS to render the video portions, and then the whole licence problems would devolve to the OS and not to the browser itself. All major OS's have support for h264 out of the box - even Linux via x264.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

H.264 is an open but not free standard. The patent grant is both costly and non-transitive. WebM is a closed standard, with a libre and transitive license and patent grant and libre reference implementation.

Also, remember Theora is still available in multiple browsers, and other codecs will appear in the future. A vote against H.264 is not necessarily a vote for WebM, though it is probably the best choice at the moment.

No hardware support you say? Hardware rendering of WebM in soon to be shipped hardware was shown at CES:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html

I know of no linux that has x264 out of the box. In many countries, it's illegal to use x264 without paying licensing fees, as all encoders and decoders require licenses. Today there are 3 legal ways to play H.264 on Ubuntu in the USA: the Flash player, and http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-plugins/ and Google Chrome.

Freedom is freedom for innovation. You want to build a new video software application or hardware device with H.264? Time to pay the piper. And the piper doesn't sell 10 packs of licenses.

You want to charge for video on the web? You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes.

With most video cameras that support H.264, you're breaking the law if you use them for commercial purposes. http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA

We need a free format for video to be widely supported. What would have happened to the web if you had to buy a patent license to create commercial content, servers, or browsers? It would have a few thousand users probably.

Innovation matters. Don't burden the future with what might make sense today.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

Let me clarify, as my statement isn't clear:

I think in the short term this will push many sites back to flash video, in the medium term it will be good for the web, and in the long term patents don't matter, so H.264 is probably a better choice *from that perspective*.

I support dropping H.264 as a good move, as innovation matters, and patented H.264 will stifle innovation. Pushing everyone to support non-patented WebM/theora/Dirac/etc as an option at least is the best move.. Unfortunately the only way to make that a viable option is to drop support for H.264. Otherwise MS and Apple are unlikely to ever support non-H.264 codecs.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[Celarent Darii]

"You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes."

This simply isn't true. People make h264 movies (your phone uses this format) and upload them to youtube and have been doing so for at least 6 years.

You only need a license fee if you are produce content to sell, and usually it only concerns units of 10,000 or more.

In any case the idea that WebM is free of patents is also questionable.

It's not innovation because it isn't doing anything better, nor improving anything in any measurable way. Rather it is destroying what progress had been made in unifying video formats.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[spinkham]

Read the whole thing again:

You want to charge for video on the web? You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes.

Yes, you have noise about threat of patent for Theora for over 6 years(still no action), and WebM for 7 months (no action).. What we have is FUD against 2 probably open standards vs 1 definitely patented one.

And once again:

Also, remember Theora is still available in multiple browsers, and other codecs will appear in the future. A vote against H.264 is not necessarily a vote for WebM, though it is probably the best choice at the moment.

This is MUCH broader than just H.264 VS WebM. I can legally do whatever I want with WebM, Theora, and Dirac today. If I break the H.264 patent agreement I get willful infringement charges, with WebM it would be much lower normal infringement charges *if* patents ever are asserted.

Formats will come and go, but we have one chance to push for open vs closed ecosystem.. The Internet is a great argument for open, remember AOL and compuserve was once better also..

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[BZ]

> Mozilla were the first ones to take a stand,

1) Not quite. Opera actually took their no-H.264 stand first.
2) Apple took a no-Theora stand at the same time as Mozilla took a no-H.264 stand, iirc. That discussion took course over just a few days over email, so the timing of who was "first" is more related to when people checked their inbox than anything else.

Of course Apple's no-WebM stand postdates all of the above, since WebM wasn't around at the time.

Re:Don't blame Google, Blame Mozilla.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

No they can't. There is no price that MPEG-LA will permit redistribution. Period (if they did then that would be the only license fee they would collect as anyone who wanted the codec could just download FF etc). Thus any patent license they can get is a violation of the GPL and Mozilla license. This is well known. You can't be legally compliant of both patents and the GPL on this one.

Mozilla and FF cannot have a closed source version (aka a binary version thats different) without a total rewrite, as this would violate the copyright of many contributors.

So to sum it all up...

[Anonymous Coward]

To sum it all up: Because nobody can play nice with their patents and their licenses HTML 5 video will still be "oh, work on machine x but not on machine y". And this was supposed to be a panacea for apps, video and everything. Except now it isn't. This is why we can't have nice things.

You want hardware accelerated video? Use h.264 and it will work swell on Safari on Mac and IE on Windows.

You want something that will target ALL machines? Use WebM, but make sure you have your users install some plug-ins or Codecs on the most popular operating systems. Oh, and for mobile? yeah - don't use WebM.

What a mess we are making of this stuff.

Good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Free standards are better for everyone, they don't need expensive licensing, they're freely usable from everyone and they don't need closed-source codecs. You will have to simply convert your video to ogg/theora instead of H.264. I think this is good.

Ah, Baloney

[Anonymous Coward]

Gruber gets to the root and calls BS:

"Regarding Google’s stated explanation for dropping H.264 support in Chrome:
Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give content publishers and developers using HTML an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their sites.
In addition to supporting H.264, Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin. If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why?
Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”? If not, why not?
Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM? If not, how will Chrome users watch this content other than by resorting to Flash Player’s support for H.264 playback?
Who is happy about this?"

Re:Ah, Baloney

[DragonWriter]

In addition to supporting H.264, Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin. If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well?

Probably, just not today.

Most places that provide H.264 provide a Flash-container fallback for H.264 encoded video. Moving H.264 support out of the core browsers video tag support and bundling Flash means that, as long as H.264 is relevant, Chrome users have support via Flash -- which while bundled by Google is maintained by Adobe -- but maintaining H.264 support is no longer a cost Google has to bear, and once HTML5-based video and web-apps have reached critical mass, Google can strip down the Chrome distribution by dumping bundled-in Flash.

Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?

