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."

Comments

Re:What I care about

[Anonymous Coward]

MPEG-LA has a real quandary here. Imagine, for a moment, that you're running the MPEG-LA business, and think about the devices that code and (more importantly) decode video. Your job is to create as many revenue streams as possible. In order to do this, you want your encoder used by all content producers, but more importantly, the content producers need an audience, so you want your *decoder* used by all consumers.

Furthermore, you're smart enough to realize that you want royalties on every *hardware* device (think cellphones, DVD players, etc.) that is shipped with h.264, and perhaps every copy of OS X and Windows. You also realize that there is zero money to be made from including h.264 n Firefox/etc, because Firefox generates no revenue. In fact, you *want* h.264 used in Firefox, Chrome, etc., just because it increases the audience size. So you sit down to rewrite the royalty/licensing structures to specifically allow free browsers to implement h.264 for free, but then you stop. Why? Because you've just realized that these little hardware devices (or even DVD players, these days) can incorporate Firefox/Chrome/etc. into their software stack and thereby skirt any royalty structure you've just set up for your hardware devices.

Maybe it's because I'm not a lawyer, but I can't conceive of any legal language that would allow MPEG-LA to distinguish between browser+h.264 on computer vs. browser+h.264 on cellphones/DVD players/whatever devices comes along in the future.

Re:Shocking: Apple and MS are doing the right thin

[Andy Dodd]

A good point here - Google has a lot of "green" initiatives (reduced-power computing, huge solar cell farms on their roof, etc.)

This approach is NOT a "green" approach - a "green" approach is one that makes use of the large amount of hardware acceleration infrastructure now deployed for the existing standard codecs.

WebM/VP8 will force a non-accelerated CPU-only rendering path on ALL existing hardware. This eats power compared to hardware acceleration. (Look at how well most Android devices handle H.264 thanks to hardware accelerated decoding.)

Google is being hypocritical and inconsistent here. Great summary at http://daringfireball.net/2011/01/simple_questions - Key here is, HTML5 was supposed to at least partially break Adobe's stranglehold on the web by moving some content away from Flash. Google just killed any hope of that - They talk about supporting open codecs, but they still bundle Adobe Flash (which includes H.264 support) with Chrome?

As a result of this mess, content providers are starting to shy away from HTML5 and stick with what "just works" (for the most part) - SmugMug was starting to consider HTML5, but Google's latest decision has them moving back to Flash.