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Google Submits VP8 Draft To the IETF

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-could-have-had-a-vp8 dept.

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.'"

4 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Venue choice? by Compaqt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is there any significance to the fact that Google chose IETF instead of ISO (where MPEG-LA and M$ submitted H.264 and OOXML)?

    --
    I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
    1. Re:Venue choice? by msauve · · Score: 3, Interesting
      It takes some time before an RFC can become a proposed IETF standard.

      A Proposed Standard specification is generally stable, has resolved known design choices, is believed to be well-understood, has received significant community review, and appears to enjoy enough community interest to be considered valuable.

      - RFC 2026

      There aren't that many actual IETF standards. The standards process isn't even a standard. HTTP is only a draft standard. RFC 1918 (which defines the 10.0.0.0/8 - 172.16.0.0/12 - 192.168.0.0/16 private IP addresses) is only a proposed standard, yet was published in 1996, and is in universal use.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  2. Re:If Microsoft was doing this by Burpmaster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If microsoft was doing what google is attempting to do we would all be screaming bloody murder

    What, you mean producing a standard that actually matches the implementation and irrevocably granting free use of the necessary patents to everyone? How do you know how people would respond? Microsoft has never done that. They'e done the exact opposite, though...

  3. Hey Google? You want to win this war? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Take some that immense R&D budget that you have and put a team of programmers on the task of getting VP8 encode/decode acceleration via OpenCL/CUDA.
    The x264 team is sitting back and saying it can't be done, meanwhile a university has already posted the code for a modified x264 that uses the GPU to accelerate the pyramid search. The race is already started.

    If x264 is further improved for GPU support and this makes it into FFMPEG, then the race is over...