Probably eventually (perhaps after the merger with Chrome OS that Google has announced is in the cards for Android in the future), but the balancing for Android is different than that for Chrome.

YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if, like Chrome, YouTube eventually went to WebM via HTML5 video + H.264 via Flash wrapper, and then later to WEbM only.

Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM?

AFAIK, those all use plugin-based players (Silverlight, specifically, for all of them, I think) rather than HTML5 video for DRM reasons, and therefore changes in browser support for codecs in the HTML5 video tag have no effect on those services.

Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[Tomsk70]

...how many desktops use opera as their browser again?

It's bizarre - they all seem to think that decisions like this will simply be followed by the users, when the reality will be a) find a plugin, or b) go get a browser that does it already. Like IE9 :-)

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[kanto]

...how many desktops use opera as their browser again?

It's bizarre - they all seem to think that decisions like this will simply be followed by the users, when the reality will be a) find a plugin, or b) go get a browser that does it already. Like IE9 :-)

Please add Firefox and Chrome users to the tally. I personally don't care what the codec of choice will be, but from watching the long and miserable existence of Flash as a whole I appreciate having diversity and genuinely free software.

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[Tomsk70]

It bothers me - this isn't some codec that's up'n'coming, it's something that's in use *right now*, and it isn't some buggy app like Flash.

It reminds me of Open Office - 'hey, let's set the default format to something that *no-one uses* - oh, why has our userbase not exploded?'

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[kanto]

It bothers me - this isn't some codec that's up'n'coming, it's something that's in use *right now*, and it isn't some buggy app like Flash.

It reminds me of Open Office - 'hey, let's set the default format to something that *no-one uses* - oh, why has our userbase not exploded?'

Well, H264 isn't the first codec and won't be the last; I'd prefer everything just working without a hitch, but it's less likely to happen when device makers have to pay license fees to add support for codecs or contrainers. And what, Open Office should've used something outdated or a closed proprietary format?

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[Tomsk70]

Well, what's the most popular word processor in the world? That might be a good place to start - if you want your alternative to have any sort of chance.

OS, Proprietary...it makes no difference if everyone is *already using it* - Otherwise you may as well bitch about NTFS and the like. Working in the industry, you tend to define 'standard' as what everyone is actually already using, not what someone has decided would be best on your behalf. If it were that simple, I'd have everyone on Amiga's and we'd be getting the same work done with a tenth the memory and storage use. Sure, you can *steer* the likes of MS towards one technology or another, but writing apps that simply ignore them is usually commercial suicide.

Chrome with it's IE-plugin is the right sort of approach - introduce people to something new without insisting they abandon what they're using now.

It's a shame everyone's waited twenty years to start pretending MS/ Windows doesn't exist, and it's hugely ironic that everyone's so FF-friendly when it was their parent company that ensured everyone moved onto IE in the first place by deciding that we all wouldn't mind paying £30 a pop for Netscape.

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[kanto]

You maybe onto something, I too once thought of creating a program to be downloaded free of charge by millions and instead of reinventing the wheel I thought i'd just reverse-engineer and copy-paste someone else's work quite sure that I'd never be sued/billed for infringement/use of copyright, patents or otherwise. OO btw is doing okay... well, by my standards at least.

What is the reason to coddle people who have been stuck using inferior stuff e.g. IE? The chrome plugin is more of a developer quirk and a workaround for people who have to use older IE's, not really a sane solution for anyone else. Let's not pretend that for most users there's something about IE that's missing from everything else and that transferring bookmarks would be that much of a hassle.

Unfortunate for Netscape, they didn't come with a somewhat expensive OS and the internet wasn't the huge marketplace it is now, yet they gave IE a run for their money. Thanks though for SSL and javascript, one I love and the other I somewhat loathe.

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[Tomsk70]

You don't *have* to copy & paste code just to get something to save in a format - plenty of non-MS apps already save stuff in .doc format.

And with browsers, there's no pretending - if you run Exchange (which a huge number of sites do), and you users want to use Outlook Web Acces (which they always do), it's IE-only if you want all the features to work. Instantly, any other browser is pointless.

After that, you're then trying to justify supporting two browsers, two sets of patches, two sets of Internet/ Intranet 'zones', two sets of GPO's (which FF sort of supports, but the others don't - so no corporate control, another deal-breaker). Home users can switch between these apps in an instant, whereas corps are more like a huge truck - it takes ages to turn, to the point where it *really* has to be worth turning...and usually it isn't.

Or how about the chairman trick? Show your chairman how the FF his son loaded for him allows you to show all the passwords in English with two clicks. *By default*. Queue lots of spluttering from the chairman - now image in IE was that exposed out of the box...Gates would have been stoned to death.

As for open office, last year I read their CEO claiming a userbase based on the *number of downloads*, "which means lots of people must be using it" (Ri-ight). And for any serious-size company, the amount of integration with Access (as a front end), Outlook (because of Exchange) and Word (forms, etc.), OneNote, not to mention training people means that OO has never really been a serious contender. MS Office has been king for twenty years because there just isn't anything else as good or as integrated.

And you'll need to define 'somewhat expensive OS' - compare Windows 95 to Windows 7, and look at a) how much software now comes free (AV, Antispam, defrag etc.) then look at home much 95 used to cost compared to Win7 x64 costing £100 - I don't call that expensive. I do wish that the linux crowd had spent more time coming up with working alternatives instead of (for instance) bleating about how AD was just LDAP with bells on.

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[kanto]

I'm not a lawyer, but I think that not everything in the office doc-formats is inherently free - MS will have patents to implementations and I doubt they've waived all of them. We come back to using outdated/restricted stuff vs. truly opensource and free.

Corporations using exchange and having to go 100% Windows because of it, meh, why not. Should this force everyone else to do the same? No.

