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Microsoft Slams Google Over HTML5 Video Decision
jbrodkin writes "Microsoft is accusing Google of some heavy-handed tactics in the battle over HTML5 video standards. In an attempt at humor, a clearly peeved Microsoft official wrote 'An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google,' which likens Google's adoption of WebM instead of H.264 to an attempt to force a new language on the entire world. Internet Explorer 9, of course, supports the H.264 codec, while Google and Mozilla are backing WebM. The hyperlinks in Microsoft's blog post lead readers to data indicating that two-thirds of Web videos are using H.264, with about another 25% using Flash VP6. However, the data, from Encoding.com, was released before the launch of WebM last May. One pundit predicts the battle will lead to yet another 'years-long standards format war.'"
Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle - you are both black.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
when Microsoft does it!!
The hyperlinks in Microsoft's blog post lead readers to data indicating that two-thirds of Web videos are using H.264, with about another 25% using Flash VP6
yes, but once Google updates Youtube to only use WebM, I guess that'll show 91% of all online video to be in WebM format.
I wonder what Microsoft will say then?
Dammit, does this mean I need to buy the white album again?
I found MS's blog post to be pretty dang funny. If you don't get the satire, check where all those links go - apparently Theora was made by Klingons.
Sure, I disagree with Microsoft's stance, but I will concede that they made a very humorous point.
If Google want to pull a Microsoft they just need to drop flash and H.264 in Youtube and convert everything to WebM and then convince (bribe) Netflix to do the same...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Alanis Morissette claims prior art
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
That advice would be better directed at Google, since they are the ones dropping support for H.264.
Internet Explorer 5 debuted in 1999. Firefox didn't arrive until the end of 2004.
IE isn't pushing any specific format. IE9 will support h.264 out of the box but will also play other formats if codecs are installed. IE9 will support WebM just fine. It's not like a browser has to pick a format and that's it; Chrome can perfectly well include support for WebM out of the box as well as h.264, as is the situation today. Or they could remove built-in h.264 and support installed codecs. The problem is that you have entities that are deciding to snub platform-provided methods for playing media in favor of political posturing in their own attempt to "fix the web". In the end we're going to end up with fragmentation and it is the end user who will lose.
We have Firefox, Chrome and Opera which decide that it's a good idea to avoid a format which is so patent encumbered that you've to pay licences to program a player, to program an encoder, to stream a video and to create a commercial video using that format (try to guess what it'd be like if authors had to pay Microsoft a licence to use the.doc format when they write their novel).
And on the other side, Apple (Safari) which own part of the licences and Microsoft who decided to pay... But neither are streaming anything (unlike Google via Youtube) and both have plenty of money available.
I don't see the problem with Google removing H.264 support from his browser... It's not like if he was the only one who don't support that format nor like if he had a major market choice...
What could have been wrong would be if Google suddently moved Youtube to WebM-only without Flash or H264 fallback AND was the only one to support that format... But the format is open and free...
Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all reject H264
Chrome and Firefox reject H.264. Safari only supports H.264. IE9 supports whatever you have codecs installed for, which is H.264 by default but can be WebM / Theora / whatever.
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Good for you! Can you please pay the Licensing fees then for everyone?
I am certian that if you give Google a few Million they will see it your way.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Man, I remember Irony before it sold out. Irony used to have integrity.
Now, the only way I can appreciate Irony is ironically.
English doesn't have license fees, making it unusable for everybody that doesn't want to pay. If it had, I guess Esperanto or Klingon would suddenly seem like a better choice.
Google is pushing a free and open standard that they released at an initial loss!? What bastards! We can't let them get away with this travesty and have their name associated with everything good about to come from the internet!
I find it better to look at the content of a decision before I judge it right or wrong, rather than just see who agrees with the decision. Normally I disagree with MS. This time I agree with them.
There are some simple questions that can make it easy to choose between competing standards.
1. Are they sufficiently similar quantitatively in doing the job?
2. Are they sufficiently similar qualitatively in doing the job?
3. Is anyone allowed to use them without inhibition?
It's not hard. If one of the potential standards satisfies all three of those requirements and the other does not, that is the better standard. Why? Because we strive to be a free market economy. We do that because it is a better answer -- mathematically speaking -- than being a biased-market economy. Free market means satisfying the customers needs (item 1), their wants (item 2), and their freedom to choose (item 3). Competition is one of the pillars of free market efficiency. Encumbered standards create inhibition to competition.
