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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.'"

48 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.

    --
    My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    1. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Guspaz · · Score: 2

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

    2. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Halborr · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by somersault · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    4. 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.

    5. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by silanea · · Score: 2

      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?

      --
      Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
    6. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by MtHuurne · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. 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.

    8. 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.

    9. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
    10. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    11. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Yvanhoe · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
    12. 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.
    13. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2

      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 :-)

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    14. 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.

    15. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Guspaz · · Score: 2

      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.

    16. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by bonch · · Score: 2

      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.

    17. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    18. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by Draek · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
    19. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by h3 · · Score: 2

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

    20. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by lennier · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
    21. Re:Everyone else uses H264/MPEG4 by sadtrev · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  2. Re:No news here. by feedayeen · · Score: 2

    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

  3. Bad research.... by gQuigs · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

    1. Re:Bad research.... by Haedrian · · Score: 4, Funny

      "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

    2. Re:Bad research.... by EdZ · · Score: 3, Informative

      Firefox does not support h.264.

    3. Re:Bad research.... by silanea · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
  4. Re:Sad news for the web by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  5. Since when do we listen to Oprah about this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. WebM by jpea · · Score: 2

    everyone, get your zencoder instances fired up

    --
    - Fun & Work : http://thegearjunkie.com
  7. Re:Sad news for the web by Haedrian · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. Re:No news here. by MrHanky · · Score: 2

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

  9. Re:Sad news for the web by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  10. Re:No news here. by afidel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  11. Re:I wish.. by Shikaku · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  12. Re:Sad news for the web by lingon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:Sad news for the web by fast+turtle · · Score: 2

    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

    --
    Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
  14. Re:This will cause flash to win in the end. by Spad · · Score: 2

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

  15. Re:This won't change much in the "big picture" ... by Merk42 · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. 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!

  17. 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?

  18. Re:I wish.. by Alrescha · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    ...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
  19. Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp by maxwell+demon · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  20. Re:I wish.. by TheTurtlesMoves · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
  21. Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp by TheTurtlesMoves · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    --
    The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
  22. Re:Sad news for the web by jlp2097 · · Score: 2

    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.

  23. Re:Sad news for the web by tuppe666 · · Score: 2

    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.

  24. Re:Use what the standard is. Stop trying to usurp by lennier · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC