YouTube Now Transcoding All New Uploads To WebM

theweatherelectric writes "According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video. Google's James Zern writes, 'Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we're also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we've already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We're focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we've made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we'll keep you posted on our progress.'"

Comments

Open Standards Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Go WebM!

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.

WebM is produced by one firm, controlled by one firm, has had no real determination of patent liability, and is documented well by... no-one.

In organisational terms, WebM is closer to Flash and H.264 to HTML. In patent terms, WebM is undefined: a single corporation's promise is meaningless (going to hand over control of WebM to a non-profit consortium to be developed by a working group or some such? thought not) and there has been little to no effort to determine who may be owed what (legally speaking) for its implementation or deployment.

tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.

Of course, the "open" solution is allowing lots of competing plug-in technologies rather than dropping support for everything which doesn't support your desire for control and resultant bottom line. Google, as the new Microsoft, are learning to take the latter approach.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[walshy007]

H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.

At any point, someone not part of the group could pipe up and sue h264 for patent infringement, sure it's the same with webm, but to pretend that h264's patent liabilities are 'well known' is a farce. Sure some known patents are covered for, but there is no denying the possibility that there are submarine patents somewhere for it, just like there could be for webm.

That is the crux of it. All the people who made mpeg would have to do to get everyone on the h264 bandwagon is to say, unlimited royalty free redistributable license for all forever, and there would be no issue, since they won't do that, it's being worked around.

In other words, wait until the law suits start flying before you say webm is a patent minefield, or instead name some yourself that it breaks that it is liable for.

tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.

If that were the case, there would be no issue shipping implementations of it with free operating systems.

Of course, the "open" solution is allowing lots of competing plug-in technologies rather than dropping support for everything which doesn't support your desire for control and resultant bottom line.

Last I checked people can make plugins for both firefox and chromium, what is your issue here? they have to ship in-built support for every third party format now? no, they can support what they want to support and others are free to implement plugins that add extra.

Google might very well be becoming a skynet equivalent, but that doesn't mean you have to hate the nicer things they do for us. Their goal is for an open internet that is completely platform agnostic, it gives them more eyeballs which is what they sell. That it is in googles best interest to provide us with an open internet is convenient and you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Utter rubbish.

http://www.osnews.com/permalink?470666

tl;dr "Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of this specification"

IOW: Anyone may use, anyone may implement, full permission is granted irrevocably and in perpetuity (as long as you don't sue Google).

Specification is documented and submitted to the ITEF.

An independent implementation is here:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/499

Your claim "H.264 is far more open than WebM" couldn't be more wrong if you tried for millennia to make it more incorrect.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[mug funky]

webm = matroska(VP8,vorbis). there's some kinda subtitles in there too.

matroska is patent free and open standard

vorbis is patent free (by design) and has been around and in pretty wide use long enough that if there were submarines they'd have sunk by now.

VP8 was the last work of On2 tech, who famously donated the patents and source for VP3 to xiph for use in theora. there have been no challenges in court to this, and VP3 was used for years in flash video and youtube itself.

now, the technical problems:

matroska doesn't actually support standard frame rates - it has a frame length stored on every frame, set in nanoseconds. this mauls standard rates like 24000/1001 and 30000/1001, but it isn't a huge issue as a competent splitter will know what to do.

vorbis doesn't really have a lot of problems, though computational complexity (and hence battery time) used to be an issue. not sure if it is still (i think it used to be float only, but i've no idea).

VP8 is a big mess and has some roadblocks to quality. these appear to have been a consequence of on2 consciously avoiding as many patents as possible. the x264 crew appear to be working on a VP8 encoder, so we'll see what happens there.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[juasko]

Yepp, unless WebM is govenred by ISO/IEC or IEEE or any other similar organization I don't want it.

Time for a competing service to sky rocket supporting standards. So far I'm all into MPEG and wont change that unless an other standard comes along. Will never make WebM content for any purpose just as little I do any WMV.

Everything i code goes into h.264, finale.

All should have similar stand, I'm not against WebM, just standardize it and I'm on the wave, but unless that happens I will resist.

Would not surprise me if this evil move from google is in cooperation with Adobe. Google promise to fight for flash, and Adobe will fight for WebM as they promised already.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[juasko]

the whole h.264 patents are submarine patents for WebM, yes I exaggerate but thats how it is.

There is no issue in shipping implementations of h.264 in free systems. Just that nobody wants to pay the licenses. Though it's quite small fee.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[juasko]

It's more open than webm, it's less free.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[GooberToo]

H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.

Why do people keep trolling with this garbage? H.264 is patent encumbered and the organization is constantly and clearly trying to position it to leverage for massive royalties down the road. They openly admit that. Its also closed sourced.

WebM is produced by one firm, controlled by one firm, has had no real determination of patent liability, and is documented well by... no-one.

What you mean is, it appears to be equally patent free, guarded by one of the largest tech companies on earth who clearly have an extremely important vested interest in its health and survival, is extremely well documented given that the source is freely available. Furthermore, anyone can use the codec in their project (modified or unmodified) for anything.

and there has been little to no effort to determine who may be owed what (legally speaking) for its implementation or deployment.

And this is just bullshit and stupidity. A company the size of Google, as standard practice, is absolutely going to perform patent searches and evaluate their current and future liabilities. Unless you have proof they specifically did not do what every large company does, you're trolling and talking about your ass. What a surprise.

tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.

Except in the real world where is absolutely is not unless you're a complete fucking idiot.

The bottom line is, WebM is already competing with H.264 in visual quality. WebM's encoding performance (time) is worse than H.264 but still acceptable. On the other hand, WebM has superior decoding attributes and is on par with H.264 (software vs hardware). With newer hardware which now supports WebM, WebM provides a superior decoding experience which directly translates into better battery life. Future hardware is expected to widen the gap even more.

The combination means WebM has visual parity with H.264 while providing superior battery life. For the majority of the world, no one gives a crap about encoding time and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter at, all so long as its good enough. Add to the fact its perpetually royalty free, open source, freely available licensing, and seemingly, patent unencumbered (which is technically on equal footing with H.264), WebM looks better than H.264 anyway you want to look at it so long as you're not a complete fucking idiot.

Hell, the fact that the H.264 consortium is going out of their way to patent troll WebM and has yet to state they've found anything is yet more proof of WebM's unencumbered patent status.

So please, stop with your fucking idiocy and stop spewing lies and trolling. H.264 is only more attractive if either you're a complete fucking idiot or you have a vested financial interest in H.264. For the rest of the world, WebM is the winner.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[LingNoi]

Yepp, unless WebM is govenred by ISO/IEC or IEEE or any other similar organization I don't want it.

Seriously? The ISO (I sold out) organisation that Microsoft bribed to push their standard through. Who gives a shit about them? Let me guess, Microsoft employee or partner employee?

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

upto wich gpl u use

even better choose bsd or apache

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Goaway]

H.264 is patent encumbered and the organization is constantly and clearly trying to position it to leverage for massive royalties down the road.

They are trying to position it for massive royalities by... declaring it free of royalties for web streaming forever? That's one cunning plan right there.

Its also closed sourced.

This statement is non-sensical. A format can not be "open source" or "closed source". It can be openly documented or not. h.264 is quite well and openly documented, and the best implementation of an encoder for it, x264, is 100% open source.

guarded by one of the largest tech companies on earth who clearly have an extremely important vested interest in its health and survival,

You could say the same of Android, and look at how well that is working out.

A company the size of Google, as standard practice, is absolutely going to perform patent searches and evaluate their current and future liabilities. Unless you have proof they specifically did not do what every large company does,

Again, Android.

The bottom line is, WebM is already competing with H.264 in visual quality.

Not at all. On its best settings, it competes with h.264 on its worst settings. On equal terms, WebM still loses every time.

On the other hand, WebM has superior decoding attributes and is on par with H.264 (software vs hardware). With newer hardware which now supports WebM, WebM provides a superior decoding experience which directly translates into better battery life.

You seem to be confusing WebM with Theora. Theora requires less work to decode. WebM does not, it has some features which require quite a bit of processing power during decoding. It also has much less support for dedicated hardware, which gives h.264 another edge in speed and power usage.

So please, stop with your fucking idiocy and stop spewing lies and trolling.

Before swearing at and accusing others of trolling, make sure you know what you are talking about.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

MS standars?....

What ever, ISO is a standardizing organization. Who came up with what and standardized it, is no matter to me. Was it Apple, MS or who ever.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[GooberToo]

They are trying to position it for massive royalities by... declaring it free of royalties for web streaming forever? That's one cunning plan right there.

I stopped read right there given that its factually incorrect. Its royalty free for non-commercial use. You must pay royalties for commercial use.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Goaway]

So basically if someone doesn't agree with them you do not listen to them.

And then you think you have the moral high ground to go around calling others "trolls".

Right.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[DurendalMac]

Vorbis hasn't yet been picked up by a big, fat, juicy target. Patent trolls tend to wait for that before suing. If Apple picked up Vorbis (not bloody likely, but for the sake of argument) and started trumpeting it, you can bet that patent trolls would crawl out of the woodwork.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Raenex]

All should have similar stand

Fuck off. I'm not supporting a patented standard that requires royalties.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[GooberToo]

No, when people use well established bullshit to support their point of view, I stop listening. That is the case here. As such, I'm tired of morons spewing ignorance and lies to support their holy war of stupidity; as very much seems to be the case here.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Goaway]

All you're managing to do here is show that you are a fanatic who will refuse to even listen to anything you don't already agree with.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[EraserMouseMan]

YouTube is Google's product. They can encode their video as dog poo if they want to.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Yeah, this is a case of, "what the hell else do you want?" They blew it as wide open as possible.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[GooberToo]

Or...more realistically, someone who knows you're completely full of shit and have no fucking clue what you're talking about. I even glimpsed at your previous post - absolute lies and bullshit.

You are either a troll or a fucking idiot. Literally. Period.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[mug funky]

true, ish.

iRiver were pretty big before iPod took over completely. they've supported vorbis for years.

also, game makers use a lot of vorbis exactly because there's no need to worry about licensing. same deal with bink video (which is kinda not that good but has some unique features).

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[SnowZero]

There is no issue in shipping implementations of h.264 in free systems. Just that nobody wants to pay the licenses.

If you have to pay, it isn't free anymore (in either sense of free).

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[tehcyder]

YouTube is Google's product. They can encode their video as dog poo if they want to.

To match the content you mean?

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[tehcyder]

Its royalty free for non-commercial use. You must pay royalties for commercial use.

Wow, that's pretty fucking evil.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Goaway]

You haven't managed to address a single point I made, though.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously this modded troll,

Troll moderators that's what it is. Google homogenits is what they are.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[GooberToo]

Actually, I did. Thusly the stupidity comments were born. The fact you have no clue why your comments are stupidity is sad. Your posts are on troll after another. I seriously can't figure out if you really are that stupid or are purposely trolling. Either way, its been answered.

Re:Open Standards Fanboy

[juasko]

That is fully up to those who want to ship their software. They are allowed to ship freely to anyone. Still they have to pay the license.

