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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."
Please make it easier to report/flag spammer accounts. That is all.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
H.264s development was open? I mean really that is just a bit of a reach.
So I disagree with everything in this but one thing.
The correct way to implement video is to used the OS provided framework. Support EVERYTHING the OS can support as far as formats goes. It really is the the correct and most flexible way to do things. While I support the idea of WebM it will cause no end to problems if Apple, RIM, Nokia, and Palm/HP do not support it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Doesn't matter what Google chooses to support in Chrome as they are still going to have to support H.264 for Youtube streaming unless they feel like making the battery life of all current and soon to be released Android phones abysmal when playing Youtube videos.
"Firefox, Opera and Chrome" Since it appears that sentence was directed at browsers.
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
The only thing that concerns me about the web video format is that it needs to be unencumbered by royalties or other licensing. If I want to make a video, encode it, sell it, make ads off of a website, get 100 or 100,000 visitors, I should damn well be able to do that without having to pay a dime to anyone for the ability to make my own god damn videos--unless I optionally choose.
By using h.264, you pretty much guarantee that *someone* *somewhere* is paying for it. Could you imagine if say, the "David After Dentist" kid had to pay tons and tons of royalties to the MPAA for a video they created simply because they used the h.264 container format? To even conceive such a thing is such bullshit that this should absolutely be a non-issue.
Though this will never happen, the US government should claim eminent domain on all patents involving the h.264 technology, and then dare the large companies to make a move. After all, we're the ones with the guns.
Well I learned something new. Perhaps "liberated" would be a better term since the software, like Seamonkey, Songbird, OpenOffice.org, have been liberated from the clutches of single companies (i.e. Microsoft).
Google also has a WebP standard based on VP8, to replace GIFs/JPEGs, but it seems like it's reached a deadend. So WebM is the container.
--- VP8 is the video
--- Vorbis is the audio
Versus h.264:
--- MPEG4 AVC for video
--- plus some audio codec, like MP3 or AAC or HE-AAC
MPEG4/h264 vs. VP8 comparison (h264 slightly better - specially on low bitrate connections):
- http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2010/vp8_vs_h264.html
HE-AACplus vs. Vorbis (HE-AAC wins):
- http://listening-tests.hydrogenaudio.org/sebastian/mf-48-1/results.htm
JPEG vs. WebP (WebP wins):
- http://englishhard.com/2010/10/01/real-world-analysis-of-googles-webp-versus-jpg/
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
H.264 is closed. VP8 is open.
How is H.264 closed? The spec is available for any one to buy and implement. If H.264 is "closed" than so can be said for the vast majority of ISO standards.
It's frustrating that only the OS-provided solutions (Safari and IE) are doing this right by handing it off to the OS. The notion that your browser needs to reimplement everything, including video rendering, is what leads to the bloatware we have today. The whole point of having an OS is to have a common framework and API layer that all applications hosted on it can access. Instead, Firefox, Chrome and Opera are all re-developing their own video rendering, for each platform they exist on, AND each one needs to write its own video-card accelerator layers for each platform it exists on.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
http://antimatter15.com.nyud.net/wp/2011/01/the-ambiguity-of-open-and-vp8-vs-h-264/
If H.264 is "closed" than so can be said for the vast majority of ISO standards.
Not sure if it's a vast majority, but a lot of ISO standards are closed. Even so closed that you cannot read them without paying a shitload of money.
It's not free for anyone to buy and implement.
So then ODF or C++ are not "open" either, right? One has to pay to get a copy of the spec for those technologies. Secondly, you can freely implement H.264 and release it in source form. MPEGLA has applied an exemption to source code for quite some time which is why, for example, the XviD or x264 people face no problems.
Secondly, even if you are distrbuting binary encoders/decoders you don't pay anything until you hit about 50,000 units shipped.
I can't for example buy and implement it in my app which is released under gpl
And yet there are plenty of apps released as GPL using the GPLed x264 encoder.
And just the thought that I should have to pay each time I publish a video, just because it is encoded with h.264 is insane**.
If you are streaming videos for free you have never paid royalties, and even if you are doing so for pay you have a pretty big threshold to hit before you even start paying royalties.
**This may have been postponed a few years for most people, but still.
Actually back in August the MPEGLA said they will NEVER charge royalties for freely streamed H.264 videos.
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.
H.264 is an open standard, governed by standards bodies (ISO & ITU). It is not, however, a 'free' standard, in either the "beer" or "freedom" sense.
VP8 is a proprietary standard, governed by Google, and developed by a single company. It is, allegedly, a 'free' standard in both the beer and freedom sense - and it's worth noting that there are some concerns as to whether or not this standard would survive an IP infringement claim, making it less "free" than we're asked to assume.
You're right, the definitions are quite clear. I'm just not sure why you seem to think it's opposite day when labelling H.264 as closed and VP8 as open. Until Google submits VP8 to ISO or some other standards body, it's not an "open" standard, it's a "Google says it's cool so I guess that's what we should do," standard. It would seem that you're conflating "royalty-free" with "open."
The point is that H.264 is no less "closed" than other standards which are called "open".
The QtWebkit based browsers and KHTML also hands it off the OS (through Phonon and/or GStreamer).
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
The problem with H.264 is not that isn't open (all patented stuff is open, by design). The problem is that is isn't royalty free (with free meaning both price and freedom).
That's why I don't like to talk about "linux" or "open source". Heck, even Windows is some sort of open if you apply for the Shared Source program. Is about freedom. But yeah, since Stallman is a hippie, nobody should even try to listen to him, much less talk about his ideals considerim quite valid for a variety of reasons.
Spawning up some WMP or Quicktime in the browser sounds like fun..not.
OpenDocument Specification: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office#odf11
So basically what you're saying is that having one supported format that web developers can rely on being supported, regardless of platform, is a bad thing?
For years Slashdot seems to have yearned for a wider adoption of Vorbis and Theora. Theora didn't quite cut it, so Google replaced it with VP8, and has thrown its weight (and its patent portfolio) behind Vorbis as well. But since it's Google, now Slashdot seems to support a royalty and patent encumbered h264 instead of pining for WebM (which is VP8 + Vorbis wrapped into a Matroska container) to win, for which there's a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty free license on everything, including fucking _ASIC designs_. WTF people? Do you have no principles?