Economically speaking, this is Dick & Jane stuff. The only people who could fail to get it are the ignorant and charlatans.
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as a professional web developer who makes his living from web development, i say no to anything that involves internet explorer. internet explorer has accrued so much karma over the torture of web developers trying to make perfectly standard compliant code of websites fit the standards-ignoring whims of internet explorer that, its name is akin to 'plague' in the eyes of long time web developers. couple this with microsoft glorious, glaring, dazzling reputation in regard to open standards and compliance, and you can understand where i am coming from.
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'years long standards/format war' ? really ? with what ? internet explorer lost a lot of share to become head to head with firefox. chrome is eroding ie even more. google has much more reach on the web than anything microsoft, because google had come up embracing the web, even to the point of setting up adsense/adwords to enable small websites and advertisers that everyone on the internet was ignoring and snubbing, including microsoft. from webmaster tools to google analytics, and many more. what microsoft has to show against all these ? internet explorer
there isnt going to be any format war. microsoft has nothing to wage a war with.
Read radical news here
an attempt to force a new language on the entire world.
You mean, like,
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
If only it were a simple matter of technology, we could all agree with you. Unfortunately, H264 is a serious problem in the USA, because of software patents and license requirements. You cannot produce legal free software H264 editors in this country, nor can you import legally produced software from other countries. True, patent trolls will probably find a way to corrupt WebM, but at least they would have to put some effort in.
Palm trees and 8
H.264 High Profile is undoubtedly more efficient them WebM. WebM quality should have an upper bound of about the same as H.264 Main Profile.
I think in that Mozilla, Google, and Opera are right on this one. This is about openness and innovation. H.264 stifles innovation, while non-patented codecs allow greater innovation.
Today, H.264 seems to make sense, but limits the freedom of people to build software, hardware, and services based around web video.
The lesson of the internet is that libre and gratis standards combined with connectivity help foster growth and innovation like nothing else we've ever created.
I support dropping H.264, at least until all browsers support a freely available codec. Free standards should be mandatory, and costly ones optional.
Unfortunately, the only way to help move some players to free standards is to refuse to support the paid ones.
I'd rather have the option of using both, but value the innovation of having free standards everywhere over that option as a short term tactical move.. That's exactly what Google, Firefox, and Opera are doing.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
BESIDES the licensing fees will disappear very soon. MPEG1/2/JPEG are already public domain if I recall correctly, and MPEG4/H264 will soon be an open standard too
MPEG1? Check.
MPEG2? *bzzzzzzzzt* 2023.
JPEG? Yep, was never patented to begin with.
H.264 soon? Well, if 2027 is soon.
And you didn't mention MP3, but that is 2012/2017 depending if you think the submarine patents are valid or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If your "iGadgets" can't be updated with software to support new codecs or variations in existing codecs, then I fear you have already wasted your money on crappy technology.
Remember to maintain your supply of
You don't get it. Video decoding hardware is very specific in what parts of what codecs it supports, and it can't be upgraded through software. The x264 devs already determined that WebM contains algorithms that don't translate well to efficient hardware, and that it will be a huge resource hog compared to current h264 solutions, until dedicated WebM hardware is released to the market.
As for the whole licensing discussion: I think everyone should pull their head out of their asses and stop spreading the H264 licensing and royalty FUD. The H264 patent pool serves only a single purpose, which is licensing H264 for use in commercial products and services. The terms are very clear, only if you make more than x amount of money (somewhere in the neighbourhood of a few hundred thousand dollars) you have to pay a very reasonable royalty fee as a compensation for using the work done by the MPEG group and ITU. I don't see what's wrong with that.
The only arguments against H264 that people can come up with are irrational, and hypothetical, and none of them make any sense at all. What if MPEG-LA reverses their decision and asks everyone to pay up for watchin youtube? What if MPEG-LA challenges open-source codecs in court to crush them? What if the lock the specifications and extort everyone hosting an H264 to pay up? None of these make sense unless you think MPEG-LA are codec fascists who are only out to screw everyone, instead of just trying to make money off a very advanced piece of technology that is widely regarded as the best you can get for video coding.