Stupid, yes. But that is the legal case here.

Now what about 3d?

[elucido]

When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?

Re:Now what about 3d?

[Jappus]

When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?

If I had to venture a guess, somewhere around April 1st next year.

Re:Now what about 3d?

[Danieljury3]

Actually its been around for a while While

Re:Now what about 3d?

[macemoneta]

When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?

Youtube is already in 3D, and has been for some time. You can find 3D videos with this search:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yt3d%3Aenable%3Dtrue&search=tag

3D videos have an additional '3D' menu at the bottom, to select the type of 3D output preferred.

Re:Now what about 3d?

[johnsnails]

Wished I knew how t o/ if i could mod you up.

Re:Now what about 3d?

[treeves]

First you need mod points, then the comment has be below maximum moderation (+5). No one can up-mod a +5 comment.

Re:Now what about 3d?

[tehcyder]

Actually its been around for a while While

There seems to be some sort of red ghosting effect on that video.

Quality?

[Anonymous Coward]

No doubt at the lowest possible bit-rate giving even worse video quality than they already do.

It works like this

[Anonymous Coward]

"It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM."

OMG! Quick, someone implement this ground breaking technique into EVERYTHING!

Dear Slashdot, what point in the past do you formally recognize 'yourself' as having become redundant / post-shark jumper?

Anon

Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[erroneus]

When you have critical mass, use it. Microsoft and others can bitch about their patent encumbered format 'til they are blue in the face, but Google knows when it comes to video on the web, Youtube is the first thing people think of and the first place they look.

If no other move makes a difference in this html5 format war, this move is the blitzkrieg that will pretty much end it quickly and definitely.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Spad]

Step 1: All videos available as WebM
Step 2: HD videos only available as WebM
Step 3: All videos only available as WebM

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 4: Massive anti-trust fines!

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[erroneus]

In this case, Google isn't selling a product -- just making content available. (They do sell advertising, not that I see much if any of it) It's "their content" and they can put it into any format they want and make it available to anyone who wants to see it. They will just need a browser with support for WebM... whether that is in the form of a plug-in or native to the application. It will work for everyone and will cost the users nothing.

Antitrust cannot really be used to require the use of proprietary or patent encumbered stuff. Well, it "can" but I don't think it would fly.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[lxs]

Step 4: all WebM videos transcoded in the next codec they adopt.
Repeat until nothing is left of grandpa's videos.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[mjwx]

If no other move makes a difference in this html5 format war, this move is the blitzkrieg that will pretty much end it quickly and definitely.

The format troops will be home by Christmas.

Unfortunately I dont share your optimism here. Google may have launched a veritable operation Overlord with WebM but the Axis of MPEG wont give up that easily.

Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front. Lets just face it, not being able to watch a video in the browser and having to open a separate application is just a pain in the butt, even on Android with supports true multitasking. Apple wont permit WebM to be in the browser and I'm not sure if MS will permit an alternate browser on WP7.

The desktop battle is trivial, the allies of Firefox and Chrome have already got dominance on the desktop, it's on the phone that the battle will be waged.

This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end but perhaps it is the end of the beginning.

I've carried on the war analogy a bit far haven't I?

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[mjwx]

Step 1: All videos available as WebM
Step 2: HD videos only available as WebM
Step 3: All videos only available as WebM

Step 4: Profit (cmon, this is the one time this meme is appropriate, Google want to make a profit from YouTube).

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[mjwx]

Step 4: Massive anti-trust fines!

Step 5: here you go Mr DOJ, the full specifications for the WebM format, in exactly the way we've implanted them, oh and have some source code too.

I've got enough for you too Mr EU, dont you worry.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Bert64]

MS are not really relevant in the mobile market right now, meaning it's pretty much a battle between Google and Apple.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: All videos available as WebM
Step 2: HD videos only available as WebM
Step 3: All videos only available as WebM

Step 4: No longer use YouTube.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, videos in the iPhone aren't viewed in the browser anyway. YouTube videos actually open up in the dedicated YouTube app, and other media types open up in a QuickTime process; they're already doing the "app switching" you're talking about.

Apple would need to adopt the codec in QuickTime, and would have to update the YouTube app to be able to leverage the updates in QuickTime, which may not require any coding (perhaps only a recompilation). Whether this actually happens is up for debate.

As for WP7, they'll need a large enough market share to be able to matter in this debate. That may happen in the future, but it's not the case right now.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[tepples]

What do you mean? YouTube saves the original uploaded video. When it added MPEG-4 AVC to available formats, it didn't go back to the FLVs; it went back to the uploaded video. Likewise, I assume, with these WebM videos.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[juasko]

Nope because you as consumer chose WebM, no antitrust there
So to stop step 2 and 3 never do step 1.

Step 4 will never happen.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[juasko]

Exactly why we users should shun WebM as long as it's not governed by a third-party standardization organizations like ISO/IEC.

But hey why do that ISO/IEC already has one. ISO/IEC 14496-10. Oh it happened to be known as MPEG4-10 or just simply h.264

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[juasko]

Nope, h.264 vids on youtube opens directly no special youtube app at all. Yep I have an iPhone. But forget that when google goes WebM.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[archen]

And I'm wondering if Apple might change their mind if WebM gains enough traction, that their support would further encourage everyone dumping flash.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[slim]

Again: there is no suggestion that YouTube will stop delivering H.264.

YouTube keeps multiple versions of every video, and your client negotiates which one it wants. Size, format, etc.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[RicoX9]

Except for the whole patent encumbrance bear trap in h.264.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

...and Google is winning. Apple may have to add WebM eventually to keep their 'just works' image.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

IANAL: Since Youtube "owns" WebM, if they were to suddenly make all content only available via WebM, that would seem to be leveraging a dominant position in one market (Online Video) to push a product in another market that some less scrupulous characters might argue is being "dumped" by virtue of its being freely available.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[erroneus]

Google certainly owns the domain for the webmproject.org site. But as far as "owning" it goes? It's open source so "everyone" owns it and "noone" owns it. It's using a BSD license which means it can be put anywhere and even taken into closed source implementations if desired. This is especially important since closed source implementers would not be limited or required to put out the source code of anything they modified and published. I am pretty sure that was by design as the expectation would be that Microsoft and Apple would be reluctant to implement it if it were under a GPL license. (Microsoft and Apple are well known to use BSD licensed open source projects in their own products.)

And once again, since Google has what I would call critical mass for web based video content, should Microsoft attempt any "embrace and extend" nonsense, it would be less likely to work in the future unless standards are followed properly.

In any case, to get antitrust going, it would have to be shown that other parties are somehow being EXCLUDED from participation in the market. This is not possible with an open source implementation of a standard without any patents or other restrictions. (And a BSD license is without any effective restrictions.) Under the current license, it would be impossible to exclude anyone else from participating in the market, so antitrust allegations would be baseless.
 

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[pla]

Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front.

"Hey, let's deliberately prevent our users from accessing the single largest content provider in the world as part of our pissing contest with Google over meaningless more-or-less identical (to the end user) media formats - That should boost our market share!"

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Bent Spoke]

Lets just face it, not being able to watch a video in the browser and having to open a separate application is just a pain in the butt,

The converse is worse: being forced to use a browser to watch videos, especially via, flash is a pain.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Score Whore]

Just because whatever you are leveraging to advance your business is open source doesn't mean you aren't committing anti-trust violations. In this case they are using youtube to push webm to drive up their browser and cellphone OS market share.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[517714]

Exactly why we users should shun WebM as long as it's not governed by a third-party standardization organizations like ISO/IEC.

Yeah 'cause we all just love what the way they handled ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML).

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

And on that front (mobile, that is), Google seems to be currently winning, and win or lose looks to remain at least a substantial chunk - and supposedly as of "Gingerbread" (Android 2.3) and later, WebM support is supposed to be provided. Granted, it's likely done in software rather than hardware-accelerated on current devices, but it means that the format will at least hypothetically work for quite a few mobile devices.

(I haven't tested it yet on Cyanogenmod 7, so I can't confirm that it works there, but I believe it is supposed to.)

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Fight for what purpose? and in what way?

Microsoft has already stated they will do nothing to stop WebM being used in IE. And as a late comer to the current smartphone scene, and no zombie army like Apple, deliberately ignoring or making it difficult to play a free of license fees codec would be incredibly stupid. Why give the competition a selling point to beat you over the head with. Apple gets praised for not doing something. Microsoft gets pilloried. He lost sales when the phone can;t play Youtube is far bigger than the lost profits from a share of h264.

Apple will be Apple, and the holy one will proclaim it unclean. The faithful will announce a virtual Jihad with cries of WebM being dead, and nobody wanting it. Just like 3G, cut and paste, Flash, multi tasking, and the ability to make phone calls on a phone, and any other technology/system that the holy one pronounces to be a world of hurt. And the world will still keep on turning. Fanboys will still whine about being the biggest seller of a single handset or tablet, but will be lost in the sea of Android and Win7 and WebOS and what ever else units. Apple phone sales have pretty much peaked. Android is still growing, Microsoft is coming on, Blackberry is still hanging in there.

Meanwhile, everybody else will use the new codec and not even notice. Upload a video clip to Youtube, and it gets converted automatically and seamlessly.
Visit a website and it will at most, pop up a little flash download like box, asking you to install the codec Unless you are on Linux, in which case, it will play out of the box. And will do so on the myriad embedded devices before long, if not already. Job done.

Multi platform, multi device. What is not to like.

On the hardware side.. Similar thing. Camera maker X has an option to install a royalty attracting codec for the h264 capability, or the option to add WebM free of charge. Or both.. What do you think they will do? Especially for consumer grade stuff that is destined for Youtube anyway.
Set top boxes.. Same thing.

Software.. Please. One update and the problem is solved.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[BasilBrush]

I'm guessing Google always keep the original upload, regardless of what format it was in. It's the sensible thing to do, and stupidity isn't usually a Google trait.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you think Apple would not permit WebM in a browser? Apple's browser complies with other open standards.
I'd expect the opposite is true.. Steve Jobs will jump on HTML5/WebM and support that instead of flash in their products since it doesn't have any of the things that Apple complained about with flash (CPU only, crashy, full of security vulnerabilities, etc.)

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[steveha]

Step 4: Profit (cmon, this is the one time this meme is appropriate, Google want to make a profit from YouTube).

The profit comes from selling ads.

The WebM thing is just a way for Google to control their costs, without losing control of their business.

They could encode everything in MPEG1 H.261 and not have to worry about patents; but then the files would be huge and they would have their net connections totally saturated with all the extra bits. That would be stupid.

They could encode everything in MPEG4 H.264, and then once their whole business was committed, the MPEG Licensing Authority could raise the royalties to crazy levels, and Google would have absolutely no choice but to just pay up. That would be stupid.

By using WebM, which is not as good as H.264 but is not too much horribly worse, Google gets reasonable file sizes, reasonable network traffic, and can predict exactly how much in royalties the will need to pay in the future (i.e., zero).