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Are Apple/Microsoft doing the right thing because it's the "right thing", or because they fear an independent web browser with builtin Video support, might make their OSes obsolete? (i.e. Don't install either OS X or Windows- just install Seamonkey, or Opera, or a spinoff of those like Splashtop, and you're done. The browser does everything.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Ah, but can't write such a thing and release it under the gpl... And that's my problem with adopting h.264 as the standard. We wouldn't be able to have general-purpose Free OS anymore ;)
exp(i*pi)+1=0
The problem is that is isn't royalty free (with free meaning both price and freedom).
Unless you are charging for the videos, and even then you have to hit a pretty high volume, it IS royalty free indefinitely.
In this case, the right thing to do would be to release it to a video decoding layer for Linux
Which would end up supporting only MPEG-1, Theora, and VP8 given the patent policies of many GNU/Linux distributors. And for each operating system, how should the browser direct the user to find and install appropriate codecs? Do video decoding layers for Linux even support codecs installed by one user for that user as opposed to codecs installed by root for all users? Most of the tutorials I found were for .deb installation on Ubuntu, which is always system-wide.
I don't think it's a matter of them 'exempting' it, they simply can't do anything about source code.
Clearly, as I do not understand what are you talking about, could you please point it out? Bear with me, I'm still learning the English language.
exp(i*pi)+1=0
that's not the issue. The issue is that there are still parts you can have to pay royalties on.
If it isn't free, then it's not free. there is no imbetween just because the end user doesn't have to pay.
Meanwhile, if people implement VP8 encoders/decoders? There's no question of "how much do I have to pay?" People just do it. That's the difference. That's the only way it will ever work cross platform. Think you can implement a windows or mac decoder/encoder without paying for it? think again.
This matters because: decoders and encoders are not fucking magic and every general purpose device built in the last 10 years can be made to support it in some way but is only hindered due to legal concerns.
concept of ownership was challenged. mod to oblivion. dey comin for ya. hide your patents, hide yo codecz ...
Read radical news here
The same applies to H.264.
VP8 doesn't have a Damoclean sword hanging over it in the form of fees ready to be jumped skyward by a cabal.
Yeah I'd totally hit some of that hot piece of ass Apple is flaunting in Main road.
Oh wait I got confused. They are utilising an upgraded processor in their upcoming iPhone refresh.
Secondly, even if you are distrbuting binary encoders/decoders you don't pay anything until you hit about 50,000 units shipped.
This is the problem with x264. If x264 becomes the de facto standard, two guys in a garage will never be able to develop their own browser that competes with all the current market leaders, because the second it starts to gain widespread acceptance it becomes subject to royalty fees that two guys in a garage will never be able to afford. The x264 standard may be open, but you can't do anything useful with that standard without paying up.
This isn't really about desktop browsers. It's all about mobility. Not a coincidence that Google announced this right when Apple announced that iPhone was coming to Verizon (Android's biggest US sales generator).
Simply put, Safari in iOS doesn't allow plugins and relies on the HTML5 Video tag to play H.264 video (which is supported natively by frameworks in iOS and MacOS). Until Android 2.2, it was the same thing in Android. Now Android supports Flash, and Google also built their own special version of Flash into desktop Chrome. So this is pretty much just a naked attempt to kill the HTML5 video tag and by extension harm iOS and help Android.
On the desktop, Chrome exists mainly to keep Microsoft reasonably honest. On Android, it's everything. Google wants to do everything it can to blunt iOS and boost Android - and trying to break iOS's video experience may be a dirty trick but all's fair in OS wars. If it were just about boosting WebM then Google would start pushing WebM, helping with video acceleration efforts, helping to produce authoring tools, and such while not changing a thing about their already built H.264 support. But they are actively removing H.264 support from the browser.
Don't be evil, my ass. Apple may not be the paragon of Free Software that most Slashdot readers want them to be, but they are supporting a standards-based tag that uses a popular, documented video standard that is prevalent in multiple media forms and well-supported by browsers and tools.
When the Chromium dev build with H.264 support removed is pushed to my computer is when I remove Chrome from my computer. Microsoft and Apple are doing the right thing here for once - at least Firefox's stance is political in nature. Google's is just about trying to kill iPhones. When Apple changes the default search engine in iOS and Safari to Bing, this'll be why they did it.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Or you make an encoder. Oh wait what's that, this is what is being discussed not the streaming costs?
However you put it this hurts Small companies who want small scale commercial projects selling cups, or small sponsorships for products who can with WebM compete freely.
Oddly those who are not hurt are the Mega-Corps Like Microsoft, and Apple.
Um, x264 is released under the GPL, and I've seen it included in recent Linux distributions.
Do video decoding layers for Linux even support codecs installed by one user for that user as opposed to codecs installed by root for all users?
Why does it matter? It "just works".
When you install Ubuntu, you don't get AVC because it's patented. Instead, to watch an AVC video in Totem for the first time, you have to connect to the Internet,* open Software Center, authenticate with sudo privileges, install gstreamer-plugins-ugly, and then affirm that you don't live in a country with AVC patents. You have to have someone with sudo access present for this.
* Should be obvious, but there's actually a feature request for being able to queue up packages in Software Center for installation the next time Update Manager runs.
If you want to call yourself an "open standard," you might want to, you know, standardize.
Why are you lying?
FFMPeg is GPL
x264 is also GPL
Do I need to go on and list a few more, or is two enough to snub your ignorance?
"His name was James Damore."
No, they are not both "open standards". That term means something. H.264 is an open standard - it went through the standardization process, with all the feedback solicitation and ratification that that implies. VP8 is a "proprietary standard" that was developed by one company, and then dumped into the public domain by another.
I would think that readers of a site that roundly derided Microsoft's OOXML "standard" would understand the difference between an "open standard" and a "proprietary standard that's been dropped into the public domain but which has seen no significant attempts at standardization," but then, I guess when Google gets involved, all logic goes out the window.
Maybe when you get older you will understand, and situations like this will not seem so weird.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
But we're not being asked to assume that H.264 is "free", are we? We know exactly how much it costs, and have contractual guarantees in the forms of royalty agreements, which also guarantee limits on future royalty increases, as well.