FF passwords; yeah, it's better to lie to users that their passwords are absolutely safe in the registry where no one can find them or that autocomplete equals secure because you can't see the password. Default settings are rarely safe, they're mostly expedient. I don't use FF, don't know if there's a way to set password protect them?

On the OS comment; IE has MS, MS has Windows, Windows means revenue and control which were lacking from Netscape.

Re:Wow, well if Opera thinks it's cool...

[Tomsk70]

This is what's odd - everyone's keen to jump on/ fine MS for ther likes of IE and WMP, but .doc format? No one even whispers. NTFS file system? Not a peep. Which is mad - to me these things are far more in the realm of 'should be accessible by all'.

You're right - everyone else *shouldn't* have to use what corps do, but it's nearly always corps that drive this sort of thing, and as a result most non-tech people are keen to use what will get them a job, not what the 'standard' is.

FF passwords - most users don't even know what the registry *is*. Alternatively, *any* user can find their way to the password list. And a properly set up Windows domain won't let you see the autocomplete files and won't save *any* passwords - but that's IE's fault; they made it open assuming everyone would lock it down, when the only people who actually do that are corp-employed domain admins. Then everyone jumps around shouting about how unsafe IE is - why don't they do the same with FF? Why does no-one point out that allowing updates *every time you start the browser* might not be for the best? I'll certainly knock MS when they deserve it, but it grates that other co's do the same and no-one says squat. Don't even get me started on Apple.

As an aside - I love Slashdot! Most of my comments are usually based in reality and experience - the way things are, as opposed to the way I wish they were. It's usually the only way to find a workable way forward.

As a result, I've never had a comment with a score higher than 1. Which made me move to reddit, where at least you can press people to *justify* the downvote.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

No more h.264?

[jonescb]

Since Gentoo only provides Chromium, I haven't had built in support for h.264. I don't miss it. 99% of the videos I watch are on Youtube which is obviously owned by Google. If Chrome will only support WebM then so will >90% of the online video market (Youtube alone).

Re:No more h.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the non-porn online video market, surely?

Re:No more h.264?

[lingon]

However, the porn industry have always been the first to adopt new, free and open standards so my guess is that it's 90% of both :)

Re:No more h.264?

[maxwell demon]

Given that Apple holds some h.264 patents, I'd not be surprised if at some time the fine print said you may not use the codec to encode porn ...

Re:No more h.264?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is where the real power in Google's decision lies, IMO.

If most of the videos (YouTube) are in WebM format, and all market entrants CAN support that format (Open Spec, Open Source, no royalties) then this is a major coup for WebM and open source.

Dial-up stuck? Don't think so!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dialup, or rather data transmission using antique crappy copper wires buried haphazardly in the ground and left to corrode, is doing just fine. Or did you think ADSL/VDSL is somehow not using the same copper wires?

I'm not sure if we are approaching Nyquist or Shannon, but currently I get 40Mbit down / 4 Mbit up easily. And, get this, I can even call on the same line at the same time.

I wouldn't call that stuck, would you?

Re:What browser will support them all?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

According to this article IE and Safari, through plugins, eventually.

This will cause flash to win in the end.

[ZorinLynx]

In the end, the only format that's going to universally work on all browsers for video is flash. So flash is going to come out on top (or stay on top), and the industry as a whole will lose.

We need everyone to agree on one codec and STICK WITH IT. This sort of flapping around is going to mean that no one codec is ever going to be adopted, and flash will remain the standard because that's the only one that works on most devices.

Re:This will cause flash to win in the end.

[Spad]

I'm sorry, I must have misheard that; did you just say that Flash works, universally, on all browsers?

Re:This will cause flash to win in the end.

[petermgreen]

We need everyone to agree on one codec
Unfortunately that is simply not likely to happen :(

Mozilla can't implement h.264 without both paying quite a lot of money and more importantly violating the core principles of being an opensource project and they refuse to use OS level implementations because they believe in consistency across platforms.

Apple and nokia refused to implment theora claiming submarine patent risks. Whether that was the real reason or whether the real reason was a vested interest in pushing h.264 remains unclear.

IIRC MS has been sitting on the h.264 side as well though i'm not sure of their reasons.

Google has brought VP8 along as a third option but so far they don't seem to be doing a very good job of bringing the likes of apple arround to it.

I think the only way this will truely be solved is when the patents on h.264 expire :(

In the news today...

[Quiet_Desperation]

...companies brag about dropping features or touting ones they never had.

Re:In the news today...

[Ant P.]

It's a misfeature, like how HTML5 at one point declared "--" in the middle of a comment verboten. Encouraging people to use a format scheduled for patent-litigation genocide against end users in only 5 years is ridiculous.

Compromise

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The problem here is that multiple parties all have valid conflicts of interest, but lack of standardization hurts us all. Here's how:

• Fragmentation promotes Flash which leaves us all stuck with a single vendor proprietary solution that will have poor security and performance.
• Browser promoting WebM means everyone with an existing mobile device and many people with mobile devices being made for some number of years going forward will lack hardware support for that format, resulting in crappy battery life.
• Companies that provide video now will have to translate large portions of their catalog, which means some video will simply go away (as that will be cheaper) and everyone will incur expense that no one wants.

So, can the big parties come together and create a compromise that will help everyone, or are they more interested in hurting one another than in helping consumers? Here's what I propose. All major browser/OS vendors commit to h264 support for a period of six years, then agree to remove said support; as part of the HTML5 transition. After six years, all browser vendors agree to support WebM. This gives content providers a plan going forward and gives companies that make cell phone chipsets time to integrate hardware support for WebM and for phone makers to incorporate those chips in their designs. People with six year old phones would still have shitty battery life at that point, but I suspect that will be well past the lifespan of a smartphone.

This won't change much in the "big picture" ....