WebM is a purely defensive move, to keep costs down. So, yeah, profit, because profit is revenues minus costs. But Google isn't trying to extract money out of WebM.

My prediction is that H.264 will continue to have its users; it is still the best video coder out there (where "best" means highest visual quality per encoded bit; or, to put it another way, smallest output file for a given quality level). But WebM means that the MPEG Licensing Authority will be less able to extract large amounts of money out of the video community. (They hate that.)

steveha

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[steveha]

we users should shun WebM as long as it's not governed by a third-party standardization organizations

Why?

H.264 is a frozen standard. If you want to implement it, you have to conform to that standard.

WebM is a frozen standard. If you want to implement it, you have to conform to that standard.

How is the one any better or worse than the other?

Why should we care what the history of development of the standard was? Both are frozen.

But only one standard requires that the user buy a patent license, and that standard is not WebM. So if you don't want to pay royalties, or if you want to be able to distribute free software that is not encumbered by patents, WebM is the clear choice.

steveha

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[toddestan]

Yeah, that would be like Apple not allowing Flash on the iPhone. Oh...wait....

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[mjwx]

The converse is worse: being forced to use a browser to watch videos, especially via, flash is a pain.

Explain.

Thought not. You're just bashing flash for no reason because it's the "in" thing to do.

Why does no one use a separate application for youtube on the desktop if using a browser to view YouTube is so horrible an experience?

Your point is not very well though out. Especially considering that dozens of applications that can view you tube are now available (VLC for one).

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[mjwx]

Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front.

"Hey, let's deliberately prevent our users from accessing the single largest content provider in the world as part of our pissing contest with Google over meaningless more-or-less identical (to the end user) media formats

Very good way of putting it.

But it's not like Apple or MS have a history of trying to foist their own standards by building them in to their products and it's not like Apple hasn't got a history of blocking something they don't like even when their customers want it. Considering that iUsers already have to open a separate (Google provided) application to view you tube videos, Google will simply roll the codec in there and they wont lose the views from iUsers, the question is, when Android can use the browser, will Apple lose iUsers?

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[mjwx]

Why would you think Apple would not permit WebM in a browser?

Apple is heavily in bed with MPEG-LA with a large stake in the license fees collected by H.264 licensing. MPEG-LA are also trying to sue Google for patent infringement on WebM. Also Apple is doing everything within it's power to prevent Android from advancing (well advancing faster then it is) such as the recent Samsung suit.

Apple's browser complies with other open standards.

Thanks, I haven't laughed that hard in ages.

KHTML made Webkit open, Google made Webkit usable.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[juasko]

First of all WebM is no standard, what standardizations committee governs it.

Google is no such thing.

So correcting your comment.

h.264 is a frozen standard.
WebM is frozen.

What ever that means.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[steveha]

First of all WebM is no standard, what standardizations committee governs it.

I didn't say it was a standard that came out of a standards body. Not all standards do.

IP networking was first documented in 1974. Over the next few years it came into wide use as a standard, and computers and equipment using IP networking were able to talk to each other. But it wasn't formally standardized until 1981. By your definition of a standard, IP networking wasn't "a standard" until 1981, right? Yet curiously, it still worked before 1981.

Between 1974 and 1981, IP networking was a de facto standard. Perhaps in your mind that isn't any kind of standard at all, but I assure you that computers were able to talk to each other.

Likewise, I can watch a WebM video in my web browser, and neither the video nor the web browser care whether or not a formal standards body wrote a bunch of documents describing the format.

It is a legitimate complaint to say that WebM needs better specification documents, or more specifically, VP8 needs better specs. (I believe that both the Matroska container format and the Vorbis audio coder are well-documented.) Right now, the standard for VP8 is basically "if the VP8 decoder can decode it, it's legal VP8, and by the way here is the code for the VP8 decoder".

But to say that the specification documents need to be improved is not the same thing as saying that WebM isn't any kind of a standard. As I said, my web browser plays WebM videos just fine. If I download them, my media player plays them just fine too.

A standard doesn't need to be from a formal standards body to be useful. It doesn't even need to have a good specification document. It just needs to work well, and WebM works well as a standard.

steveha

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[juasko]

Yes but now we do have a standardized format. Packaged as MPEG1,2,4.

Why use anything different that is not a standard allready. What I say, WebM is welcome in the game, if it is standardized.

And BTW what standard is there that isn't governed by a standardization committee, none!

But true that not everything that is a standard started of as a standard. Eg, PDF, IEEE1394. Still they are today governed by a standardization committee.

And this is my whole point. Unless WebM is standardized, use MPEG. If WebM get standardized consider it then, not before.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[steveha]

You seem to be missing my point. There are de facto standards and they work. It is not necessary to have a standards organization define something.

For example, what standards organization governs the Python language? None; the Python community and Guido van Rossum make the decisions, and their decisions define the standard for the language. Would Python be better somehow if ISO were in charge of it? I think not.

Why do you care whether a standards board wrote the WebM standard? It's frozen now, and all anyone needs to know is how to write a decoder for it, or an encoder. Just as all anyone needs to know about H.264 is how to write an encoder or a decoder. It's the same situation; they are both frozen specs.

Why use anything different that is not a standard allready.

Because you can use WebM for free, without asking permission. To use H.264 you need the permission of MPEG LA, which may or may not involve licensing fees but always involves getting their permission (or at least following their rules; many uses are currently permitted without fee and for those uses you just need to obey their rules). And they can change the rules or the fees at any time until the patents run out.

Debian GNU/Linux, for example, cannot ship H.264 support, because of the legal issues. Debian can ship WebM, and does. That is a pretty big reason to choose WebM. And what do you have to put up against it? "Don't use it because the standard wasn't developed by a standards body?" Why do you even care?

steveha

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[juasko]

And why phyton isn't that popular either, what if it got standardized. Frozen or not..

A standardization body, will not be subject to sudden ideas of it's maker. Just look at PDF, how Adobe to day will not be able to change it easily, especially in a way that looks it tho them. It's a huge difference with a proprietary frozen code base and a standardized one.

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[steveha]

And why phyton isn't that popular either, what if it got standardized.

Python is One of the Most Popular Programming Languages

Python is #7 on the TIOBE rankings:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

#6 is ObjectiveC, which also has no official standard from any standards organization.

Whether you like it or not, de facto standards do exist and do work as standards.

Frozen or not..

Python is definitely not frozen. It is growing and evolving, with an active community headed by a guy who is called the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (the title is a joke but actually pretty accurate). ObjectiveC is not frozen either; it is pretty much owned by Apple at this point.

A standardization body, will not be subject to sudden ideas of it's maker.

WebM is frozen . Just like H.264 is also frozen . There are no "sudden ideas" for either of these two.

So, in summary:

0) de facto standards can work as well as standards that came out of standards organizations

1) it is possible for things like Python and ObjectiveC to grow and evolve and improve without an official standards organization

2) standards organizations are completely irrelevant to both H.264 and WebM because they are frozen standards

I think I'm done explaining this. If you don't get it yet, you aren't going to. If you are a troll just seeing how much of my time you can waste, congratulations on your success.

steveha

Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft

[juasko]

Yes I get it and I've seen what happened to de facto standards before, i.e. IE html. That was a de facto standard too.

But I've seen many other good ideas been crippled due to one single proplem. They where not standardized.

So your actually making my point with phyton. Obj-c is not popular, it's only enforced by Apple to those who want to make apps for their products. Well you can if you have to use some c++ bridging but that is not the point.

Phyton is simply not popular, phyton is available on all major platforms. Obj-c is available to the mac users and linux user. How many linux users actually use GNU/Step? a few geeks. And most of them calling them selfs geeks don't understand the point of GNU/Step. If phyton got standardized like C. It may very well grow in popularity.

I'm not sure if C++ even is standardized at this point. But it may very well be as there has been some activity going around for achieving just that. Still a standard is better than free. IE was free too.

All I need to know...

[Anonymous Coward]

is "Friday" converted yet?

Re:All I need to know...

[517714]

"So far we've already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site." So 'Friday' and a couple of lolcats vids. I'm pretty sure they had to euthanize the server responsible for that.

WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Geeks" have the problem of not knowing how to market things properly. Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero. Another example: Theora. Penetration? Zero.

Vote troll all you want, but these are facts - as much facts as the reality that current WebM encoders do a worse job in terms of video quality than x264 does for H.264. End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you take it in your patent controlling hole.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[some_guy_88]

Fact: Google is a huge company whose services are used by MANY people

Highly likely: Whatever format Google choose for YouTube will become extremely popular.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Highly likely: Whatever format Google choose for YouTube will become extremely popular.

Good. If that happens, then the more open standard wins and it's better for everyone.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean except for the fact, that WebM is a crippled Matroska container format with H.264 video inside?

Also, the problem with geeks is, that they have zero self-confidence. They are the smartest people out there, yet fold like chickens to every drooling retard who raises his voice.
And retards are known to act more secure in themselves, since they lack the intelligence to even come up with way they could be wrong. They also don't know if they are right. They have to believe it. Which makes it worse.
It's known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

If you manage one thing, just work on associating geeks with being cool and dominant. If you're secure enough in in, you can turn all cattle around. I know this from personal experience.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[BisexualPuppy]

" Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero"
I know you are just trolling, but just getting the fact straight : ogg/vorbis was read by my samsung 'mp3' player in ~2005/2006. It is also the format of Spotify streams. That's the two examples I've got right now, personnal experience, and it was not a choice of my own at all.
Another example, nearly every single professionnal (AAA etc etc.) video game you buy today uses ogg/vorbis (that's ... free).
You yes, you are indeed trolling. Or dumb. Or both.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

They chose MPEG-4 ASP first. It was already popular, and has remained popular for many other reasons outside of YT. Then they introduced MPEG-4 AVC (h.264) on YT. It is incredibly popular right now. Now they switch again, to WebM, but I'm not sure the -commercial market- will follow suit with it.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[ElusiveJoe]

I use music player with OGG/Vorbis support. I've got a feeling that by "music player" you mean only iPod. But even in this case, you could install Rockbox firmware and play Vorbis.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[amolapacificapaloma]

Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format ;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

WebM is a crippled Matroska container format with H.264 video inside

WebP is VP8, not H.264.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[sakti]

Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry?

Not true. It is easy to find music players that support not only ogg/vorbis but flac as well. The only player I've seen recently that doesn't support them are ipods, which isn't surprising given that it is primarily a vehicle to promote itunes.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

No. No, you couldn't. Because RockBox doesn't install on recent iPods. I can't even install it on my 120gig Classic. You can't install it on any iPod Classic. Neither can you install it on any iPod Touch. Looking at the page now, you also can't install it on iPod Nanos past the second generation and it doesn't look like you could install it on a Shuffle, not that that's any great surprise.

So actually, no, for *every single iPod you can buy on the market today and have been able to buy for the last couple of years* RockBox is totally useless.

This isn't an "Oooh iPods are great!" post, it's not an "Oooh Apple are assholes!" post, it's simply pointing out that you've got no clue what you're talking about.