That is the reason why Google decided to no longer support H.264 in Chrome. Not supporting WebM and Theora in IE and Safari is very similar to any other monopolistic approach in business. As far as I know, the HTML5 tag is , not . So, Google is playing the same game as Microsoft and Apple removing H.264 from Chrome.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Secondly, even if you are distrbuting binary encoders/decoders you don't pay anything until you hit about 50,000 units shipped.
That pretty much makes the x.264 decoder illegal.
No one is saying that you can't pay as much money as you want to use a specific video codec. All we are saying is that if I want to do an html5 cloud based video app (editing encoding etc.) or website for my business or for the general public, then I should be able to use the basic tag without having to worry about getting the pants sued off me.
Actually back in August the MPEGLA said they will NEVER charge royalties for freely streamed H.264 videos.
Actually back in August they also announced that with the exception of free end user viewing all other licensing can change every 5 years. That means they could stick everyone for massive licensing costs when they feel they have enough users invested to force people to pay it.
once more into the breach
Considering Chrome-the-browser is part of Google's push towards a Chrome-OS, one could argue that Chrome *is* handing it off to the OS... itself. Chrome ultimately needs to be more self-reliant than most pieces of software out there.
Also, while an OS is there to have a common framework, that only works on single-OS applications. If you have a cross OS application, you either need to implement standardized frameworks with hooks into the host OS, or you need expensive divergent development paths.
The ______ Agenda
Judging from many of the comments here, plenty of 20-30 year olds are doing far worse than this 15 year old kid.
The grid the blogger shows has "standardized" and "development history" columns. These are both completely irrelevant to the discussion at this point. The bitstream of both formats is frozen and available to everyone NOW, so they should be judged as-is. This leave only the implementation and distribution columns, where the only codecs that are fully green are Theora and WebM. And there lies the reason Google wants WebM. It's as simple as that. .gif image disaster and what had to be done.
You can switch to WebM today and stick with it forever. Or you can go H.264 today and then switch to H.265 when they jack up the royalties before the patents expire and THEN switch to the new patented codec and repeat. Google paid $130M to free the web, and all people want to do is bitch about it. Seems we've forgotten the
This will all change when YouTube turns off Flash - HTML5 and WebM are already there.
Maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe I'm just dumb. But I can't, for the life of me, understand why it is so difficult for Apple and Microsoft just to ship libtheora with their Operating Systems and stop bothering everbody.
H.264 is a theatrical production standard, a broadcast, a cable and sattelite distribution standard. H.264 is supported by every HDTV set, video game console and set top box on the planet.
H.264 is deeply entrenched in medical, industrial and military applications. The corporate intra-net is H.264.
H.264 supports content protection.
The fact that it has not gone through an "open" standardization process does mean that it is not an "OPEN" standard.
Google bought it, and dumped it into the public domain.
By this measure, anything written by anybody and dumped into the public domain is then an "open standard," which dilutes the meaning of "open standard" to the point of meaninglessness.
Is it a standard? Sure, one which google controls, one which google owns, and one which google can change on a whim. Is it an open standard? Not until it is ratified as such by the members of a standards body.
Ok I'll come clean I havent RTFA, but it strikes me weird that a 15 year old is going to grasp all sides commercial and technological nuances of a very complex issue.
Anyone else feel the same way?
Oh geez, not a 15 year old. Anyone under $your_age is too young to be taken seriously. This should be removed immediately, so that discussion can continue the proper way: Ignoring a group of people for no reason.
VP8 is a proprietary standard
Was a proprietary format. Is not a standard (yet).
governed by Google
Only for so long as the rest of the world accepts their governship. Now that the spec is out in public, Google only retains as much control as people are willing to cede them. This will be quite a lot for now, I admit, because Google has quite a bit of clout, especially with their ownership of Youtube, but since WebM/VP8 is not a standard (yet), there's nothing preventing a proper consortium from forming and taking control if it becomes necessary. All that's required is for a sufficient amount of the industry to decide that Google's stewardship is inadequate. We've seen similar things happen in the past (EGCS, XFree86), and even have a few similar efforts (e.g. Libreoffice) going on at present.
it's worth noting that there are some concerns as to whether or not this standard would survive an IP infringement claim
That's true of just about anything, including H.264. The main difference is that we know H.264 uses/"violates" a number of existing patents. It may also be violating uncounted numbers of as-yet-unrevealed patents. We don't know. We don't know of any specific patents violated by VP8, so random claims about how it (and it alone) might be violating all sorts of random patents is basically pure FUD. Apache or Firefox or Linux might be violating any number of undiscovered patents too, so why single out VP8 to worry about?
"Google wants to do everything it can to blunt iOS and boost Android - and trying to break iOS's video experience may be a dirty trick but all's fair in OS wars."
Everything it can to blunt iOS? Then would you care to explain Google Maps for iPhone, Google Voice for iPhone, Google Latitude for iPhone, Google Goggles for iPhone...?
If Google wanted to try to kill HTML5 video, it would have been easier and more effective just to drop support for H.264, full stop. Instead, they spent $133 million to buy On2, then went to all the effort of continuing to improve the VP8 encoder, creating the WebM open source project, and building support for it (critically, among hardware developers). And the result of all that is that Apple and Microsoft can now foil Google's dastardly plans simply by including WebM in their products. HTML video would be saved and WebM would be the baseline. Hurrah!
But to support the video tag, the browser doesn't have to encode, just decode.
Instead of attacking his article based on his age, why don't you actually read it, and deal with what he wrote, not who he is. Slashdot is news for "nerds", right? I thought nerds didn't care about who a person is, only whether their arguments are logical and well supported by data/evidence/experiments?
How is H.264 closed? The spec is available for any one to buy and implement.
That's not a standard, and certainly not something purporting to be a standard for web video.
If H.264 is "closed" than so can be said for the vast majority of ISO standards.
If a lot of them are like that, and they are, then yes. They're designed to give the appearance of something everyone can implement with a lot of fences put up by members of the club who'd rather there wasn't too much competition.
Why are you lying?
FFMPeg is GPL
x264 is also GPL
Do I need to go on and list a few more, or is two enough to snub your ignorance?
He's not lying, he's just over-simplfying.
So far, software patents have not been legally applied to source code because source code has been clearly defined as "speech" as it is a means for people to express ideas.
So it is legal to write and distribute source code.
But, in most countries with software patents, it is illegal to actually use a binary built from that source code.