[King_TJ]

Maybe the Linux community will see this as a more important change than most people, due to their software options. (Obviously, Linux users aren't huge Internet Explorer users, nor do they use Safari browser as a rule. They're also more likely than others to use a version of the Opera browser.) But all in all? Apple was just recently pushing H.264 as one of their preferred codecs, so it'd be crazy for them to go along with pulling it from Safari. (Didn't they just recently convince YouTube to convert a whole bunch of former Flash based videos to H.264 format?)

I don't think Google Chrome has exactly taken the world by storm either, so their failure to support a popular codec like H.264 will just serve to further relegate the product to "niche use only". This would have MUCH more impact if FireFox was going to pull support for it, instead of Chrome doing so.

Ads, ads, ads

[mveloso]

By controlling the codec, Google can design it so they can insert ads into the video stream more easily.

This isn't about open, unless open = more money for google.

Remember when computers did stuff

[holophrastic]

I remember the days when computers had these things called codecs, and you could simply add support for just about any format. No one ever removed functionality, it was all about adding support for more and more formats.

Re:Remember when computers did stuff

[TheTurtlesMoves]

But are you willing to pay for it?

Re:Remember when computers did stuff

[holophrastic]

Yes. And that's why I buy Windows -- so my computer actually does what computers do.

Re:Remember when computers did stuff

[TheTurtlesMoves]

So does mine... I do work on my computer.

Re:This won't change much in the "big picture" ...

[Merk42]

This would have MUCH more impact if FireFox was going to pull support for it, instead of Chrome doing so.

Firefox doesn't support it in the first place.

Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp it.

[wazzzup]

JPEG, GIF and MP3 all have/had encumbered with licenses yet they are still to this day, web standards. I never hear anyone complain about seeing JPEG's on their web page be it web developer or end user. It's only an issue to people who place ideals over practicality. People are listening to billions of AAC and MP3 files on a daily basis without complaint (and with hardware support).

Which leads me to the next point. What practical reason do I have for wanting h.264 support in a browser? Because I get hardware-based decoding with h.264. It saves my battery time and leaves my CPU free to do other more important tasks. With WebM or Theora I get software decoding and thus a less responsive machine with a shorter battery life.

Perhaps most importantly, the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media. Given Theora's performance compared to WebM and h.264, I certainly hope Ogg isn't responsible for pushing r&d into codecs for the future. Open source is great. I use it every day and can't imagine how much more difficult computing would be without it but the great bulk of its work has been with reproducing free/open versions of existing products and paradigms, not at pushing the boundaries of research and development.

You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?

How high is the sky?

[westlake]

Is h.264 really that big?

A search of Google Shopping returns about 67,900 hits for "H.264."

The H.264 camcorder ranges from the $150 "Flip" to the $21,000 Panasonic AG-3DA1 which records 1080/60i 3D to two 32 GB SSDs.

H.264 is supported by your HDTV. Your Blu-Ray player. It is deeply entrenched in theatrical production, home video, broadcast, cable and satellite distribution, medical, industrial and security applications. Towards Diagnostically Robust Medical Ultrasound Video Streaming using H.264

Re:How high is the sky?

[Quick Reply]

All whilst all those royalties are flowing to MPEG LA for everything that we do.

Re:How high is the sky?

[nabsltd]

H.264 is supported by your HDTV.

Most HDTVs do not natively decode H.264 (or even H.263), but instead just display raw video that has been decoded by some other device.

HDTVs with built-in tuners do natively decode MPEG-2, and there are a few that decode MPEG-4 of some flavor, but they are in the minority.

Re:This won't change much in the "big picture" ...

[Avenger_Mullah]

This would have MUCH more impact if FireFox was going to pull support for it, instead of Chrome doing so.

Firefox never had support for H.264 in the first place

Very good

[devent]

At least now we have some what of a chance to have an open web without any plugins. Gif, Jpget and Png are already free and now since over half the web browsers (Chrome have 10%, Firefox have 40%, Opera have 5% [or some what in that region]) won't support H264 the web sites have to use either Ogg or WebM at least as a second option. But since you have to convert your movies either to Ogg or WebM anyway and you don't need to pay license fees with the two, web sites are good to use just Ogg or WebM and just leave H264 in the dust. Hurray for Google. Now if Google would drop Flash for Youtube (after FF and IE support the new video tag) and make WebM the only codec for Youtube we could say bye bye H264 and welcome to open web.

Opera, the follower.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every single time any web browser makes any decision, you always hear Opera chiming in behind them.
Back when everyone was making a big fuss about flash vs html 5, as soon as someone picked a side (I believe it was apple with its safari, can't recall), what did Opera do?
"OH, ME TOO!"
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't give a lick what these followers think.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[denis-The-menace]

png: Created because of licenses/patents on Jpeg and GIF

Ogg: Created because of licenses/patents on MP3

The only reason you have hardware-based decoding with h.264 is because Intel/AMD/Nvidia were ask/told/paid to do so.
If someone adds WebM hardware-based decoding, people will flock to it.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[lingon]

You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?

Because when Microsoft fragmented the web, they reimplemented open and free standards, threw in a bunch of their on stuff in them an then forbade everyone else from using it unless they were using Microsoft products. When Mozilla and Google are fragmenting the web, it's about taking proprietary, patent encumbered, closed standards and opening them up enabling free innovation. That's why.

People are missing the other side of this.

[brunes69]

People are really glossing over the IMPORTANT side of this decision - YouTube.

YouTube is by far the largest source of online video on the web, and it is owned by Google. Until now, YouTube's HTML5 version used H.264 encoding. By dropping H.264 from Chrome, Google would in effect be making YouTube incompatible with their own browser. They are not going to do that.

What this points to, is YouTube is very likely to switch to WebM itself for HTML 5 video in the near future. This has HUGE ramifications since IE 9 is not slated to support Web-M - which would mean IE 9 would not work with HTML 5 YouTube, while every other browser did.