Fortunately I don't give a toss if my music is encoded with MP3, AAC or Vorbis, so I reripped the stuff that was in Vorbis to AAC and just loaded it all on. That's because I like to listen to my music rather than wank over how brilliant I am to only use Vorbis, much as I like Vorbis.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

> You mean except for the fact, that WebM is a crippled Matroska container format with H.264 video inside?

This is not a fact.

In ACTUAL fact, WebM is a Matroska container format with VP8 video and Vorbis audio inside.

http://www.webmproject.org/about/

Each technology within WebM: VP8, Vorbis and Matroska, is royalty-free for anyone to implement.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[grumbel]

What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.

My player can play it out of the box just fine. You also have to look beyond the music industry, it might not have killed MP3 there, but when it comes to commercial computer games for example the penetration of OGG is extremely high, I see it used quite a bit more these days then MP3. I have even seen Theora being used (that one however is pretty rare). So while OGG isn't exactly an MP3 killer everywhere, it certainly has found a few niches where it is extremely popular.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[ElusiveJoe]

No. No, you couldn't

Okay. I'm not an iPod user, so I don't know everything.

'But your post is screaming "I bought an iPod, but it won't play Vorbis, that means Vorbis is baaaad". You got what you bought, and you bought what you had chosen. Bashing Vorbis in this matter is stupid.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[horza]

Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.

Exactly. Only tiny nobodies like Philips and Samsung support it.

End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.

Ah Anon Coward doesn't seem to have heard of this new site called "YouTube", where end users now can upload videos as well as download. This makes licensing now a factor for end users.

Phillip.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[cavreader]

Your description of Google seems to match Microsoft's description in the early days. Leverage your large user base to get as many people as possible using your formats and specs which in turn will make those users and content providers dependant on your future good will and services while also raising the barrier for anyone new looking to enter that particular technology stack. Google seems well on it's way to become just another MS on steroids. Their steady march towards capturing, storing, and analyzing data from any where they can get it and providing that information to others, for a minor fee of course.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, wow, just look at this extensive list of players that support Ogg Vorbis. Surely it's the up and coming dominant audio format.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Skarecrow77]

1st gen "classic" support is already in alpha phase. check the builds, it's pretty far along, it's just not "officially supported" yet. As you yourself mention, I'm sure that you know that it is entirely apple's fault that rockbox doesn't support newer ipods yet, as apple has gone out of their way to make it as difficult as they can, on purpose. The tone of your post however, despite your "disclaimer", seems to indicate that you think this is a failing of rockbox. It isn't like nobody is trying to overcome the protection apple put in place on newer hardware. They're trying, the road is just harder than it should be.

As to procuring an ipod on which to load rockbox in the first place, why wouldn't you just pick up an ipod 5.5 off of ebay for dirt cheap to load rockbox on, instead of going out to the apple store and paying them an arm and a leg for a new one? You're just going to do something that (in theory) violates the warranty anyway.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Skarecrow77]

Android natively supports vorbis. that is a LOT of market penetration right there. As of 4th quarter 2010, 32.9 million androids phones had been sold, and the sales rate is only increasing.

The interface is terrible of course, but winamp for android clears that up nicely. The sound quality is actually pretty damn decent, and it can even drive my Beyerdynamic DT880 600ohm cans to a reasonable volume. The only reason I even still bother with my rockbox'd ipod is because it has more storage space than my droid.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

Nope if that happens a proprietary format wins, forget Google giving it for free, they do that now to get momentum.

MPEG4 licenses are not huge... just use it and be happy that it's a standard. WebM is no standard.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

and VP8 is....

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

MPEG4 video = h.264
MPEG4 audio = aac

well there is more in the MPEG4 standard, but just because they use Vorbis, wont make the video to not have patent problems to h.264.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

No wonder why I never got samsung players or like spotify...

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

But plugins make itunes handle it and put it on ipods as aac

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

problem is those devices has zero penetration.

Only competitor to iPods I ever seen in reality play mp3 and WMA that's it.

So yeah penetration is still 0.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

Btw, your missing the point. iPods and other mp3 players are doomed.

Future is phones. Show me the native support on the phone side, maybe Andorids have it. Symbian is suporter of MPEG4, Apple is supporter of Mpeg4. MS claims to be a supporter of Mpeg4 (i doubt that will happen).

Google maybe support non standard formats.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Symbian is dead and Windows Phone 7 is stillborn. Android is already the largest phone OS, and they support every format I've ever given a shit about and then some.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

> well there is more in the MPEG4 standard, but just because they use Vorbis, wont make the video to not have patent problems to h.264.

There are no patent claims made against WebM. The only applicable patents that anyone has identified are those patents for VP8, now owned by Google, and which are irrevocably licensed in perpetuity by Google to everybody worldwide, no-charge and royalty-free.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh no. The MPEG standards are not as simplistic as you seem to believe. Many different video and audio codecs fall under different parts of the various MPEG standards.

MPEG4, Part 10 = h..264
MPEG2, Part 7 = AAC
MPEG4, Part 3 = HE-AAC

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[zach_the_lizard]

Any cost at all is enough to make it impossible to include in GPL software, legally anyways.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

market shares market shares....
symbian still greatest, and support mpeg4

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[vgerclover]

There is one big difference: one locks you up on proprietary, patent riddled, "standards", to a level where one version of the application can't reliably open a different version's documents, while the other one entices you to use their products by being good, and to stay by staying good, having always a reliable way of leaving. I'll leave you to decide which one is which.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[vgerclover]

Yeah, zero penetration indeed. As in products that allow me to play the formats I want don't try to penetrate me.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

iPods and other mp3 players are doomed.

Future is phones.

Except for those of us who both like to listen to music AND have battery life for using our phones. Or for those of us who don't always want to carry our phones with us while listening to music (ie. while exercising, at the beach, at the park, hiking, going to the club, etc).

Yeah, all-in-one devices suck for a large percentage of us.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[cavreader]

Personally I have never been "locked" into any one system or set of standards. Don't get me wrong I know people have been backed into a corner especially regarding document standards or lack there of. MS "standards" were a by product of their applications. The wrote the applications first and when they were done they looked at the output and declared here are our "standards". That made their apps in 100% compliance as far as they were concerned. Later on others came up with another set of standards that were not necessarily tied to any particular company or application and when they were done they declared any thing that didn't fit their standards were not compliant and proceeded to criticize and heap scorn on anyone who disagreed. Unfortunatley MS had such an overwhelming market share the their "standards" became the de-facto standards based solely on usage. Maybe one day people will get on the same page but it is not the end of the world.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

"your post is screaming "I bought an iPod, but it won't play Vorbis, that means Vorbis is baaaad". You got what you bought, and you bought what you had chosen. Bashing Vorbis in this matter is stupid."

How odd you can get that from

----
This isn't an "Oooh iPods are great!" post, it's not an "Oooh Apple are assholes!" post... ...much as I like Vorbis."
----

I never said Vorbis is bad. I really like Vorbis. To my ears it hits transparency at around where AAC does -- about 160-170kbs. MP3 gets there at 190-220kbs. For a while I had my entire CD collection ripped to Vorbis. Then I got an Archos player that only played MP3, so I re-encoded everything (from FLAC) into MP3 and junked the Vorbis files. Then I got an iPod -- because of the sheer size of its hard drive, rather than any hatred of Vorbis -- and I still have everything in MP3 or AAC. This isn't bashing Vorbis -- which I like -- it's pointing out that I can't play them on the iPod. Big wowzers. I'm crying big fat tears here. Luckily I ripped everything to a nice, open, efficient lossless format so I could re-encode to MP3 without haemorrhaging quality. Frankly getting into heated arguments about lossy formats is like pissing in your tea. It seems like fun at first but you'll soon realise it's unpleasant and pointless. I like Vorbis and I like AAC and I like higher-bitrate MP3. I'll use any of htem on my player and not worry...

Also, since I'm posting AC and have Slashdot's restrictions on me, to reply to juasko,

"But plugins make itunes handle it and put it on ipods as aac"

introducing artifacts that I wouldn't hear through Apple's crappy earphones but may well hear through decent headphones and would pretty much certainly hear through even half-decent speakers on an iPod dock. I'm much happier re-encoding from the original CDs/FLAC rips so that I don't do that. I'm not a crazy audiophile or anything but some things *are* a bit painful...

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, anything else? you only confirm my post.
Part 3 is audio
Part 10 is video

And no Part 7 isn't AAC, thats Part 3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Google said that they won't sue anyone for any patents they hold on the format -- which means they can't go back and change their mind later even if they wanted to, see: Laches.

The implementation (encoder and decoder both) is open source and already included in a number of other products, for instance ffmpeg and Firefox.

How, exactly, are they going to "stop giving it for free" in the future? I would like to know.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Leverage your large user base to get as many people as possible using your formats and specs which in turn will make those users and content providers dependant on your future good will and services

If that's Google's plan then they have already failed, because VP8 isn't theirs. The whole reason VP8 is such a big deal and not Just Another Codec, is that VP8 is everyone's. Anyone can implement it, without getting locked into anything else. No patents and no trade secrets means no license, and that means no limitations.

VP8 fans are who they are, precisely because of their paranoia about lockin or being tricked into having to deal with any particular company who may turn out to be a monopoly chokepoint. It's exactly because of this view, that VP8 is so exciting.

It's not that VP8 advocates trust Google; it's that they see they won't need to trust Google (or anyone else). When it comes to security, you look at capabilities, not intent. And with VP8, Google's offensive capabilities are nil, which makes their future goodwill and services irrelevant.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, from a consumer's point of view it is a failing of RockBox -- just one they're addressing. But yes, of course it's Apple's fault for changing all the firmware and trying to block RockBox. I was really quite disappointed after getting my iPod to learn I *couldn't* put RockBox on because I genuinely prefer Vorbis to MP3 -- and, partly because I was working on (and listening to music on) Red Hat machines at work, I had no MP3 support and went straight for Vorbis as the easiest and highest-quality alternative. So I had about 30 gigs of Vorbis files at that time, all of which I had to re-encode to MP3. Actually first for an Archos which was too crappy for RockBox to work on it (one of the Gminis; I think the processor is nothing like powerful enough) and then for my iPod. It would've been much nicer for me if I could've put the Vorbis straight onto the players, of course it would. And of course I know it's Apple's doing that I can't put RockBox on and do that.

I just don't see the point crying about having to use MP3 or AAC. I *like* Vorbis, sure, but it's no huge challenge to re-encode them. I set it up on my computer and left it churning away overnight from the original FLAC rips. Hey presto, 30-odd gig of MP3 files. Since then I've swapped to AAC instead (since getting the iPod; I don't quite recall but I don't think the Gmini supported AAC. Maybe it did and I was just being stupid, which wouldn't surprise me) but the same thing holds.

And I didn't get an iPod with the express purpose of putting RockBox on it - if I did, then yes, I'd have bought an old one off eBay. (And then quite possibly watched it crap out in a couple of month's time.) I got an iPod because I wanted a massive hard drive so I didn't have to constantly swap music around. Format really isn't a concern of mine. If RockBox worked for the Classics I'd probably put it on, but since it doesn't (well, not in official support) I didn't.