Its just the compiling it yourself or downloading it from a country without software patents makes it pretty much impossible to get caught.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Breaking that lock is very important. It means a lot. It's a must. H.264 will survive. VP8 will be a cost effective alternative. Nothing keeps it from being incorporated into hardware.
Google won't lock us in with their alternative. When you have no choice you will be locked. when you have a choice it is hard to lock. But the alternative must be viable and gain enough market penetration to make a difference (and the pre-existing lock can't be so entrenched that no one can compete with it).
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Easy there tiger. I used the word "wierd". As in .. "wow this is an anomalous data point"
Purposefully refrained from making a judgement call or inference. Because if he does nail all sides then its very impressive indeed!
I don't think I know enough to able to make that evaulation as to whether he does grasp it or not.
I don't have to pay anyone royalty money, to my knowledge, to go out and a build an 802.3 compliant NIC. I don't have to pay royalties to implement OSPF. H.264, on the other hand, requires me to cough up some cash to a legion of patent holders, so that I can have their blessing. x264 cannot be legally distributed in binary form (certainly not in the numbers it is distributed in) for free.
SSC
MPEG-LA could cut this whole thing off at the knees and ensure WebM is relegated to an also-ran by making a H.264 basic profile available in a completely royalty-free way... Obviously there are a lot of profiles in H.264, but pick a baseline one for the video and audio portions and make it entirely freely available for anyone to implement without signing any agreements/etc. From a purely cut-throat business position: If I were one of the major members of MPEG-LA, I'd certainly take this seriously and do anything I could to ensure there is no need for WebM to exist. Basically make myself the path of least resistance.
Now people like Apple/Microsoft are still going to pay the license fee to implement all the profiles but for projects like Firefox it would give them a way to implement a video standard that was developed through an open process, is an ISO standard, and enjoys widespread hardware acceleration support. It would also give anyone targetting browsers an easy way to do so because everything that exports or records video does so in H.264 or supports transferring to H.264. Selecting the "web standard profile 1.0" would be all that one needed to do to ensure compatibility.
It's not like this isn't what will happen anyway: what linux users haven't installed ffmpeg or VLC with included H.264 support? Honestly, all this would do is legitimize the status quo. H.264 isn't going way: iPhones/iPads alone mean video is going to be produced in H.264 (mindshare can be as important as marketshare). Add in Windows and Mac native support and you are looking at what - 80% of all web users? 90%?
I hate this political bullshit that gets in the way of just standardizing on what everyone is already doing anyway.
P.S. I don't see what is bad about handing off video/audio rendering to the OS frameworks. Frankly, if Firefox or Chrome can't render a given codec, they should fall back to that mode anyway. I may be doing things for my internal intranet or my own personal use that have nothing to do with this browser maker pissing contest so just get out of my way and let my OS render anything it knows how to render.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
I think the whole argument is really over peanuts. I care little about the technical merits of either side. Personally, my eyes cannot distinguish between good H.264 and WebM. They both look equally as good. So one might be marginally faster or even marginally better? I would rather go for the patent unencumbered technology because I don't want to be threatened with a royalty lawsuit for maybe making some money off of a video I shot. I want to completely own the videos that I shoot. It comes down to a legal argument versus a technical one. It is all well and good if there are ISO standards surrounding H.264 but if using it brings lawsuit storm clouds overhead, no thanks! Everyone here is trying to make a technical argument when the article is looking at legal issues.
You're still paying a monopoly for their blessing, and no other reason, even if they're nice enough to not raise their prices beyond what your contract stipulates.
SSC
I don't think it's a matter of them 'exempting' it, they simply can't do anything about source code.
Bingo. Source code is protected by the first amendment because it is a means for people to express ideas.
Patents don't restrict speech, only use.
So executing it is a violation of the patent, but it is impractical to enforce on anybody except large public, usually commercial, users.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
But why on earth should video playback, of all things, be made part of the OS?
This is how Windows and OSX try to do it, and it's stupid. The integrated players (WMP and QuickTime) are pretty awful, and even if they werent, there privileged position in the OS just causes problems anyway. I use VLC on every platform and certainly dont want or need these inferior players. Firefox IIRC bundles ffmpeg internally, which seems like a fairly reasonable way to do things. Of course it would be nice if Firefox would figure out how to detect and use the up-to-date copy of ffmpeg on the system already, instead of insisting on maintaining its own, but there are obviously quite a few obstacles to doing that in a sane, cross-platform way, so their solution works fine for me. The last thing I would want to see would be for them to copy IE and Safari by using WMV/Quicktime.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
There seems to be some confusion as the limits of the standard vs the limits the patents held, or believed to be held(and how many were tested in court instead of settled?) by members of MPEG-LA for H.264 and others.
No open standard can do what you say it can until the patents expire, no matter how open they are, unless they can PROVE IN COURT that the patent does not do what the patents in question restrict apply to them. That's why software patents are so harmful, they cannot be worked around in a technical manner. NO amount of clever will let you base your business on doing what is patented. No amount of clever will let you do it for free either, because the patent holder MUST either
1) sue you
2) collect royalties from you
3) get a contract from you that defends its patent
I can't find examples of a 3) being applicable to open source/open ideas initiatives right now, although small "the library of Kerhampton, middle of nowhere" can use the software without license for perpetuity has happened.
But OOXML *is* an "open standard" because it was accepted and released by a standards body - NOT because it was unceremoniously dumped into the public domain by its corporate owners.
And if you look at all of the nastiness here regarding OOXML's rapid acceptance and ratification, I'm left wondering why an unsubmitted "standard" owned by a single corporation is being viewed with any more excitement and friendliness, other than the obvious "double standard" explanation.
We can debate the technical merits of H.264 vs. WebM, and we can debate the merits of royalty-free vs. royalty-encumbered standards, but the fact remains that WebM is *not* an "open standard" as yet, and insisting that it is does not make it so.
And could you expand on what "hacks to get crap to work on your Linux distros again" you need to download? Honest question. In my experience the x264 libraries handle H.264 playback quite well on Linux... and if I'm not mistaken, x264 is released under the GPL.
Google also says "don't be evil." Look how that's turning out.
So WebM is final, until Google decides that it doesn't suit their purposes, and they change it again? Boy, that sounds like a great way to manage a standard!
I'm so glad you're okay with tying your data up in a format that can be changed on a whim by the sole owner of that format's specification. Freedom for everybody to do things the way Google demands!
