Slashdot Mirror
The Ambiguity of "Open" and VP8 Vs. H.264
An anonymous reader writes "With all the talk about WebM and H.264, how the move might be a step backwards for openness, and Google's intention to add 'plugins' for IE9 and Safari to support WebM, this article attempts to clear misconceptions about the VP8 and H.264 codecs and how browsers render video. Firefox, Opera and Google rely on their own media frameworks to decode video, whereas IE9 and Safari will hand over video processing to the operating system (Windows Media Player or QuickTime), the need for the web to establish a baseline codec for encoding videos, and how the Flash player is proprietary, but implementation and usage remain royalty free."
There are open standards, and open source, and they are not the same. The IETF, for example (subject to yesterdays Birthday Article) deals with open standards. Linux, by contrast, is open source.
An open standard means that no one party controls the generation of the standard, and that the standard is openly available. Generally, open standards are developed by SDOs (Standards Defining Organizations, such as the IETF or the W3C). As a general rule "anyone" can participate in their creation (but this may require that you or your company be a member of some organization or have some other qualifications). Many open standards have patent encumbrances. Typically, SDOs seek RAND (Reasonable and NonDiscriminatory) licensing terms; some even require a particular patent licensing policy as a condition for participation. The IETF, however, requires disclosure and seeks, but does not strictly require, RAND terms. While an open standard may have some code associated with it, typically the entire point of an open standard is to allow you to go off and write your own code, generally under whatever code license you want. This is how the Internet was developed.
Open source means that the source is licensed by GPL or BSD> or some similar licensing. Now, generally open source means that the code is available, but in practice many open source projects are more or less closed to outside participation, and they frequently do not provide documentation sufficient to replicate what they are doing.
So the Right Thing is to force everyone to buy an OS from Microsoft or Apple? Do you know there are some crazy people developing free operating systems? And even using them! How dare they ask for a royalty free baseline codec for encoding video for the web?
You're missing what the GP said - no-one's suggesting forcing anyone to buy an OS, the suggestion is to hand off video playback to the OS. In this case, the right thing to do would be to release it to a video decoding layer for Linux and then call it from Firefox/Chrome.
Cheers,
Ian
Can you contribute code to H.264?
The question does not make sense. It's like asking 'can you contribute code to HTML?' H.264 is a standard, not an implementation. The license of various implementations is independent of the way in which the standard was developed.
H.264 was developed jointly the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). These groups solicited contributions from anyone. If you wanted to contribute something to the spec, you could. There was a lot of political stuff as well, with a few things being added to the spec just so that companies could get one of their patents in.
In contrast, VP8 was developed in private by On2 and dumped on the public by Google. The x.264 developers raised some issues with the spec, but were told that the format was frozen and would not be modified. Theora and Dirac are both frozen now, but they had an open development process and modified the bitstream format several times based on feedback from external groups.
So, when you are talking about the process for developing the spec, Theora, Dirac, and H.264 were all open. When you are talking about using the spec, Theora, Dirac, and VP8 are all open.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You are confusing the standards with their implementations.
All of these standards are now frozen, so no one can contribute to them. H.264 was open during its design, and VP8 was closed (and suggestions for improvement were ignored when the spec and reference implementation was made available). Since they are both frozen, I'd say H.264 spec was and is more open *as a standard*.
Now, as far as implementations go, it's a different story (though still not as cut and dried as people claim). VP8/WebM is now open source, great And x264 is a GPL implementation of H.264, so it is just as "open". The difference all comes down to licensing - a number of patents are required to implement the H.264 standard, so anyone who implements it and wants to use it in a country that recognizes those patents has to pay licensing fees or risk being sued.
That last bit definitely makes VP8 more attractive to people who don't want to pay license fees. So, call it "more expensive to use", "patent encumbered", or some other more descriptive term. But just throwing around the vague concept of "open" without the real context doesn't help the discussion...