I got it at a cut-price from Amazon, though, not straight from the Apple store...

I didn't intend any particular tone in my message -- just that the guy was totally wrong and *his* tone suggested he thought we should all just put RockBox on anyway. Which these days we can't do.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[N Monkey]

Fact: Google is a huge company whose services are used by MANY people

Highly likely: Whatever format Google choose for YouTube will become extremely popular.

That may be fine if you have a high-powered PC that can run any codec in software but it's a complete pain if you have a mobile device with a low-power (both in terms of MIPs and energy consumption) CPU that, instead, uses dedicated, highly-efficient video decode hardware. That hardware probably supports a certain subset of (well defined) video standards (eg MPEG/VC1/H.264) and some new random system is not going to be supported.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

Any cost at all is enough to make it impossible to include in GPL software, legally anyways.

PSST: The consumers of videos could care less. If you aren't targeting those people, by the way, you're a small, uncounted niche.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[sglewis100]

Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format ;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.

Would "near zero penetration" work better for you? Seriously, what percentage of the market for portable audio is that?

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[sglewis100]

Btw, your missing the point. iPods and other mp3 players are doomed.

Future is phones. Show me the native support on the phone side, maybe Andorids have it. Symbian is suporter of MPEG4, Apple is supporter of Mpeg4. MS claims to be a supporter of Mpeg4 (i doubt that will happen).

Google maybe support non standard formats.

I'm not quite sure that's true. Apparently there are more than 60 million iPod Touches in the market. The Nano seems to sell well. But putting all that side, if MP3 players go away, and phones take over, the future is still in MP3 and AAC. After Apple and Amazon's music stores, what's left? There's just no question that if you take tens of millions of "portable devices that play audio", that the HUGE majority of them play MP3 and AAC, and the HUGE majority of the content loaded onto them is MP3 and AAC. Phone, iPod, whatever. That's what's on there. The HUGE majority of sales are AAC (Apple) and MP3 (Amazon), or physical (Amazon, retail). Heck, the place where music might most likely be in your format of choice would be something underground, where more geeks tend to be then on iTunes. But yet, it seems to me most of the stuff on Usenet (The first rule of Usenet is, you don't talk about Usenet) is in MP3 format. Well, at least that's what a friend told me, I don't frequent such establishments.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

"OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero."

While I can believe the current market share overall isn't a majority, and I really can't argue against your central thesis that legally-free formats are very poorly marketed, Ogg Vorbis DOES have a larger market share than people give it credit for...

A number of generic portable media players actually do support Ogg Vorbis audio (some of them don't ADVERTISE this fact, though). Also, every Android-based device supports Ogg Vorbis natively, including "media player" devices like the ones Archos makes. Having support in what appears to currently be the most popular "smartphone" platform at the moment is certainly worth notice, even though the lousy marketing means few people seem to realize it's available. Heck, a lot of the advertising materials for Android phones leaves Ogg Vorbis off of the list of "supported media", despite the fact that it's in there.

Of course, outside of portable media player devices, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, and Opera all support it natively. (Safari and everything else on a Mac CAN support it with a simple install of the "XiphQT" component for Quicktime, but obviously that's an extra step. On Microsoft systems, there's a similar set of DirectShow filters for the Xiph formats, but it's not clear to me if IE9 supports anything that "DirectShow" supports in the same way that Safari supports anything that QuickTime does.) I'm under the impression that Ogg Vorbis also has a certain amount of popularity for use in PC game sound effects and music, though I don't know what the actual proportion is.

My only question is whether the Ogg file format will end up being killed off in favor of Matroska for audio-only media. As far as I know, with the possible exception of "Gingerbread" and later Android devices, there really aren't any dedicated media player devices that recognize the Matroska formats, including WebM (which uses the Vorbis codec for audio).

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, anything else? you only confirm my post.

The only thing that is confirmed is that you are clueless.

Part 3 is audio
Part 10 is video

Yes, because MPEG4, Part 2 AKA DivX/Xvid isn't a video format.

And no Part 7 isn't AAC, thats Part 3.

Learn to read.

MPEG2, Part 7 = AAC
MPEG4, Part 3 = HE-AAC

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[amolapacificapaloma]

Have you ever heard of Android? Anyway, the point is that it is "easy" to implement and all it needs is "just" better marketing so the consumers start to demand it. And that would be good for everyone involved, except the holders of the rights to all these other proprietary formats and codecs. That's were a 800lbs gorilla like Google enters the scene to change the consumers' perspective on the issue ;)

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[sglewis100]

Android? Why, are people who own Android phones buying a lot of music in Ogg format? I realize you like Ogg, but that doesn't make it relevant to consumer music listeners.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[amolapacificapaloma]

Not now, but what if the rumored Google Music store started to sell ogg files? It would take very little for most of the hardware makers to support it. I know it's day-dreaming, but it is not unreasonable ;)

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[Anonymous Coward]

ur missing the picture, it's not the patents they have, but those they don't have.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[juasko]

Ever heard of development... one version may be free, the next may not.

Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free"

[npsimons]

What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero. Another example: Theora. Penetration? Zero.

Normally I don't respond to AC's, but you're a fucking liar. My phone, portable music player, laptop, my wife's phone, my wife's laptop, and my wife's music player all play Vorbis and FLAC. The only ones that don't play Theora are the music players (which don't have color screens). Music players that support Vorbis aren't that hard to find.

as much facts as the reality that current WebM encoders do a worse job in terms of video quality than x264 does for H.264. End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.

Differences in quality between WebM and H.264 are negligable, at best. Most people won't notice or care. But how about that "end-user experience" of paying a royalty fee everytime you want to encode, decode, or distribute a video? Or not being able to play H.264 videos out of the box on Linux because the members of MPEG-LA can't compete any other way? Doesn't sound very fucking user-friendly to me.

WebM is open and free in every sense of the word; the submarine patent issues apply equally to H.264; and hardware support for WebM is coming along rapidly. Face it, WebM is the future, and that's a good thing.

One missing browser tho

[nu1x]

Not for a long time, but still, Seamonkey stable still does not support WebM, it is in upcoming 2.1 as I understand. Seamonkey does not represent a large portion of clients, of course.

Waste of energy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Until computers/phones have hardware to decode it this will just result in shorter battery life for everyone.

Re:Waste of energy...

[Anonymous Coward]

The codec is already supported in hardware in new ICs, just because Apple chose not to, doesn't change the what the rest can pick from the shelves.

Re:Waste of energy...

[monkeythug]

Seriously, why does this meme just keep going round and round?

computers/phones already have hardware capable of decoding WebM - it's the same hardware used to decode h.264! In most cases all that is/will be needed is a firmware update.

Android phones will obviously be there first - it's already available in Gingerbread. Apple will follow suit eventually, they might resist for a while but with Android's rising market share and Google controlling Youtube, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and I'm sure they know it.

Re:Waste of energy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another ignorant idiot. / Troll.

WebM is crippled Matroska. Matroska is a container format. Not a codec. It is EBML, which is basically binary XML. Very efficient and flexible. And WebM limits the video codec inside it to H.264.

All smartphones and computers I know have hardware H.264 acceleration.

Re:Waste of energy...

[amn108]

You seem to be somewhat uninformed as well. WebM indeed is a "narrowed" Matroska container format. The video stream however is NOT a H.264 but VP8, and ONLY VP8. Google chose to narrow down the Matroska and call it WebM precisely because they wanted to avoid having a format on the loose on the Web that could include any type of video stream. And so chose to limit video to VP8 and audio to Ogg Vorbis. Basically if you have a .webm file, the video (if any) it carries MUST be a VP8 stream, and the audio (if any, again) MUST be a Vorbis stream.

Google bought On2 Technologies which developed VP8. The latter is comparable to H.264 with pretty much any kind of motion and bitrates. There are subjective perception tests on the Web dating back at least two years, when the debate on VP8 vs. H.264 and open video was heating up.

Re:Waste of energy...

[Overzeetop]

Really? Everything I see on the web indicates that WebM is a container for VP8 video, not h.264. Now, I'm not intimately aware of the details of the two codecs, and they may likely use similar operations, but for them to be patent independent would require significant differences in their implementation. Purpose built hardware for h.264 would have to be exceptionally flexible to have firmware that could be rewritten to process VP8. Call me skeptical.

Re:Waste of energy...

[greg23s]

You mean VP8, not H.264

Re:Waste of energy...

[keeperofdakeys]

Actually, VP8 uses many of the same techniques to encode video as h264, it is just implemented in a different way. The techniques themselves aren't patented, just the ways of using them, which is firmware not hardware trouble (well, depending how the h264 acceleration hardware was written).

Re:Waste of energy...

[tepples]

Now, I'm not intimately aware of the details of the two codecs, and they may likely use similar operations, but for them to be patent independent would require significant differences in their implementation.

The infamous article 377 shows that VP8 is just MPEG-4 AVC with the patented parts ripped out. So yes, any DSP that can handle MPEG-4 AVC should be able to handle VP8 with a minor rewrite of the bitstream parser.

Re:Waste of energy...

[Lunix Nutcase]

That's great but how many of the 1 year or less Android phones and Tablets have that? Oh yeah, none of them.

Re:Waste of energy...

[juasko]

Problem is that VP8 is h.264... so while u get it correct on the low level u don't see the whole picture.

Miss the forrest because of all the trees...

Re:Waste of energy...

[juasko]

=

Re:Waste of energy...

[Anonymous Coward]

VP8 is h.264

But that's wrong...

Re:Waste of energy...

[amn108]

No, the problem is that you don't know what you're talking about. Instead of stopping here, I will attempt to tell you why and what's what, if you care to read on.

Both are two different codecs in their own right. VP8 is as much H.264 as anything else that uses motion estimation, motion vectors, inter-frames, human-perception-based color space, DCT and a bunch of other clever tricks that around half of the more prominent AND standalone video codecs have been using in the course of the entire last decade or so. Meaning of course that it is not H.264. As much as some basic principles of video compression are shared pretty much by ALL modern codecs, noone with a clue calls all a single name.

Additionally, H.264 was conceived almost entirely by MPEG, while VP8 was invented by On2 Technologies, its legacy going back as far as VP3 and a codec known as Truemotion S, both also by the same company (then known as The Duck Company if I recall correctly). The latter two, originating in 1995/1996, obviously predate H.264 and/or the novelties that make H.264 what it is (bidirectional inter-frames, variable-size blocks used in motion compensation etc)

Re:Waste of energy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that article claims that VP8 is a horrible rip-off of H.264 with the patented bits left in.

Re:Waste of energy...

[arose]

The latter two, originating in 1995/1996, obviously predate H.264 and/or the novelties that make H.264 what it is (bidirectional inter-frames, variable-size blocks used in motion compensation etc)

It does have some interesting features like alternative reference frames though. Of course it has gone largely unexplored so far, I hope at some point there will be non-Google people who try to sqeeze every bit out of it in the way that x264 developers are doing with H.264 and xvid with MPEG4 part 2.

