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

WebM will never catch on

[javacowboy]

Why?

1) WebM/VP8 probably infringe on several MPEG-LA patents (I don't agree with software patents, but U.S. courts do)
2) Google has not offered to indemnify anybody who uses WebM.
3) Mobile hardware has H.264 compatibility built-in, not so for WebM,
4) The media companies have encoded their content in H.264, they can't be bothered to re-encode it to WebM.

This is the same reason that Linux won't catch on on the desktop (arguably, the only reason). Media companies (RIAA, MPAA, and game publishers) will never support these open formats (OGG Vorbis, OGG Theora, WebM). The developers of the closed formats (MP3, H.264, GIF) will insist on getting paid one way or the other, which means their formats can't be natively supported by an open source OS.