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Opera Supports Google Decision To Drop H.264

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the rally-behind-the-big-dog dept.

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.'"

8 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by cpu6502 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by tixxit · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by lingon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Steauengeglase · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by squallbsr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
    5. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:I wish.. by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  3. Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp it. by wazzzup · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?