Re:Waste of energy...

[compro01]

Any android devices based on TI's OMAP system can be rigged to hardware decode webm. And that's quite a lot of devices. Practically everything Motorola makes uses it, along with Samsung, Archos, RIM's playbook, etc.

Nice troll.

[nu1x]

Nice troll.

Open Standards Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Help! Help! Someone is trying to give me something for free!

Re:Open Standards Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Like you can get AIDS for free? Laugh all you want, I'm not laughing.

Free speech

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine. Now that we have secured our ability to post and view unprovocative videos of kittens and whatnot, how about solving the problem of free speech on the internet?

Youtube can and do limit speech by removing videos and suspending users. We need a free speech tube! This probably means that it can't be financed by ads. (Or at least not financed by any old ad. Maybe there are companies who's CEO:s and boards are hard-core free-speechists who would finance such a site.) Remember, free speech is not the same thing as good speech. The ultimate litmus test for a free speech video site would be whether someone could post a video denying the holocaust and promoting Nazism.

Of course, any free speech video site would have to remove illegal content such as incitement and defamation.

I'm curious about codec efficiency

[PhrostyMcByte]

It's been established that WebM's only real advantage is in being supposedly patent-free, with H.264 still offering significantly more room for higher quality at lower bitrates.

But YouTube doesn't care about efficiency, really. They care about speed and compatibility, which significantly reduces their options. I wonder how x264 fairs compression-wise against YouTube's WebM encoder when tuned to run at the same speed. I'd guess probably still better, but I haven't seen anyone do this sort of test.

Based on their graphs, a 3min video takes them about 1min 45sec to finish encoding -- about 85fps. Unfortunately they don't list what resolution that's in, or what encoders/settings they use.

Re:I'm curious about codec efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been established that WebM's only real advantage is in being supposedly patent-free

Citation needed.

Oh, and nice use of the scare word "supposedly" by the way.

Re:I'm curious about codec efficiency

[carlhaagen]

Why don't you just google and enjoy the results of the many decent tests of WebM vs x264's H.264 output that you can find out there? So far, the current best (only?) WebM encoder hasn't proven itself to give better quality at same bitrate as what x264 puts out as H.264 in any test; x264's results consistently bests WebM at same (and sometimes even lower) bitrate. The bonus? H.264 decoding is adopted in hardware all over the place.

Re:I'm curious about codec efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you just google and enjoy the results of the many decent tests of WebM vs x264's H.264 output that you can find out there?

No, how about the GPP backs up his claims with some evidence? There are many tests out there that compare WebM and H.264. Most of them are flawed in one or more of the following ways:

• They are out of date
• They compare poorly encoded WebP files to optimally encoded H.264 files
• They use poor source material
• They transcode from one lossy source to another.
• They use still shots of moving video to prove a pre-conceived notion that one is "better" than the other.
• They use pretty PSNI graphs that are meaningless in real life

The only thing that anyone has ever conclusively proven with any comparison tests ever done to date is that the current WebP encoder is slower than x264.

Re:I'm curious about codec efficiency

[keeperofdakeys]

Of the tests that are floating around the internet, WebM is comparable to H264 base or main, but not high (the different profiles are almost like different codecs, requiring more features as you get higher). Considering pretty much no phones can play high, or maybe even main, the quality comparison is kind of moot, unless you roll multiple versions of the video for different devices.

But no, the one of the advantages of WebM is that it is patent free (there is always a chance of submarine patents though, same with theora, although since VP8 was originally made by a company it is hoped that the patent pool is complete). The other advantage is that it doesn't cost money to use it. Currently it costs a few million dollars per year to buy the rights to distribute a program with the h264 codec, if you look at mozilla for example, this is a significant fraction of the money they raise each year. Currently anybody is free to distribute h264 video, but MPEG-LA could change this at anytime (although, it would be a very bad move if they did). So you have a codec is irrevocably free, or something that requries money to distribute codecs of and could cost money to distribute videos in.

Re:I'm curious about codec efficiency

[juasko]

Nope, plenty small size coders make h.264 for small money.

I have a few. So ur million dollar fees are flawed.

Re:I'm curious about codec efficiency

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen any test of Youtube WebM encodes? Their H.264 encoder (or its settings) is notoriously crappy compared to, say, Staxrip/x264 with default parameters. If they didn't value speed over quality this time, Youtube transcoding might be a nice web service to use. I'd never permanently host a video with them though, the interface sucks.

Re:I'm curious about codec efficiency

[arose]

You forgot the most important one. There are no double blind tests. Audio codec development has matured to the point that no one will take anything else as concrete evidence, video has a long way to go. What we need is a double blind test that compares *only* video (no stills) with participants who are not familiar with current codecs (and have no preconceived notions of what is supposed to look better). The current situation of people developing the codecs declaring a victor based on how much over-sharpened detail (or noise, as it may be) can be seen when you zoom in on some stills is silly.

Transcode from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they transcoding from the original upload materia going back to 2005, or are they transcoding from 240p .flv in many cases?

Re:Transcode from what?

[slim]

Are they transcoding from the original upload materia going back to 2005, or are they transcoding from 240p .flv in many cases?

Presumably, they transcode from the best version they have of any given video. I doubt they've been discarding the original upload for a very long time. Google doesn't treat storage as scarce.

Currently, if I upload an HD video, they transcode it into multiple formats at multiple resolutions; WebM is just another format to add.

WebM WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

WebMediocrity?
WebMonopoly?

Re:WebM WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

WebMedia

This will only hurt the users

[Anonymous Coward]

h.264 hardware support is in my TiVo, my point-and-shoot camera, my dedicated video camera, my Apple products, my Android phone ... the list goes on. WebM is useless to me. It locks me back to a software codec. It requires a transcode. If YouTube doesn't work for me, I'll just stop using it. No great loss. Plenty of websites out there will stream video for me, use h.264, not require Flash, and even not decimate my soundtrack. I've already pulled out of Google Calendar and reduced GMail to just bills/online shopping/online signups with mandatory email addresses, looks like I'll be pulling out of YouTube, too.

Re:This will only hurt the users

[Anonymous Coward]

I wasn't aware that Google Calendar and Gmail used either H.264 *or* WebM. You learn something every day!

Re:This will only hurt the users

[Anonymous Coward]

So long, you'll be greatly missed.

Re:This will only hurt the users

[slim]

Where does it say they're dropping H.264 from YouTube?

YouTube stores videos in a bunch of formats, and the client negotiates the best format for the current situation. It will keep delivering h.264 to you. It will have the option of delivering WebM to clients that are better at displaying that. Everybody's happy.

Re:This will only hurt the users

[keeperofdakeys]

Then you doom opensource software to be unable to use h264 in their products. FFmpeg and x264 get away with it due to their source-only distribution, although I'm sure MPEG-LA could come after them if they really wanted. If you wanted h264 in firefox, that will be a few million dollars please, per year that is. Considering that that amount of money is a significant fraction of their earnings, I don't think that they will be doing it anytime soon. So thankyou for dooming us all to propriety consumer equipment. Also consider that MPEG-LA reserves the right to start charging for the distribution of h264, although they are very unlikely to do this, vp8 has free use and distribution irrevocably given to you.

Also, h264 and vp8 are rather close, close enough that a lot of hardware can decode it with just a software update. This is truly the difference between having a codec that is only feasible to use by big companies, or something that is feasible for use in anything. If things get moving then you should get vp8 support in your devices, at that point you should be good.

Re:This will only hurt the users

[juasko]

err... just be patient and the world as u know it has changed.

Re:This will only hurt the users

[Anonymous Coward]

Your equipment 5 years ago didn't have h.264 hardware support but had MPEG2 support. Therefore, there was no point in anyone upgrading to h.264 because it locked you into using a software decoder.

Avoiding the future simply because some peoples' ephemeral gadgets are behind on hardware, just keeps you out of the future. Yes, some users will complain that their Tivos can't play WebM, but others will be using newer PVRs with Gallium drivers and WebM state trackers.

If YouTube doesn't work for me, I'll just stop using it.

That's not Google's plan. YouTube will keep serving videos in obsolete formats. Then one day you'll buy a new device, and when it negotiates content type, it'll pick the newer format. Then many years later, Google will see that less than 1% of its users' devices still ask for the obsolete format, and they'll drop it and free up some disk space. And then some years after that, the h.264 patents will expire and it'll be worth reconsidering again. It will finally have the potential of becoming a real standard, the catch being that, like GIF, it might be so technically behind by then that no one will care.

Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[Posting=!Working]

I noticed this week that YouTube videos will now make my old laptop overheat and shut down. I can't get through a 4 minute video anymore. I took it apart, cleaned the fans/heat sinks, made sure the fans still ran, and tried a few different video sites, but YouTube seems to be the only one with a problem.

Is this a freak coincidence (or not so freak, it is a 4 year old laptop and my test was far from scientific), or is WebM more processor intensive to decode than the old encoding?

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[carlhaagen]

It's more intensive in terms of software decoding than the current best H.264 decoders. I am not aware of any software that can do hardware decoding of VP8 video on current, common GPUs.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[amn108]

On my setup the situation is opposite - Adobe Flash heats my laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43) to the point where even with the highest fan speed the CPU temperature climbs to 70C degrees and I either have to lower the frequency ceiling or pause/stop playback. Fullscreen is infinitely worse, if there is such a thing. And an interesting thing: even with videos that don't have much motion or use a static image, it'sWebM is much less resource intensive there.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[Anonymous Coward]

My crystal ball needs a polish so it might help to know if you were actually watching WebM encoded video or not.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had that problem with my 5 year old T43. I took it apart and blew all the dust out with compressed air. Now it runs significantly cooler.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[amn108]

Yes, I did that once too, a couple of years ago. But somehow, afterwards, I came to detest the idea that I have to unscrew the poor thing whenever it stops being able to ventilate itself. I repaired four or so Thinkpads and some other models - call me a bad nerd, but I am really tired of fiddling with computer internals, especially when it's a laptop (everything is tiny and more fragile). Yes, I know - it's the nature of having moving parts and being cooled by air and so on and so on, but if what you suggest is a common thing to do (like it is with say vacuum cleaners) - don't you wish they had some spring which you push and the entire ventilation system of your Thinkpad just pops out, which you i dunno, wash or rinse or blow clean and reinsert? :-) Basically, a reusable filter. Yeah, i am creative today ;-) And if someone does it first, it must be Lenovo, they got so much in the R&D dep. going on, it's a wonder they haven't done it already.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[Skuto]

It's quite comparable in complexity, but it's less likely to have (full) hardware acceleration support for the decode. Some parts of H.264 decoders would be reusable, though.

Then again, if your laptop is so old that decoding a video overheats it, it probably didn't have it for H.264 either.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you deliberately CHOSE to watch the webm format, then you are seeing the good ol' flash based video.