This may be the actual whole reason behind this decision - to indirectly force Microsoft's hand in supporting open video in IE.

Re:People are missing the other side of this.

[digsbo]

Good point. Will the new tablet and phone OS flavors from Microsoft run non-IE browsers? If not, no one will buy them. Why have a tablet you can't watch YouTube with?

Re:People are missing the other side of this.

[ergo98]

This has HUGE ramifications since IE 9 is not slated to support Web-M - which would mean IE 9 would not work with HTML 5 YouTube, while every other browser did.

IE supports plug-ins. Adding a Web-M plug-in is non-difficult, and really I wouldn't be surprised to see Google themselves provide one.

Re:People are missing the other side of this.

[riskeetee]

YouTube isn't going to switch. They'll re-encode every video and serve up H.264 for the clients who support that, and WebM for the rest. And Flash versions for the ones that don't support the video tag. We have some videos on our site, and we encoded them only in H.264 because the iPad/iPhone support was our main concern. We use a Flash-based viewer for Firefox and other browsers that don't support H.264. Why? We're not going to encode and store different versions of our content. It's a PITA, and with our current solution we support 99% of the users.

Re:People are missing the other side of this.

[digsbo]

You're right, but you may be missing something. When Android is the dominant mobile OS, content providers will see WebM as the "must-have" and H.264 for iOS devices as what they begrudgingly do for backward compatibility with the minority of the market.

Re:People are missing the other side of this.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

YouTube supports Flash and will almost certainly continue to do so to reach IE users.If they move away from it, it will only be after they implement Chrome plugin or a WebM plugin. Also, youtube is not going to abandon iPhones. Both markets are simply too big and would give too much market share to alternative sites. MS, in particular, still has more leverage and benefits more by breaking compatibility unless MS is getting really worried about Adobe; and lets face it, they're the real winners here.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[CharlyFoxtrot]

png: Created because of licenses/patents on Jpeg and GIF

Ogg: Created because of licenses/patents on MP3

Both wildly successfull, huh ? I guess you see PNG used these days but how long did it take to become moderately popular and today does your camera save PNG's or still those nasty encumbered JPG's ?

The only reason you have hardware-based decoding with h.264 is because Intel/AMD/Nvidia were ask/told/paid to do so.
If someone adds WebM hardware-based decoding, people will flock to it.

Everyone is already buying h.264 hardware. It has been tested, it's cheaper 'cause everybody already buys it and it offers compatibility with already available content. Do you think they'll flock to hardware they'll have to support in addition to existing hardware (for backwards compatibility reasons) with all software development and testing costs that entails ?

Why should your browser support ASCII?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should your browser support ASCII? How about JPEG. Or GIF. Or ...

Because you still have the problem that your browser cannot display the content. It has to communicate with the OS to do so in ways that are NOT standard.

Oh, and your OS would then need to pay the patent royalty.

(PS: your OS having a display license still means you can't upload your content in H264 if you are not given ANOTHER license to do so. Even Camcorders which license it don't allow you to do that).

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Joehonkie]

Ogg Vorbis is pretty common standard for video game audio because you don't have to pay royalties for implementation. So in that way it's pretty damn successful. Speex (their voice chat codec) is also fairly commonly used for VoIP, presumably for the same reason.

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

Make WebM work, and we're in business.
Otherwise keep your dodgy "free" standard that is open but useless.

Flash okay but H.264 is the vendor-locked one?

[djabbour]

Isn't it a bit hypocritical that Google adds Flash support to Chrome and then decides to remove H.264, claiming it wants to support "open formats?" This is crazy. Give users a choice, and support the more popular format.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[maxwell demon]

Both wildly successfull, huh ? I guess you see PNG used these days but how long did it take to become moderately popular and today does your camera save PNG's or still those nasty encumbered JPG's ?

Actually, contrary to what the parent poster claimed, PNG was only designed to replace GIF. It doesn't have lossy compression like JPEG. Which also explains why your camera saves JPEG. You wouldn't get as many PNGs (or GIFs, for that matter) on the chip.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[TheTurtlesMoves]

JPEG has always had a royalty free version. Always. Pretty much the *only* version of the spec that is used.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[jez9999]

You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?

I always said they should've specified a baseline codec in the HTML5 standard that had to be supported for the video tag. At least then there would be ONE thing that people had to support or be called out as breaking the standard.

Talk about conflict of interests

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, yay for google, they are getting rid of the patent encumbered H.264. Now, when will they get rid of the proprietary and probably patente encumbered flash to really support HTML5?

Re:What browser will support them all?

[marcosdumay]

Any browser can support both through plugins.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Anonymous Coward]

> Which leads me to the next point. What practical reason do I have for wanting h.264 support in a browser? Because I get hardware-based decoding with h.264. It saves my battery time and leaves my CPU free to do other more important tasks. With WebM or Theora I get software decoding and thus a less responsive machine with a shorter battery life.

RockChip support WebM decoding in hardware.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Draek]

You do know Theora was part of the official HTML5 standard until Apple raised a bitchfest of epic proportions to usurp it for their own gain, right?

It's not Mozilla and Google who are getting a 'free pass' here, they're just trying to fix the mess Apple created.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Random BedHead Ed]

You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?

We complained about Microsoft because they were using their browser development and bundling to make the Web as proprietary as possible - specifically, they were trying to make it hard for web designers to build services for anything that wasn't Internet Explorer and ActiveX. Complaints about H.264 are consistent with, not contrary to, the gripes many of us had with Microsoft when they were trashing the Web. Google, Opera and Mozilla are doing the right thing here because H.264, unlike XML and JavaScript, is proprietary. The Web always gets better when open standards gain wider acceptance (think RSS, Ajax, and RSA encryption). Video will be no different.