Another post by someone who doesn't know what proprietary means. From the Oxford English Dictionary
H.264 are a collection of standards that utilise the Intellectual Property of the Members of Mpeg LA. This property or ownership controlled legally through license makes the format and encoders/decoders undeniably proprietary.
VP8 is based on Intellectual Property with following license (see below), this makes it non proprietary or common ownership (like the atmosphere).
While we are at it "open standard" both h.264 and VP8 have freely available, accessible technical documentation, this is all that is required to be an open standard. As regards standards bodies like ISO/ITU et al. HTML wasn't passed through one of those for 9 years and xHTML (widely used) still hasn't been, were/are they not open standards...
Their approval says volumes about the standardization of the format.
That's why they're called "standards bodies," not "openness bodies."
What the standards body adds to the process is the inclusion of numerous parties across numerous industries and areas of expertise who all contribute requirements and feedback into the standard, thus reaching a stable format that they ALL can then agree to implement.
Right now, we have Google telling the rest of the world, "Tough shit, do it the way we say. We're Google, and we know better than all of you."
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?
Why does the solution have to the problem have to be H.264? Why can't it be WebM? Why did Google kill that hope. Apple hold patents/ Microsoft hold patents why can't they offer support to WebM? Why should the Restrictive License/Patent Encumbered Codec become the standard?
Flash has won the web because its crossplatform and codec agnostic. Why would settling on a now solution be better when better formats are available. WebM2 or H.264+. I Loath Flash, but if the alternative is the web locked into a legacy restrictive licensed/patent encumbered codec. I'll take it.
Thanks. Yes, I was simplifying it on purpose, to prove a point: slashdotters don't really understand the issue. I guess that makes me a troll ;)
exp(i*pi)+1=0
Over 20 hardware manufacturers are working on WebM hardware implementations, including Broadcom and Qualcomm, the two biggest chipset makers for mobile devices. When H.264 was standardized, all computer implementations were done in software as well. The hardware acceleration came later. Three years ago, HD-DVD and BluRay war was still undecided, and smartphones that played streaming video all but non-existent. Who knows how much inroads WebM could make in the next three years.
SmugMug was starting to consider HTML5, but Google's latest decision has them moving back to Flash.
Firefox and Opera don't support H.264 either, and they have much greater market share than Google. So if this announcement changes anyone's plans, they obviously hadn't thought them through very well to begin with. Either you support two formats for the next several years until everything is sorted out, or you exclude a large portion of your audience. This is a draft standard we are talking about. You should expect early adopter issues.
So, can you use x264, ffmpeg or whatever other implementation of the h.264 "open standard" without having to pay any royalties? Can you distribute binaries of that software in countries were software patents are valid?
exp(i*pi)+1=0
Can you share ffmpeg or x264 binaries in the US without asking mpeg-la for a licence? Remember that your ignorance won't help you from being accountable for your breaking of the law ;) and if you start doing some money from your work and refuse to pay up, you'll be sued to oblivion.
exp(i*pi)+1=0
Will it also just work on XP?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Come on, it's only trolling if you are wrong! Creating honey pots for people that don't understand the issue to prove their ignorance helps getting them educated ;)
exp(i*pi)+1=0
No, they are forcing you to pay a licence to be able to use a basic infrastructure. And they are preventing any Free alternative OS in the countries were the mpeg-la patents are valid. Maybe someone else will sell you an OS properly licensed (say Red Hat or Canonical), but that won't allow you to share it (i.e. it won't be Free).
Trust me, I'm not one of those floss over-zealots, but they first came for the video tag but I didn't watch any videos online, then...
exp(i*pi)+1=0
No. You can tell people to use WebM and install the codec to view the content to.
Firefox, Chrome and Opera could even ask if you want to download it if it wasn't already installed upon the first run or whatever. Though I assume that should really have been the media players task.
You pay for a copy of ALL ISO standards - that is how they organization is financed. That does not mean they are not open.
You can usually get "non-branded" version of the same specifications from other member bodies, e.g. instead of shelling out for ISO-MOTIS you can get X.400 from ITU-T for a smaller sum if memory serves. They even point out helpfully where their spec differs from the ISO version.
Know your rights: H.264, patent licensing, and you
That is another really good FAQ on this issue. In short: understand the difference between "open" and "free" before going into a discussion on this topic.
First, you say it's just linking a library, and then you refer to rolling silicon for hardware decoding. I suspect you understand some of the issues then. Why does a company want to roll silicon? To Save $10k in licensing fees? I think not.
I can write a C++ compiler and sell it without paying anyone a dime. Could I do the same with a H.264 encoder?
Since VP-8 most likely violates some MPEG patents, you can't do that with VP8 either - at least not long term. It just *appears* to be free...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is the problem with x264. If x264 becomes the de facto standard, two guys in a garage will never be able to develop their own browser that competes with all the current market leaders
Any browser writer could implement the video tag in such a way they fall back to system supported codecs. Then they need not pay anyone even though on all platforms you would support h.264 playback.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Which also costs money.
Leaving all "open standards versus open source" debate aside, it is interesting that these discussions usually bring so much emotions on the surface. Also topic of TFA indicates need for flame.
Well, there is simple deal - Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox has nice market share. They are planning to push V8. It is their decision. It is their strategy. Will work it or not - it is not a subject here. Somehow lot of people feel offended by such competition in first place. Why? Does it suddenly cancel all movies, clips available in H.264? No. Can it kill H.264? With Firefox taking H.264 decoding from Windows - hardly. So what's the problem then?
I see good reasoning in existence of video formats free from patent and royalty shackles. Not everything on video in Internet is entertainment. Not everything has to be compatible with your latest iPhone. But I don't deny H.264 has a solid market share and place in electronic entertainment.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
But you may be able to get them from libraries, or get documents that are almost the same as the ISO ones.
All ISO standards are available from the British Library, and there's nothing to stop you reading the standard and writing your own description. Inconvenient, yes. Closed? Not really.
x264 is just an encoder, I don't see what it has to do with anything.
Also, just nitpicking, but two guys in a garage are never going to write their own (decent) browser. The web is waaaay too complicated for that now. (I agree with your point though.)
The thing is, H.264 is patent encumbered too. Almost certainly it's infringing on some Google patents, we just don't know which ones yet. Start using it and you'll find out.