The age of a laptop does not tells us much anyway.
You could've bought the worst shit ever made 4 years ago, just like you could've bought a decent core 2 quad which is still powerful enough to run crysis.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[RobbieThe1st]

Unless you're in the HTML5 demo, that's still flash+h.264 you're watching. Try enabling it( http://www.youtube.com/html5 ), and see if that helps. Oh, and use FF4 or Chrome.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[RobbieThe1st]

120PSI compressed air. Works wonders.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[Posting=!Working]

Thanks, I didn't know that.

I guess I didn't analyze the phrase: "we've already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site" accurately enough, and thought that 99% of views were transcoded videos, which isn't what the phrase says.

I'm downloading FF4 now, I had been assuming it was still in beta since I've been updating Firefox 3.6 regularly and it's never asked if I wanted 4.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[juasko]

I don't load the flash at utube at all if not h.264 is available. Most vids are available directly as h.264 without flahs.

No doubt is flash worse than webm, it' s difficult to make anything crappier than flash.

But still h.264 is the king.

Re:Does WebM take more processing power to decode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep got a 4 year old macpro, I have no intensions to swap it out to a newer one for some years still. It still beats most supermarket computers in I/O speeds. Even when they have ssd and i7 or better.

Decent hardware wont age that much no. Yep it's not the fastest cpu... but that one runs mostly whiteout work anyway, it's IO that is working hardest.

Interesting statements

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA ... let's translate.

one of our key aims is to deliver great content to you wherever you are - regardless of device, browser or other technical specification

So let's take a step backwards here from the ubiquitous, standards-backed h.264 to something that currently exists only from us and only in battery-sucking Flash format.

Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term.

It will be no time at all before people "improve" the codec by adding things to it that won't work on your particular player or device.

Re:Interesting statements

[Jesus_666]

Except that WebM doesn't have anything to do with Flash and, in fact, can't be played back using Flash. And it's already supported by Firefox 4, even though Fx's implementation seems rough around the edges at the moment. And every file format you have an encoder's source code for (like, say, h.264) can be turned into a proprietary version with little effort.

But yes, apart from that you nailed it.

Re:Interesting statements

[slim]

So let's take a step backwards here from the ubiquitous, standards-backed h.264

Where does it say they're abandoning H.264?

Shame on you, made me read the article

[Anonymous Coward]

"What is WebM?

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container."

Copyright issues?

[amn108]

One thing I've been thinking ever since I joined YouTube HTML5 preview, is: do they know how much easier it is to download their videos when playing them back in HTML5? I know that one can also extract Flash video in one way or another, but with HTML5, at least on my setup - Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 9.10 - all it takes is choosing "Save Video" in context-menu. Voila - you can now have whatever you like on YouTube for your own private viewing.

The definite advantage to this, is that one can skip the page parsings and renderings, and instead simply use say mplayer to launch and watch or listen to your favs. Let's face it - the cloud or web 2.0 applications are too slow, at least for me there is noticeable delay. mplayer handles webm videos in much better way than even Firefox 4, not to mention the monstrocity that is Adobe Flash. I simply download anything I watch more than 5 times in a month to the local storage.

Re:Copyright issues?

[TyIzaeL]

People expecting any sort of copy-protection from YouTube are Doing It Wrong. The plethora of re-uploaded videos (with their source being other YouTube videos) should be evidence enough of that.

Re:Copyright issues?

[Bert64]

If your watching the flash version on linux, look at the files created in /tmp... Flash downloads the video file into /tmp and gives it a random name, but its there ready for you to copy.

Re:Copyright issues?

[amn108]

I am not talking about the legality of downloading copyrighted content as such, but about how it is far easier doing so with HTML5+WebM than it ever was (at least for me, and I can write C/C++ software _AND_ Adobe Flash Player applications!) with Adobe Flash video player they have. Simply because nobody ever made it big with a sensible, easy-to use thing that gave you a "Download this FLV" button. I've used some Firefox plugins but first, they tended to break whenever YT made changes to their website code and second, just getting to the point when you could click the button was a pain in the ass because Flash sucked the lifeblood of my laptop. I still get nerves when I have to click on a YT link, expecting massive heat issues and fan hitting 50 dB levels.

The WebM however works pretty good. I can watch stuff and still manage to do other work, and I can download not because someone retrofitted a plugin to a browser, but because nothing is actually hidden - there is a .webm stream playing and the browser can download it as well as try to render it. Simple and straightforward.

Re:Copyright issues?

[amn108]

Thanks for the tip, i'll check it out. Still, you got to admit - there is no "Download video" button, is there, as is the case with HTML5 video. It's the small and simple things... And yes, one can do a plugin or two, or a script or a launcher or what not, but it's already there with HTML5, from day one. That's the important difference.

Re:Copyright issues?

[amn108]

And of course, for the completely clueless, they won't ever know or care about /tmp, but they WILL (sooner or later) discover the context menu and choose the convenient "Save video" option. And it will spread like wildfire in dry grass :-) Before you know it, it is a fact that YouTube is essentially a video and music installment that lets customers walk out with the content they (YT) put up, without the customers paying a dime for it. Will we get the sort of witchhunts for the average consumers that the BitTorrent freaks tend to get?

Re:Copyright issues?

[pheonix7117]

I don't know about you, but Google seems to have adjusted the right click functionality to punish those who would try downloading the videos: by using Rick Astley.

Re:Copyright issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got rickroll'd by google..

Re:Copyright issues?

[CSMatt]

One thing I've been thinking ever since I joined YouTube HTML5 preview, is: do they know how much easier it is to download their videos when playing them back in HTML5? I know that one can also extract Flash video in one way or another, but with HTML5, at least on my setup - Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 9.10 - all it takes is choosing "Save Video" in context-menu. Voila - you can now have whatever you like on YouTube for your own private viewing.

Sure, if you use the base video tag the browser offers an option to save the video, but no "professional" rollout of HTML5 video I've seen does this. They instead offer their own players that don't allow saving.*

Also: YouTube converting everything to WebM doesn't mean everything will play back natively. Remember Flash has committed to VP8 support in the future, and YouTube isn't offering videos with ads outside of Flash. I also wouldn't be surprised if licensing issues even prevented some ad-free videos from being shown in HTML5.

*YouTube does have a "Save Video as..." option in their player but it just links to a rickroll.

Re:Copyright issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply because nobody ever made it big with a sensible, easy-to use thing that gave you a "Download this FLV" button

Video Download Manager

And the reason why it's not just "download this .flv" is because there isn't just a single .flv to download. On youtube, for example, some resolutions are in .flv and others are in mp4.

batch processing system?

[vlm]

cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos

Finally, a clear and concise explanation of "the cloud". Its batch processing just like JCL on MVS/360. And to think people thought it was something new...

Re:batch processing system?

[jank1887]

"our cloud"

doesn't that sort of make it not "the cloud"? I thought the whole point of "cloud computing" was that you're using other people's hardware to do your work. If it's your hardware doing your work on your network, that's now called working 'in a cloud'? So the next time Pixar uses their Renderfarm to produce a movie, they can call it their "RenderCloud"? Heck, I scripted my computer downstairs chop up my audiobook downloads so they play nicely on my older MP3 player. Then it dumps it to a shared drive where I pull it to my device through my laptop. Is that my itty bitty home cloud? Is all network/server based computing now some "cloud something"?

Gah... lets take bets on the next "we don't know what's actually new, so we'll just make up new buzzwords" word. Web 2.0, Cloud computing, ____next?___

Re:batch processing system?

[slim]

I don't know how you're missing this. A cloud is a massive cluster of nodes which collaborate to process requests, and can route around failures.

Yes, you can have your own cloud. Amazon's cloud services came about when they realised their private cloud had become big enough that they had capacity to spare.

No, a System/360 is not a cloud. Although, for as long as it's working, it might be indistinguishable from a cloud to the client.

Re:batch processing system?

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be "other people's hardware" in the sense that it's not owned by the department/people responsible for WEBM, or maybe not even YouTube, but Google. It may just be a shared resource where different departments can run their jobs.

Re:batch processing system?

[Anonymous Coward]

cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos

Finally, a clear and concise explanation of "the cloud". Its batch processing just like JCL on MVS/360. And to think people thought it was something new...

No, no, no. It is "Do XYZ" + [with teh intarwebs] = patent, please?

Re:batch processing system?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The cloud" is a business innovation, not a technical one.

Re:batch processing system?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! The cloud means "use someone else's computers on the Internet!!!!" which is pretty much redundant since it's like 99.999% of what happens anyway, so cloud really just means "INTERNET!!!!!!!" Woooooooo! New marketspeak GET PUMPED!

Or

[Mateo_LeFou]

"Apple will follow suit eventually, they might resist for a while but with Android's rising market share and Google controlling Youtube, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and I'm sure they know it."

Or...

Watch this space for iTube?

Possible solution?

[Mateo_LeFou]

I just got this crazy idea for dealing with this problem:
When people make unauthorized copies of non-free material, prosecute them for doing that.
I know this goes against the legal mainstream (viz. find out what they used to do that and ban it); I'm just thinking out loud.

The only question I have

[devent]

The only question I have is does it affect me in any way? I'm using Fedora 14 with FF3. It would be very nice to ditch the flash plugin, which I'm only using for Youtube and other video content.

Re:The only question I have

[Anonymous Coward]

The only question I have is does it affect me in any way? I'm using Fedora 14 with FF3. It would be very nice to ditch the flash plugin, which I'm only using for Youtube and other video content.

no, it does not. maybe if you have opted in for html5-mode.

Re:The only question I have

[amn108]

As far as I know, FF3 doesn't do HTML5. FF4 does, and does so quite adequately. You won't be ditching the dreadful Adobe Flash pluging just yet though - last time I checked (this morning), a substantial share of YT content is still not available in WebM. Also, if you use Flash for other websites as well, then obviously nothing has changed there. I am a Flash Player developer on occasion, and I also wish i'd disappear. There are some things there is no alternative (HTML5 including) for though - camera and microphone access and publishing to name one.

Re:The only question I have

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is working on providing audio/video input too (properly protected of course), but it's not yet ready for prime time.

Re:The only question I have

[Anonymous Coward]

Afaik, FF3 _does_ do HTML5, including the video tag, although FF4 has a new HTML parser and supports way more of the HTML5 standard than FF3 does/did.

Where are the MPEG LA VP8 patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

The MPEG LA announced their call for VP8 video patents and then they spent a month looking for them. It's now over a month since their patent search ended, so do they have any patents relevant to VP8 or not? I guess not:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx

Take some responsability for your own content

[Anonymous Coward]

Grandpa can always re-upload his videos (for free!) if he's not satisfied by the quality of the (free!) transcoding.

You aren't using a (free!) web service without keeping a local copy, now are you?

C'mon, at least TRY to sound informed

[Anonymous Coward]

"According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video.

WebM is a file format. 720p and 1080p are resolutions. They are not mutually exclusive. This is like saying "Ford are now making black cars, whereas previously the focus was on cars with round wheels."