MP3 showing age

[electrosoccertux]

MP3 is seriously showing its age at lower bitrates. 96kbps AAC+ and Ogg both sound MUCH better than 128kbps MP3 in my opinion. They have an analog falloff for the information that couldn't make the bitrate, so they sound much more natural to our ears. I can pick out the harsh harmonics from low bitrate 128kbps MP3 streams from shoutcast and icecast very easily.

I was always happy with MP3, and am for >192kbps, but the alternatives sound much better below this.

Re:MP3 showing age

[hitmark]

While true, the increase in storage and bandwidth have made the argument basically moot.

MP3 was heaven back on dialup when a single song could take perhaps half an hour. But now? The whole of metallica can be on the drive in 256 (or higher, if your really serious) in minutes depending on the number of sources and your own connection. And even that will not take up much space on anything but the cheapest throw away device.

And that is on top of "good enough" and utility. Big media already tried higher bit rate formats on audio and it basically flopped. How many owns a audio dvd? The only thing that format offered vs CD was higher bitrate. The same number of tracks and no extra features (at least none that seemed to matter). This compared to going from LP or cassette where the CD offered the real benefit of getting to the wanted track instantly. insert disc, press number, boom. And DVD offered something similar vs VHS, not having to rewind after a viewing, ever again. This on top of instant skip to scene and such. What do blu-ray bring to that?

Re:MP3 showing age

[electrosoccertux]

Disagree. Audio streams at 80kbps ogg or acc+ are what caused me to see the difference. I must use 80 because my metropcs data connection on my hacked motorola droid tops out at about 135kbps-- not enough for 128 if I have anything less than a full signal.

Get any of the free streaming programs on android, that's when I startged paying attention to the encoding format.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you sir, I think that'll be all the advertising we can stomach for today.

Re:STOP USING CHROME AND OPERA!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you just threaten half the people in the world with a lawsuit if we don't all switch to either IE or Safari? Good luck with that bud. Firefox + Chrome + Opera = 49.94% of marketshare, IE + Safari = 49.48%

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[lennier]

the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media

Best but illegal. Illegal is not a starter for a universal standard. Why are we even having this conversation?

When the MPEG-LA patents expire, then and not before will H.264 be in the running for a standard. Till then, there's "open" and there's "illegal", and MPEG-LA have decided to make implementing their algorithm in GPL code illegal. So sad, thank you for playing, next. End of line.

You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving MPEG-LA a free pass when, however shiny their beads and blankets are, they are trying to do the same thing?

Fixed that for you.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Apple. But WTF was theora doing in what was supposed to be a generic web standard for video playback. having theora as part of the standard completely undermined the standard itself and was a sure fire way to ensure it was never universally adopted. Open standards should not be encumbered by people driving their own agenda's, theora had no business being in the standard.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You do know Theora was part of the official HTML5 standard until Apple raised a bitchfest of epic proportions to usurp it for their own gain, right?

It was a proposed part of the standard. Apple was one major company to step in though, but they had some pretty good reasons. Apple makes iPhones and they are trying to sell them partly on the fact that they use less battery. Part of that is using dedicated hardware for playing video. They have millions of existing devices out there they cannot retrofit to do the same with WebM. So it sounds like what Apple did was because it benefited Apple, but because in turn it benefits Apple's customers and making them happy makes Apple more money.

This is not an insolvable problem though. WebM support can be built into hardware. A few companies have proposals for chips and they say they will do it if the format takes off. Apple could convince them to start finishing those proposals and adding support right now. They just need a reason to push their vendors and eat a small cost for more expensive hardware going forward. So why isn't Google trying to make a compromise deal that they support h264 in Android and Chrome for a set number of years in exchange for Apple promising to add WebM support to Safari, OS X, and iPhones as soon as they can get hardware support added?

If Google is really serious, this should be their proposal. If, however, they're more interested in trying to gain smartphone market share at the expense of open standards and consumers, then they should continue on as they are, complaining about Apple, while secretly enjoying Flash's gain in market share which helps them accomplish that.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Draek]

Temporary measures seldom are, and for anyone that wants h.264 that badly there's always Flash anyways, it's just Apple refuses to implement *that* one due to their personal vendetta against Adobe.

The obvious solution would be to adopt WebM as the official standard, work on putting both software and hardware in place over the next couple years, and implement Flash/h.264 as an interim solution while HTML5 is finished, to take advantage of any pre-existing h.264 acceleration. Which was exactly what we had before Apple's bitchfest except with Theora rather than WebM, what Google seems to be going for, and what Apple would be going for if they were really interested in furthering open standards on the web, rather than abusing their position on standard bodies to further their own personal wars against Adobe and Google.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Temporary measures seldom are, and for anyone that wants h.264 that badly there's always Flash anyways...

Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.

The obvious solution would be to adopt WebM as the official standard, work on putting both software and hardware in place over the next couple years, and implement Flash/h.264...

Why Flash at all? Anyway, Google is not willing to do that since they say they're pulling support for h.264. If Google actually cared about the users, they'd commit to supporting h.264 until a specific date in order to benefit end users so those users aren't stuck with Flash.

...their own personal wars against Adobe and Google

They don't really care about either. They care about profits and they're fighting that battle the right way this time, by trying to make a better product. It just so happens that h264 is the only codec that works best for their customers NOW. And you expect them to agree to a standard that has worse battery life or is closed and under the control of a company that has been ignoring the need for security and stability and performance forever? Sorry, but you're completely blinded by partisanship on this one.

Google can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting Flash and using Flash support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.

Re:Everyone else uses H264/d

[km_2_go]

MP3 is used by more than alpha geeks. Most people that aren't bound by the ipod seem to listen to mp3 (with .ogg being a very distant competitor). Also, amongst online streaming radio, mp3 is very popular. To call it a dead codec, or one that is only sustained due to 'alpha geeks', is simply not true.

MP3 is still so popular due to it's legacy. Those of us that have been collecting digital music since the late '90's are loathe to give it up, despite technical and intellectual property advantages of other formats.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[evilviper]

JPEG, GIF and MP3 all have/had encumbered with licenses yet they are still to this day, web standards.

JPEG has NEVER, EVER, been encumbered.

GIF was believed to be free, it was only just before the patent expired that Unisys decided they could extract some money from the unsuspecting.

MP3 is a popular format, but it has never been a web standard. And people started using it because, like GIFs, there was no sign anyone would try to collect royalties at the time. Not to mention all those in countries where software patents can't even be legally enforced... and today, you'll mod definitely get irate geeks if you post MP3 files, screaming about this Ogg Vorbis thing. Which I always though was odd, since Musepack has been around longer, and is undenyably the best high quality lossy audio codec around, as all frequency domain codecs have unavoidable artifacts, and Musepack and MP2 are the only time domain codecs you've ever heard of. Why MP2 isn't more popular is beyond me.

What about Flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love open standards, I use Linux daily, moved my company to use OpenOffice, and have used Chrome on a daily basis; however can someone explain to me how Google isn't being a little bit hypocritical here. They got rid of H.264 because it wasn't open standard, no problem with me, however why do they still integrate Adobe Flash? It's picking and choosing, which is fine, however don't tell me you are a rebel fighting for open standards and implement closed-ass technology into your browser.

My 2 cents; however to me this is like wrapping bullshit with gold foil; you may say it's gold, however on the end of the day the substance of your claim is ... bullshit.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel, ARM, AMD, and Broadcom are going to start adding WebM hardware acceleration.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Draek]

Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.

Adobe's Flash implementation, there's nothing stopping Apple et al from writing their own. Vector graphics and animation are more complex of course, but as far as online video is concerned FLV is nothing but a thin container over the same old h.264 they're trying to promote.

Why Flash at all? Anyway, Google is not willing to do that since they say they're pulling support for h.264. If Google actually cared about the users, they'd commit to supporting h.264 until a specific date in order to benefit end users so those users aren't stuck with Flash.

Because Flash is already here and in place on all major platforms. The real problem here isn't Flash, it's h.264 so continuing support for HTML5 h.264 would not only do nothing to solve the major problem here, it'd divert resources and focus from the true solution: WebM. Well, or Theora, but WebM is technically superior without any of the legal disadvantages of other "solutions".

They don't really care about either. They care about profits and they're fighting that battle the right way this time, by trying to make a better product. It just so happens that h264 is the only codec that works best for their customers NOW. And you expect them to agree to a standard that has worse battery life or is closed and under the control of a company that has been ignoring the need for security and stability and performance forever? Sorry, but you're completely blinded by partisanship on this one.

They care about increasing their profits at the expense of enterpreneurs and the free market itself. You really expect Google to agree to a so-called "standard" that forces anyone making tools even remotely related to internet video to pay a fee to an oligopoly or risk bankrupcy in a patent lawsuit?

You're so focused on your illogical hatred for Flash that you're willing to hand over the free market to an oligopoly just to see it dissapear a couple years sooner.

Apple can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting h.264 and using HTML5 h.264 support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.

Adobe's Flash implementation, there's nothing stopping Apple et al from writing their own.

That's your solution? No one has managed to write a compatible Flash implementation with Adobe's. It's a huge monster of spaghetti code that is bloated far beyond anything needed for a video playing codec. Moreover, it's a closed standard with more patent issues that h264. What problem, exactly, are you trying to solve here? This is about Google supporting Flash and not supporting h264, thus pushing the closed Flash over the open h264.

Why Flash at all?

Because Flash is already here and in place on all major platforms.

So is h264! Except H264 is already here and has good performance and stability on mobile devices, while Flash is a turd on mobile platforms. Are you being intentionally obtuse?

The real problem here isn't Flash...

Yes it is. Google would like you to think it isn't, but Flash is still the dominant video player and Google is supporting it by building it into Chrome and promoting it on Android as a differentiator. Buy an Android mobile device and you can have "all the Web" including Flash (even though it will suck). Google makes money by Flash being dominant because it sells their mobile OS which gets them more advertising bucks. If Google was honest about wanting to support open standards, they'd drop Flash way faster than h264.

You really expect Google to agree to a so-called "standard" that forces anyone making tools even remotely related to internet video to pay a fee to an oligopoly or risk bankrupcy in a patent lawsuit?

No, I expect them to agree to support multiple codecs in their browser, until there is proper hardware support for WebM. Instead they're forcing everyone to use Flash, which is a closed standard run by a single vendor with a history of security and stability problems. Gee, that sure is better. Entrepreneurs don't have to pay to play or encode things with h264 because the codecs are built into Windows, OS X, and Linux (nor Android nor iOS) and exposed via APIs. It's already paid for by the OS makers

You're so focused on your illogical hatred for Flash that you're willing to hand over the free market to an oligopoly just to see it dissapear a couple years sooner.

My hatred of Flash is very logical. They've been screwing us all over for years and are still dominant in the market. I'm more than willing to put up with an open standard that might be patent encumbered for a few years, especially with a scheduled transition to a non-patent encumbered open standard. In fact, that's a much better solution than an immediate switch to WebM, because a switch today would leave everyone with an existing mobile device stuck with shitty battery performance. I don't really see the drawback to eliminating Flash NOW and scheduling the elimination of h264 in 2 or 4 or 6 years when enough phones have moved through the market to make hardware support fairly standard.

Apple can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting h.264 and using HTML5 h.264 support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.