That's why MPEG-LA refuses to indemnify (say that MPEG-LA is liable for lawsuits for the use of) companies that make use of H.264.
Before you try to claim I'm being facetious, it's true: On2/Google own patents that pre-date H.264 and MPEG-LA do not indemnify any licensee against patent claims by non-MPEG-LA members. So let's stop with the double standards.
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.)
My phone has a general purpose DSP which can be used to accelerate different video codecs. Accelerated WebM can be had on my phone with a software upgrade. Theora already has software available:
http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/
Pretty trivial really. In many cases the capability for hardware acceleration of WebM is already there in existing devices. No hardware upgrade required.
I think the lesson of all this is that vague feel-good terms like "open" are useless, and even somewhat less vague terms like "standard" are not particularly useful without looking at the details ("standard" is usually a nice thing, all else being equal -- but of course, it's rarely the case that all else is actually equal!).
A second lesson, of course, is that the mainstream standardization process is very, very, broken (OK, we already knew that), and that a serious rethink is in order. That'll never happen, of course, because the entrenched interests are against it, and can afford the persuasion necessary to have their way...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
No
AccountKiller
Until someone can quote a specific patent or the MPEG-LA actually acts on its threats, this is simply FUD.
H.264 is closed only in the sense that patents cover it and the patent owners require royalties.
In other respects, H.264 is very much open. The spec is available to anyone. An open source implementation of the encoder AND decoder is available to anyone. If you ignore the patents or you're in a country where they don't apply (and don't intend to export to one where they do), the H.264 spec and existing open source implementation is fully open.
Rather than blaming H.264 we should point the finger at software patents. They don't aid innovation in the way that patents were originally supposed to, and that's especially true in software. They're broken.
History tells us patent threats around video are a very real minefield. You cannot dismiss the issue as mere FUD; certainly vendors you are asking to spend a lot of money and time to encode in VP8 cannot.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The point of TFA was that having browsers delegate to the OS is actually bad for web standards, because it means all the browsers will implement a dozen different codecs, and then web site authors will have dozens to choose from, and they will all choose different ones. Then we'll need to install *all* of them in order to browse the full web. That leads to lack of standardisation. If there is two or (preferably) one codec incorporated into all browsers, that gives us a de facto standard.
Also think about what you are saying: "It's frustrating that only the OS-provided solutions (Safari and IE) are doing this right by handing it off to the OS." How can a non-OS-specific browser hand off video decoding to the OS? This would immediately render it non-portable.
Sure, Firefox could delegate to the Windows video decoder on Windows, the Mac video decoder on Mac, the Gstreamer framework on Linux, etc. But it's still not portable, it merely runs on three platforms. How can you port Firefox Mobile to the next device?
Sure, they are GPL, but the GP said "given the patent policies of many GNU/Linux distributors". He wasn't referring to licenses. Patents. Patent-encumbered GPL code is not considered "free software" and can't be included in many distros, including Debian and (with key exceptions) Ubuntu.
The version of FFmpeg included with Debian/Ubuntu, for example, has been specifically modified to remove H.264 support.
It's not about whether the spec is available (for a fee or not). It's about what you are allowed to do with the spec and have it.
Everybody here is talking about C++ also being an ISO standard. The difference is, although you have to pay for the C++ standard, once you have it, you are free to implement it, and distribute your compiler. The product created with the standard is unencumbered, and that's what makes the standard open (even if the actual text that makes up the document is copyrighted and not available for distribution). To put it another way, I could read the source to a C++ compiler and write my own spec, and nobody could sue me for it (it's my own copyrighted description of how the technology works). But with H.264, I can't distribute an implementation of the spec without being sued.
“the License will be renewable for successive five-year periods for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions. [F]or the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal.”
Like anyone can even know that
I think you are focussing on the wrong word: "open" rather than "standard".
You say that VP8 is not an "open standard" because it's not "open".
I say that VP8 is not an "open standard" because it's not a "standard".
In other words, VP8 is by any definition "open". (Sure a lot of people are saying it was developed behind closed doors. That doesn't have any bearing on what it is now.) The spec is freely available. It can be implemented and distributed for free. The source code is available, and it can be incorporated into any product for free. This is an open technology by any means.
Is it a standard? No. Not yet. No standards board has ratified it, neither is it a "de facto" standard. So allow me to correct your statement by moving the quotes:
That is a terrible article and you should feel ashamed for using it.
No it's not, HTML is designed to be an open standard that enables anyone to create content on the internet that can be read by any device or software that is designed to interpret the HTML tags. HTML version 5 is no different. Please leave your Adobe hate at the door when defining what is a standard.
Now I'll address why Gruber is full of it.
Relevance?
Simple fact is, Google does not need to pay per-install for flash due to it's free to distribute licensing agreement. H.264 does not have a similar agreement. So this is a strawman at best, Flash and h.264 have little in common in terms of licensing.
If you think it's fair that Apple does not have to support VP8 by default in Safari, why is it unfair that Chrome does not support H.264 by default in Chrome?
Another Strawman because Gruber does not understand how licensing works. The manufacturer pays per device for a H.264 license. Google does not license H.264 in Android.
YouTube also uses VP8. It is Google's goal to drop H.264 completely. I know Gruber lives in Fantasy World but in the real world chang-overs like this do not happen overnight. You cant simply cut over from System A to System B withuot some time to acclimatise users to System B (this is why Facebook hasn't foisted the new interface on everyone just yet).
Why does YouTube use H.264, well if you haven't figured that one out you're retarded, because there was no other decent alternative, this is not the case anymore.
He's asking two questions, not entirely intelligently either.
1. What Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo or anyone else does is not Googles responsibility.
2. Google didn't ban H.264, they just removed it from the default configuration. Chrome can still use H.264, it's just not installed by default. Gruber should have been smart enough to realise this is a non issue thanks to Chrome Extensions. Google just wants to stop paying for H.264. This is question disingenuous and hypocritical of Gruber, first he derides Google's decision to include Flash by default and not as a separate plugin then he derides Google for not including H.264 by default when it can and will be available via a plugin.
Who calls this a legitimate grievance, gripe or complaint?