Does the fact that x264 negotiated a licensin scheme with MPEG-LA for 100% legal distribution of x264 for commerical purposes make any sens if they want to extort non-profit use? MPEG-LA is effectively taking x264 licensees now, or in other words: they make money off the commercial use of an open-source codec that's freely available for non-profit use.
I think this bad analogy pretty clearly illustrates what the unwitting proprietary stooges don't understand. Refusal by software makers to pay licensing fees or agree to other terms in order to get permission to implement something, is equivalent to you saying, "Since people have to pay the $60 fee to do business with a single source, requiring the people to watch SyFy in order to get tax instructions isn't appropriate."
The problem isn't that you're barred from SyFy. The problem is that neutral entities shouldn't be making you do business with SyFy instead of letting you choose who to do business with, from all the choices that arise in a free market. A "standard" with licensing dependencies is like a government endorsing -- no wait, requiring -- a particular company.
You are allowed to implement WebM. You're allowed to implement Theora. You have to get on your knees and beg permission (and pay) to implement H.264. That (not just the money itself) is what makes H.264 inappropriate.
Think about all the non-proprietary stuff that browsers do, and what it would have been like if people hadn't been allowed to do all that stuff back in the 1990s. Now you want this one little part of the browser, to have a stranglehold? What's so special about video that we put up new barriers that we're used to not having, pretty much everywhere else?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't see the "format war" potential here.
Format wars were VHS vs Video2000 vs Betamax. BluRay vs HD-DVD. And the losers were primarily the manufacturers that bet on the wrong tech, and the other manufacturers that could barely sell anything before the format was settled on. After all users had to shell out real money in serious amounts to buy one, and even more if they wanted to be compatible with the others. The space taken by an unsightly pile of equipment notwithstanding.
Now H.264 is effectively free for end users. I know there are license fees and whatnot but no end user has ever seen a bill for an H.264 player as far as I am aware. In other words: if it's not already included in your OS, you will be able to download it somewhere, and such an installation is usually very very easy. And has to be done only once. Problem solved.
WebM same story. But without the license fees.
And before anyone starts to complain about "installing so many plug-ins", I'd say many FF users chooses FF for the many plug-ins available. It's just that they're called "add-ons" in newspeak.
So it may be a format war, but for most of the end users there is no difference. Video on the web will just play. Be it in Flash, H.264, WebM, or whatever comes next.
You don't get it. Video decoding hardware is very specific in what parts of what codecs it supports, and it can't be upgraded through software. The x264 devs already determined that WebM contains algorithms that don't translate well to efficient hardware, and that it will be a huge resource hog compared to current h264 solutions, until dedicated WebM hardware is released to the market.
Oh, I get it. This is a very similar situation to the earlier days of video cards that supported "Windows acceleration" instead of more generic graphical acceleration. Software is fluid and has been since the dawn of computers. Device makers have lots of options to allow them to accelerate H.264 content without some artificial lockout of other technology, especially when that technology has been around for MANY years.
WebM is based on technology that predates H.264 by years (VP3.2 was the first open version, on which VP8/WebM are based, from 2001, versus 2003 for H.264). This is not "new" in any sense of the word I am familiar with.
Remember to maintain your supply of
Wait, you're going to tout the "standards compliance" of *Netscape*? Ummm... Netscape was just as bad as IE at standards compliance...
A 400MHz G4... Let's see... That's something like my G4 Cube, which was release in 2000.
Yeah. Apple's restrictions are all that's keeping you from running a modern browser and OS on a ten year old machine. I seriously suggest you try running Chrome 9, Firefox 4 or IE9 under Win7 or Ubuntu 10.04 a P2-400 with 256 to 512MB RAM. While you're at it, try to play back an HTML5 video streamed from the web.. Let us know how it goes.
Apple is just codifying what is, for intents and purposes, a functional limitation. If I were them, I wouldn't waste resources trying to support ten-year old hardware, either. It's nice that, eg, you can run an XFCE-based desktop under Linux on that kind of hardware and perform basic tasks, but you're still up against the "Try and run a modern browser and play back H.264 or WebM video" restriction.
--srj/mmv
So it's not enough for you that one codec is definitely encumbered with patents and that the owner of these patents is highly litigious, while the owner of the other codec has placed all patents they hold relevant to the codec explicitly in the public domain. You demand that the latter group also provide legal protection for you?