Umm, great and all, except it doesn't make sense. Apple isn't using h264 support as a differentiator because almost everyone already supports it including YouTube and Chrome and Android. Rather, Google is pulling support for it to create a differentiator. What Apple isn't doing is supporting a single vendor locked in system called "Flash" and despite your rampant Google fanboyism you haven't been able to justify a good reason why Google who claims they're acting for the good of the people with open standards is pushing Flash other than to make money.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Draek]

That's your solution? No one has managed to write a compatible Flash implementation with Adobe's. It's a huge monster of spaghetti code that is bloated far beyond anything needed for a video playing codec. Moreover, it's a closed standard with more patent issues that h264. What problem, exactly, are you trying to solve here? This is about Google supporting Flash and not supporting h264, thus pushing the closed Flash over the open h264.

Step one: download video FLV from a website. Step two: drag&drop it to VLC. Step three: enjoy your video. Flash video (ie, the only problem HTML5/h.264 attempts to solve) has already been solved ages ago.

So is h264! Except H264 is already here and has good performance and stability on mobile devices, while Flash is a turd on mobile platforms. Are you being intentionally obtuse?

HTML5/h.264 is barely used outside of a few clips on Youtube, Flash is everywhere. Within the context of online video HTML5/h.264 is barely bigger than HTML5/WebM, don't bring up camcorders or any of that irrelevant trash here, you ain't gonna be watching the movie you just recorded on a freakin' web browser unless you're a tech-obsessed nerd.

Yes it is.

No it isn't. Flash is free to use and redistribute, (other) h.264 encoders and decoders are not. HTML5/h.264 is a much larger threat to the future of the internet than Flash, regardless of what your Google conspiracy theories may tell you.

Umm, great and all, except it doesn't make sense. Apple isn't using h264 support as a differentiator because almost everyone already supports it including YouTube and Chrome and Android. Rather, Google is pulling support for it to create a differentiator. What Apple isn't doing is supporting a single vendor locked in system called "Flash" and despite your rampant Google fanboyism you haven't been able to justify a good reason why Google who claims they're acting for the good of the people with open standards is pushing Flash other than to make money.

Everyone *but* Apple already supports Flash, so by the same argument Google can't be using it as a differentiator either. And the simple reason they support it, which you can't admit due to your hatred of it, is that Flash is everywhere, with over 99% of users having it installed and multiple websites taking advantage of that. HTML5/h.264 however is not, therefore they can kill it off right now rather than having to wait a few years until WebM is mature enough to replace it.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Flash video (ie, the only problem HTML5/h.264 attempts to solve) has already been solved ages ago.

And you don't think a "lite" Flash player that only does video and breaks for other sites would be a problem for anyone? Sure.

HTML5/h.264 is barely used outside of a few clips on Youtube

You mean except for all the movies rented via iTunes and a dozen other, smaller online rental places, oh and all the natively recorded video from everyone's phones, like the ones people automatically upload to social networking sites. h246 is quite popular and huge number of sites have to it from flash in just the last year, momentum that was good for all of us since they were moving away from Flash and in a smaller number of cases away from WMV.

...you ain't gonna be watching the movie you just recorded on a freakin' web browser unless you're a tech-obsessed nerd.

Yeah, because no one uses a camcorder that is also a phone and which automatically uploads to web sites. Absolutely no one.

No it isn't. Flash is free to use and redistribute, (other) h.264 encoders and decoders are not. . HTML5/h.264 is a much larger threat to the future of the internet than Flash...

Seriously, that's your belief? You haven't seen any of the dozens of major security vulnerabilities resulting from Flash, nor the sites locked into using tools from a single vendor, nor Adobe's refusal to support Linux or other OS's, nor the huge number of browser and even OS crashes directly resulting from their crappy coding, nor the abysmal performance of Flash on many platforms including mobile? None of that is a problem for you and being locked into a single vendor product is better than being locked into an open standard where tools can be made by anyone? You are so hopelessly biased it is pathetic.

Everyone *but* Apple already supports Flash...

If by "supports" you mean it runs on some phones and runs a limited version on other phones and all of them end up having really, really lousy performance and drain your battery. Flash is a pile of crap on mobile devices and it's a pile of crap because it's locked down by a single vendor, so until they lose market share on the Web, they don't care that is sucks for users.

...so by the same argument Google can't be using it as a differentiator either.

Put down the crack pipe and pick up a dictionary. A differentiator is a feature you have and a competitor does not that you use in marketing to try to convince consumers. Google has absolutely been using Flash support (support for a closed standard) as a differentiator. I provided an example of their marketing already. Really, are you so absurdly biased in favor of Google that you truly believe they never do anything shady? Pull your head out of the sand. Google does a lot of good things. They're a fairly respectable company. I have friends that work there, good people dedicated to open standards. That doesn't mean Google doesn't occasionally do something greedy or harmful in the name of profit. It helps when the tech community points this out and calls on them to reverse their decision. It gives those people at Google who want a better choice on behalf of the community leverage to make changes. Your blind support for a harmful decision just makes things worse.

HTML5/h.264 however is not, therefore they can kill it off right now rather than having to wait a few years until WebM is mature enough to replace it.

And in the process they make all those Websites that were switching away from Flash switch BACK to Flash with no reason to ever move to WebM because it has the same performance penalties as Flash (which they will evaluate now, not in a few years). I don't know if Chrome will be enough to make a difference, but it's just another thing pushing people to Flash and that hurts us all.

Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp

[Kitsune Inari]

I don't really see the drawback to eliminating Flash NOW and scheduling the elimination of h264 in 2 or 4 or 6 years when enough phones have moved through the market to make hardware support fairly standard.

I see one: Flash is so "open" that currently there are no fully-usable alternatives; the guys at GNash, Lightspark and SWFDec are working on it, but it'll take a while to replace it. However, there is an alternative to h264 that is good enough, and that works now. Again, there will be a few drawbacks for WebM on mobile devices until the upcoming hardware with full VP8 support starts to replace current devices, but unless MPEG-LA manages to eat everybody's brains and force h264 as a standard, it's just a matter of time.