This is nothing but a filler comment to make it look like Gruber has a point, which he does not. You really need to read what Gruber writes rather then assume he is correct. But I'll answer, I'm happy because it's a giant step towards being able to host videos from
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
WebM/VP8 will force a non-accelerated CPU-only rendering path on ALL existing hardware
So what? Tomorrow this will change. The future of the open Internet is of somewhat more consequence than battery usage over the next thirty six months, especially considering we are talking about a HTML tag for which support isn't yet widely deployed in the first place.
If battery usage is such a consideration, just stick with "evil empire" codecs like H.264 and pseudo standards like Flash in the interim. As has been mentioned elsewhere, all the DRM people apparently need to stick with something like Flash indefinitely, so there is nothing stopping paid video distributors like NetFlix from sticking with H.264.
It is the H.264 uber alles movement that is the enemy of the Internet as we know it. On a limited basis in proprietary sandboxes, it is just fine.
Key here is, HTML5 was supposed to at least partially break Adobe's stranglehold on the web by moving some content away from Flash
And put it in the hands of a far more pernicious "evil empire" than Adobe has ever hoped or pretended to be? H.264 is evil. What patents does Adobe claim on Flash? Adobe allows other implementations on a royalty free basis. Do they have any basis to do otherwise? Last, but certainly not least, Adobe doesn't come close to the audacity of requiring royalties on all Flash distributed content. If they did, Flash would be dead in the water.
Do you think any web advertiser in the world would pay royalties for Flash ads, for example. Hardly - they would switch to a royalty free alternative (as simple as static images) overnight.
So what? The GPL is nearly meaningless so far as third party patent encumbered software is concerned. No one can legally use x264 without paying patent royalties. Depending on MPEG-LA's licensing whims x264 might not be legal to distribute tomorrow in any case, at least in binary form.
Until Google submits VP8 to ISO or some other standards body, it's not an "open" standard
Standards bodies (let alone evil empire standards bodies) do not have a monopoly on "openness". VP8 is open source, openly documented, and royalty free. That makes it orders of magnitude more "open" than H.264 is.
"Patented standard" is an oxymoron. The entire purpose of patents is to makes sure that nothing can ever become a real standard, but rather a private monopoly. To the degree that H.264 is a standard at all, it is the best example of an "evil empire" standard ever developed.
H.264 is an open standard - it went through the standardization process, with all the feedback solicitation and ratification that that implies
Any standards body that produces patent encumbered "standards" isn't to be taken seriously. Patents are the enemy of standardization, and so are "standards" bodies who endorse and promote them.
We're Google, and we know better than all of you.
They certainly know better than all the H.264 shills out there. Patented "standards" like H.264 are the enemy. Patents are evil - the greatest impediment to the progress of science and the useful arts ever developed.
Google is simply saying, no we are not going to pay to distribute evil empire codecs like that. If you want to persuade every user on the planet to pony up for H.264 licensing fees, then more power to you. I would rather persuade the legislatures of the world to eliminate the plague of patents completely, or nearly so at any rate.
I would think that readers of a site that roundly derided Microsoft's OOXML "standard" would understand the difference between an "open standard" and a "proprietary standard that's been dropped into the public domain but which has seen no significant attempts at standardization," but then, I guess when Google gets involved, all logic goes out the window.
Patents anyone? OOXML isn't ideal, but it is royalty free, which means for all its warts it is universally deployable. Any patent encumbered "standard" is not. The whole idea of a "patented standard" is a joke. OOXML is mom, baseball, and apple pie compared to the darkness that something like H.264 sheds over the landscape.
Furthermore the idea that something has to be developed by a "standards body" to be an "open standard" is to make a fetish out of international bureaucracy, one which is the enemy of the open Internet in this case. The Internet has far higher standards for "openness" than most putative "standards" bodies.
How about now? How about now? How about now? ...
...it's a step towards IE9.
The last time someone tried insisting on an open standard, we got the alternative to .doc - which is used by an overwhelming majority of almost no-one.
The whole open/ closed debate is all very nice, but folks are already using H.264 - so it's not 'what shall we insist that people use', more a case of 'how do we support what people are already using'. GIF isn't open, and no-one has stopped using it - ditto JPEG. It's odd, you'd think the alternatives would at least learn *something* from MS - establish dominance, create standards. Things don't usually work the other way round.
No you can't contribute code to H.264 any more than you can to WebM. VP8 is now a standard and you can no longer enhance it any further. If you're talking about the encoders and decoders. The answer is still the same, VP8 and H.264 are equally open in that there are open implementation of both which you can contribute to. In the case of H.264, the x264 project is far better than the closed ASICs and code bases anyway, so why would you want to work on those? x264 is probably the highest quality video encoder available today. (Don't tell Jason I said that)
H.264 is an open codec, anyone can implement it whenever they want. However to use it or ship it will cost money. By the time which the MPEG-LA actually starts charging for it, I'd be surprised if most of the patents of interest weren't ready to expire. But, there is certainly concern over whether use of the codec will be free. Since I have copies of the spec and the drafts are freely available and accurate (though not always complete), I consider the codec to be open. Unlike the VP8 codec, the specs are actually written well enough that you can pretty much implement a standard compliant implementation from the spec itself. I'm sure VP8 will get better over time, but last time I read the spec, it depended heavily on the code.
WebM doesn't meet the spec as far as open development is concerned either. You can implement it and you can even contribute to the reference codec, but, you won't be making changes to the spec any time soon.
The argument is complement wrong sided, let's forget one sided. The issue shouldn't be WebM against H.264, but it should be users against the browser companies.
The standard for the video tag should require that all browser vendors provide documentation on how to extend their browsers to support more decoders. The browser vendor shouldn't be allow to force you to use one codec or another. They can however choose which codecs to support by default.
Google and Opera should be reprimanded and boycotted by the users who should be outraged that they haven't released SDKs for extending their browsers to support more codecs as plugins.
Let's face it, WebM and H.264 are both superb codecs. Well, they're basically the same codec, just implemented a little differently. VC-1 should be included in that as well.
But point being they're both great codecs but compared to tomorrow's codecs and what we have learned since they were implemented, they're shit. H.265 has set a goal for decreasing the bit consumption by 50% for equal quality. WebM's successor will attempt to achieve the same to remain competitive.
What will the debate be later when there's a new generation of codecs? Will we still argue WebM vs. H.264 or will we allow the users to install new codecs that support higher quality video on lower bandwidth?
Opera can fix their problem pretty easily. They only need to compile the GStreamer codec wrapper and add code to build a pipeline instead of using a static pipeline. It's really quite simple to achieve in GStreamer.