Do you get legal protection against patents for all the software you use?
It's incorrect to say that WebM is equally dangerous to use from a patent litigation point of view. Is it 100% risk free? No. But what non-trivial piece of software is, when a static image file format has resulted in royalties being collected under threat of litigation?
Just another proletarian malcontent.
I live in the EU and there are no such restrictions for H.264 use here - for example see VLCs position in their FAQ (they're based in France). The fact that over in the US you have to pay is no concern of mine or most other people in the world. Hear that sound? It's the sound of the world's smallest violin playing.
Listen to my latest album here
I seriously suggest you try running Chrome 9, Firefox 4 or IE9 under Win7 or Ubuntu 10.04 a P2-400 with 256 to 512MB RAM.
It works very well, thank you.
I haven't tried streaming video yet though, but given how much of a resource hog h.264 is, I doubt it'll work very well. Still, I'm sure it'll do just fine with all other HTML5 features, far better than IE5 does for you Mac users thanks to Apple's planned obsolescence.
Sure, it's kind of off-topic on this discussion, but do keep in mind HTML5 is far more than a video codec or two.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
So you also believe that chrome (and all browsers) should drop support for MP3 in the tag, I take it?
This is what bugs me the most about Google abandoning H.264.
They're a bunch of ideological zealots saying "Screw your phone, screw your iPod, screw your video card, screw your laptop, screw your PS3, screw all your expensive hardware that supports H.264. We're switching to WebM. It offers no real-world benefits over H.264, but it's OPEN!"
At the risk of sounding like a bitter old man, that's a load of fucking hippie bullshit.
Google can feel good about themselves for being "open", and save a few cents in the process, but all my hardware, which did its job perfectly, now won't. (That, and we won't see hardware supporting WebM until somewhere in 2012.)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I don't see how H.264 is actively restricting aspiring young producers.
Cameras can record in it. Inexpensive software, even software that comes bundled with a computer, can author in it. Various websites like YouTube and Vimeo can serve video in it for free. Yes, that's really onerous. The average person is not going to spend one extra cent on H.264.
By the time that you reach a level where you may possibly have to pay a license fee for it, you're going to have much bigger costs in the realm of bandwidth, productions costs, and such.
As for "end to end connectivity"... H.264 is great for that, because it's widely supported and you can use it every step along the way. WebM... not so much.
It's all ideology. Like Ogg Vorbis vs MP3. MP3 may be riddled with patents, but go say "Ogg Vorbis" to some random person on the street and they'll think you're an alien.
Innovation comes from what you do with it, not whether it passes some nerd kosher test.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
"That is bullshit, because right now THE standard for personal broadcasting is h.264.
And it's for the same reason it's so popular for playing videos - hardware support."
Circular logic, as hardware support basically had to come into existence once big media decided to make it its codec of choice.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
GP isn't talking about Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. He's talking about the knee-jerk Slashtards that twist every discussion into an opportunity to bash whatever company they currently think is uncool. At it's best, /. *can* be a source for reasoned technical discussion and information. At it's worst, /. is a bunch of loser dorks stroking each other about how geeky and elite they are, and how everyone else are sheep and fashion victims. In a sea of that, it's always refreshing to see a calm, well-reasoned post.
Facebook is the new AOL
Circular logic, as hardware support basically had to come into existence once big media decided to make it its codec of choice.
Does it matter WHY it came into existence, when the FACT is that it's at the core of huge personal publishing platform now?
It's not circular, it's a chicken and egg issue. the FACT is that right now millions of people are eating metaphorically tasty chicken broadcast sandwiches without knowing or caring if the egg or chicken came first.
You simply cannot label h.264 as "for consumption only" at this point with a straight face.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ok, so if Chrome is no longer going to support H.264 then it won't be able to support YouTube except via Flash.
Have you been living under the rock for the last year? YouTube HTML5 beta has been streaming WebM for a while now, and Google says that 90% of all videos are already transcoded. If they say that they'll remove H.264 in Chrome "in a few months", it's probably when HTML5 support goes out of beta on YouTube.
If they require all YouTube streaming to be done in WebM, I certainly won't be going there.
They will still be serving it in Flash for a long time. That said, Adobe said they're going to support WebM in Flash...