Google Submits VP8 Draft To the IETF

An anonymous reader writes "Google has submitted an Internet Draft covering the bitstream format and decoding of VP8 video to the Internet Engineering Task Force. CNET's Stephen Shankland writes, 'Google representatives published the "VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide" at the IETF earlier this month, but that doesn't signal standardization, the company said in a statement. The document details the VP8 bitstream — the actual sequence of bytes into which video is encoded. "We submitted the VP8 bitstream reference as an IETF Independent RFC [request for comments] to create a canonical public reference for the document," Google said. "This is independent from a standards track." The IETF document could help allay one concern VP8 critics have raised: that VP8 is defined not by documentation of the bitstream but rather by the source code of the software Google released to implement VP8. But the IETF document still plays a subordinate role to that source code.'"

Comments

Re:Venue choice?

[arivanov]

Yes there is. Read on the MSFT XML history of going through ISO. It says all that there is to be said about ISO certification.

IETF may have its own politics (same as any standards body). However, out of all standards bodies it is the one which is probably the least corrupt.

Re:Venue choice?

[msauve]

Well, let's see. The ISO has OSI-IP, IDRP, IS-IS, CMIP, X.400, X.500, etc. The IETF has TCP/IP, BGP, OSPF, SNMP, SMTP, LDAP, etc.

I think it's pretty clear why they created an IETF RFP.

Re:WebM will never catch on

[TheRaven64]

VP8 probably infringe on several MPEG-LA patents

Does it? The MPEG-LA has not produced any patents that it infringes, On2 presumably checked the (easy-to-find) list of MPEG-LA patents before shipping VP8, and the MPEG-LA is currently asking people to come forward with patents that cover VP8 - not something it would need to do if it already had a large pool of them.

Google has not offered to indemnify anybody who uses WebM

The MPEG-LA does not offer indemnity either. This was demonstrated quite well a couple of months ago when MPEG-LA licensees were sued for patent infringement over H.264.

Mobile hardware has H.264 compatibility built-in, not so for WebM

Most 'H.264 hardware' is really a DSP with a few things like [I]DCT in hardware. This same hardware can used for VP8 (it's typically already used for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 ASP).

The media companies have encoded their content in H.264, they can't be bothered to re-encode it to WebM

YouTube is owned by Google, and they're going to be making everything WebM soon. I wouldn't be surprised if they only made the low-quality versions H.264 in the future and required WebM for the higher-quality encodings. This would let them keep iPhone users happy (low quality encoding isn't such a problem on a tiny screen), while forcing desktop users to install a WebM plugin.