Google can do the same with ffmpeg.
This would allow both browsers to support all system supported codecs from day one. So, we're all arguing over whether one inept browser vendor is better than the other hated browser vendor because some idiots chose not to use the multimedia libraries they chose properly.
So, quite your wah wah wah. If Microsoft and Apple want to pay the decoder licenses for H.264, let them and if the video provider chooses to do the same, then let them. On the other hand, if Google wants to provide WebM plugins for all browser and provide authoring/publishing/streaming software, let them. Then when the new stuff comes around, whoever publishes a codec for it can distribute it for all browsers as well.
From where? That would mean I'd have to keep an up-to-date list of all the places to get the WebM codec for all the various platforms that my visitors might be using, if one even exists. I don't mind other codecs being supported through whatever framework is available to the user - but there should always be at least one common codec that can be relied upon being present, regardless of platform.
I don't think it stands up to any of the FOSS definitions of "open".
I assume by "it" you refer to a document specifying the H.264 video encoding standard.
By the FSF's definition of Free Software and the OSI's definition of an Open Source license, I'm guessing the document isn't "free" or "open". And if you like free software, that's not a problem.
The reason is: what it means for software to be free is that you are free to run, modify and redistribute it, as well as redistribute your modified versions.
Let's say I apply this to RFC 793 (the old TCP one): I distribute a document claiming to be the TCP standard, but I have changed so it's all wrong (say, I swapped the ports fields with the sequence number). Then people go and implement my false TCP "standard". Then shit breaks. Not good.
You really want the standard documents to be fixed once the standard has been ratified by the relevant organization(s) and/or people(s). It seems to be more friendly to the bazaar-style development practiced in large part by developers of free software if the standard document is freely redistributable, but not modifiable.
(On the other hand, maybe putting a crypto signature on one document and letting people change it without keeping the signature is fine, if you can make people look for the signature...)
I'm not sure the FSF have a definition of "Open Standard". As a first approximation, I can propose: a standard for a (class of) piece of software is "Free" (or "Freedom Respecting") if it is possible to create a piece of software implementing it which is free software.
(I won't even guess as to a definition of "Open Platform". That's besides the point for this discussion anyways.)
No, actually, it is the other way around: there is no inherent right
How have you found out? I would like to know what inherent rights there are, but socialists, libertarians and geolibertarians all disagree. Who's right, and how do we know? If we prove our result, which axioms do we use? How do we know those axioms are the right ones?
Translated: I think it's all a matter of opinion. There are no objective moral truths (only factual ones). If you disagree, please prove one :-)
In this case, the right thing to do would be to release it to a video decoding layer for Linux
I think it's called mplayer :)
Why do we care about the policy choices of some Linux distros? You will always find policy choices that outlaw things.
Because all your installed base are belong to these distros. If well over 80 percent of desktop PCs running Linux are running either Fedora, CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu, then of course these distros' policies will determine how companies deal with GNU/Linux as a whole.
There are GPL H.264 encoders and decoders.
Just because the copyright in a work is licensed under the GNU General Public License doesn't mean the United States patents on the method that the work implements are necessarily licensed compatibly with the GPL.
So you've mentioned another package that does the same thing and has the same patent problems. Please allow me to rephrase my other post:
When you install Ubuntu, you don't get AVC because it's patented. Instead, to watch an AVC video in Totem for the first time, you have to connect to the Internet, authenticate with sudo privileges, install gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg, and then affirm that you don't live in a country with AVC patents. You have to have someone with sudo access present for this.
From where?
I said you could.
I don't see why the browser or media player integrated in the browser shouldn't be able to figure it out and inform the user by itself though.
That would mean I'd have to keep an up-to-date list of all the places to get the WebM codec for all the various platforms that my visitors might be using
Not once it was widespread.
but there should always be at least one common codec that can be relied upon being present
H.264 is (or well, not with the stupid browsers picking their own format and not using whatever is installed in the OS), and WebM could be to if people decided to.
(I was earlier thinking about saying it could be distributed with the browser but that would be like Apple does with iTunes and Quicktime and all sorts of crap and I don't think people want to download it time and time again even though they already have it installed. So .. Better have the browser help them out if it's not there already. It's very simple to do and your webpage don't have to do shit if the browser inform your user either at start that it need to fetch a new video codec used for HTML video or upon loading your page with WebM content.)
Patents are an orthogonal issue to whether or not the standard is open - patents are related to whether the standard can be considered "free".
If Google wants to create a free, open standard that competes with H.264, then they should submit their WebM / VP8 standards to a standards body. If they're not willing to do that, then why should anybody be willing to pretend that it's a widely reviewed industry standard that has a large amount of support?
It Is Time to Standardize a Royalty-Free Video Codec http://www.robglidden.com/2011/01/time-to-standardize-a-royalty-free-video-codec/ Rob Glidden on January 18, 2011
Patents are an orthogonal issue to whether or not the standard is open.
Add quotation marks there around "standard" and "open" and you have it just about right. As I said before the Internet has far higher standards for "openness" than some consortium of money grubbers like MPEG, ITU, or the ISO.
Or in other words, your preferred definition is slanted towards patent trolls, who like to pretend to the entire world that something they have government granted monopolies on is both "open" and "standard" merely because they came to an agreement with other patent trolls in a process fair and balanced to the interest of patent trolls and other leeches on the general welfare.
The thing is, VP8 is patent encumbered too.
Really? Prove it! We know that H.264 is patent encumbered. It is plausible to think that VP8 might be as well, but there's no actual evidence, and a company that is famous for its search technology claims to have found nothing. Who should I trust: some random slashdotter or the best searchers on the planet? :p
In any case, it's just as plausible that H.264 has unknown stealth patents lurking to bite the unwary as it is that VP8 does. So there's no obvious advantage to either one there. And both formats have huge money behind them. Google may not be offering direct indemnification (though neither is MPEGLA), but I don't think there's any question that a direct threat to VP8 would bring the full force of their legal department. Just as a direct threat to H.264 would bring the full force of the MPEGLA members' legal departments.
From my point of view (as a mostly disinterested/uninterested 3rd party observer), VP8 looks a lot safer. Plus, its supported by my OS vendors, unlike H.264. I'll start worrying about VP8 soon after Debian does, and not one minute before.