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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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.

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: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: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: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: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!

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?

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: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.