Re:C'mon, at least TRY to sound informed

[Anonymous Coward]

> They are not mutually exclusive

What IS mutually exclusive, however, is that for WebM Google are now transcoding all videos contrasting to previously only 720p and 1080p videos.

Re:C'mon, at least TRY to sound informed

[chocapix]

This is like saying "Ford are now making black cars, whereas previously the focus was on cars with round wheels."

Additionally, Ford puts the round wheels on cars named Focus.

Re:C'mon, at least TRY to sound informed

[slim]

It's like saying "Ford are now making Focus cars in black, whereas previously only Fiestas were available in that colour".

libvorbis

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they use libvorbis instead of ffvorbis for the vorbis audio otherwise it will be a big messup.

More seriously...

[DrYak]

Indeed. But, for it to work, there's also another needed step :

Step "1 1/2" : Widespread hardware availability.

It's already on the way.
WebM is basically H264 with the patented bit swapped out, so just like lots of prior knowledge could be leveraged to code a WebM codec, lots of prior hardware blocks in dedicated decoders could be leveraged to make WebM hardware support.
Also, lots of modern embed platforms feature much more than just a RISC CPU core : vector units, DSPs, and Compute-capable graphic cores are the norm.
Thus, one can already find on the web proof-of-concept code for WebM (and for Theora, for that matters).

Though I don't know yet how much actual usage in end user product it has seen as of yet. (Probably, Android will provide some vector- / DSP- / OpenCL- accelerated support on compatible platforms, soonish)

Re:More seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 0.1: Provide a usable spec for WebM, the existing one is a joke consisting of _broken_ sample code.
Step 0.2: Replace 980 million players that play H264, but are not in field upgradable.
Step 0.3: Enhance the internet infrastructure to handle the extra 10% of data, because WebM is bigger (at same quality).
Step 0.4: Fix the patent mess. (WebM didn't "swap out the patented bit", it dropped everything developed after 2002, bit still has the "old patented bit" in there.)

Step 99: Convince 240 million apple fanboys to toss their apple gadgets.
 

Re:More seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

WebM is basically H264 with the patented bit swapped out

Err, no. Not even close to being true. The VP8 codec on which WebM is based shares some of the same concepts and ideas as H.264 (which by the way makes it more vulnerable to patent claims) but is a completely different codec. Nothing that exists today in the realm of h.264 hardware en/decoding (in the 300+Million mobile devices, tens of millions of STBs, and countless other devices) can be simply 'updated' so support WebM. Any existing platform will have to use the CPU and/or GPU to perform such operations, at a corresponding loss in performance, fidelity, and battery life.

Re:More seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

The VP8 codec on which WebM is based shares some of the same concepts and ideas as H.264 (which by the way makes it more vulnerable to patent claims)

Bullshit. People who avoid patents for living have commented on the strategy, it's sound. On2 has been in the royalty free codec business for a long time, can you find patent problems in their history?

Nothing that exists today in the realm of h.264 hardware en/decoding (in the 300+Million mobile devices, tens of millions of STBs, and countless other devices) can be simply 'updated' so support WebM.

More bullshit, a lot of those devices don't actually implement the decoding in hardware, they use DSPs to do the slow bits, but they are not fixed in stone for one codec. It's not likely that they will be updated, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be. And set top boxes are a fucking red herring, unless it has a browser it doesn't matter in this context.

Any existing platform will have to use the CPU and/or GPU to perform such operations, at a corresponding loss in performance, fidelity, and battery life.

Even more bullshit. H.264 is a fucking pig when it comes to resource usage, that is why most devices out there only play baseline (with an actual loss in fidelity). VP8 was specifically made for efficient playback in software, and doesn't have a downscaling facility. It will either play or not but there will be no loss in fidelity (and one in performance makes no fucking sense).

Re:More seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you just have to figure out how to get Nokia and Apple to bundle those hardware on their phones.

The latter surely won't, while the former just got a heck of a lot harder to convince after being bought^H^H^H^H^H^H made to use Windows Phone 7 on their smartphones in the next years.

Together, they make up around two thirds of smartphone market share. Even the best market projections up to 2015 only show Android reaching 40% or so.

Then you have to consider how you aren't sure at all if Android smartphone OEMs like HTC and Samsung would acquire those hardware for their smartphones too, since by then MPEGLA would be readying themselves to acquire royalties aggressively; Microsoft already does collect some, while Apple goes the hard way with patent lawsuits.

It's already on the way alright, but the H.264 camp isn't sitting on the sidewalk -- they're setting up a roadblock and Google better drive WebM adoption very well to push successfully through it.

Re:More seriously...

[hazydave]

Updates are certainly possible. Likely... that's another story. It's generally difficult to get most CE-type companies to support anything that's moved much beyond "new".

Most mobile devices don't contain H.264 decoders specifically... they contain DCT acceleration engines, which are usually capable of decoding various standards within the family: H.264, MPEG1/2, even VC-1/WMV9.

Here's the first problem: each of these is usually a proprietary trade secret. Not documented in public. TI, nVidia, QualComm, etc. may be quite capable of supporting VP8... doesn't mean they will. Or that anyone else can. Others, like Samsung or Apple, may be using similar hardware that's a standard logic block from PowerVR or ARM. Those may be a little better understood by people outside the companies. Maybe.

Either way, this is not as simple as on a desktop. H.264 as accelerated on Windows via DXVA 2.0 works exceptionally well, and it's independent of GPU type. So one well coded, accelerated VP8 decoder fixes every PC with a GPU... could be as good as H.264 overnight, new and old systems together. For portables... not so quick. And while these chip companies may well support VP8/WebM going forward, not a huge chance for devices already in the field.

Most simple STBs have even more locked down MPEG-2/AVC/VC-1 support, and probably have little need for WebM. Game consoles do it all in software/GPU anyway, but you'd need Sony or Microsoft committing to WebM support. Given they're the guys actually promoting H.264 and VC-1, respectively, I don't exactly see that happening.

Too bad it doesn't work with firefox nightlies

[Anonymous Coward]

F#$@ useragent sniffing.

Re:Too bad it doesn't work with firefox nightlies

[RobbieThe1st]

You have to enable the HTML5 beta, silly!
http://www.youtube.com/html5
Works with my 6.0a1 nightly.

Goodbye Flash!

[oh_my_080980980]

About damn time!!

AVC baseline profile

[tepples]

x264's results consistently bests WebM at same (and sometimes even lower) bitrate.

The consensus among previous articles linked from Slashdot stories, as I understand it, is that VP8 is roughly comparable to AVC's baseline profile. When you compare the VP8 encoder to x264 set to baseline profile, what do you get?

Re:AVC baseline profile

[Anonymous Coward]

> The consensus among previous articles linked from Slashdot stories, as I understand it, is that VP8 is roughly comparable to AVC's baseline profile.

The launch release of WebM (May 2010) was roughly comparable to AVC's baseline profile.
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-web-media-project.html

WebM has had two releases since then, namely the Aylesbury release October 2010, and the Bali release March 2011.
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/10/vp8-codec-sdk-aylesbury-release.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/vp8-codec-sdk-bali-released.html

Each of these release improved the quality per bit of WebM by about 6%, so in total there has been roughly a 12.8% increase in WebM quality per bit since its launch, when the initial comparisons of WebM to h.264 were made.

The next release is to be called Cayuga and it is due in late Q2, 2011.
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/next-up-libvpx-cayuga.html

"As always, we'll continue to improve video quality in the encoder."

These improvements in quality are made via the WebM encoder. Because the bitstream format is frozen, WebM videos made with later versions of the encoder are still playable by earlier versions of the decoder.

Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough

[tepples]

They are out of date

By how long? And how much are you willing to pay the testers to update their comparison?

They use poor source material
They transcode from one lossy source to another

As I understand it, all consumer and prosumer camcorders use a lossy codec. So what freely available non-lossy source do you recommend using to evaluate codecs? Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough, as CGI movies don't exercise the portion that deals with real-world camera noise, real-world detail, and the lossy encoding artifacts inherent in home-movie source material.

They use still shots of moving video to prove a pre-conceived notion that one is "better" than the other.

I assume that in a lot of cases, they can't make the actual encoded video available due to copyright restrictions. Again, what test cases do you recommend?

Re:Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough

[Anonymous Coward]

By how long?

I've seen people continue to link to an article that compares x264 to the year-old WebM 1.0 release and quote it as "fact".

all consumer and prosumer camcorders use a lossy codec

Quite. The problem is that most of the comparisons do not make any allowances for this, or in many cases do not even mention the possibility that the artefacts they experience may partly be due to the conversion process.

I assume that in a lot of cases, they can't make the actual encoded video available due to copyright restrictions.

In most cases it appears that people prefer to use some poorly lit and poorly shot home-movie style source material which I would assume they own the copyright on. Although this point is now mostly moot that we can pick a whole bunch of dual-encoded YouTube video to compare.

Re:Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough

[tepples]

I've seen people continue to link to an article that compares x264 to the year-old WebM 1.0 release and quote it as "fact".

Does the article compare year-old WebM to year-old x264? And can you recommend newer articles to which people can link in order to support your position?

The problem is that most of the comparisons do not make any allowances for this, or in many cases do not even mention the possibility that the artefacts they experience may partly be due to the conversion process.

Perhaps because they believe it's a given that most videos transcoded into VP8 or AVC will be from lossy sources, whether from DVD/BD rips, from TV recordings, from video game captures recorded on consumer (that is, lossy) equipment, or from low-quantizer lossy encodes out of home movie editing software. Therefore, it is important for a codec not to blow up in transcodes. But you're right that it's irresponsible to take an MP4 video, transcode it to WebM, and compare those.

Although this point is now mostly moot that we can pick a whole bunch of dual-encoded YouTube video to compare.

You have a point there. So once this 30% becomes 90%, and the SELECT * FROM unencoded_videos ORDER BY views DESC inches through the long tail, comparisons should become more fair.

Re:Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough

[Anonymous Coward]

> By how long? And how much are you willing to pay the testers to update their comparison?

The original comparisons of WebM to h.264 are out of date by one year. WebM has had two releases since its first release a year ago, and has improved by 12.8% objective measured quality per bit in that time.

How much are MPEG LA prepared to pay web forum posters to try to carry on with FUD which is well and truly outdated?

In this new move for encoding to WebM by YouTube, do you imagine that YouTube will still be using the year-old launch release of WebM or the twice improved Bali version which was released in March this year?

Re:Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough

[tepples]

The original comparisons of WebM to h.264 are out of date by one year.

Which search engine and which keywords would you recommend that I use to find an updated comparison? Google 2011 (webm OR vp8) vs x264 quality didn't appear at first glance to produce anything relevant.

Re:Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough

[Anonymous Coward]

> Which search engine and which keywords would you recommend that I use to find an updated comparison? Google 2011 (webm OR vp8) vs x264 quality didn't appear at first glance to produce anything relevant.

When Google announced the launch release of WebM in May 2010, slightly after that there was a flurry of comparisons published all of which were keen to show that h.264 was slightly better quality per bit than WebM. It was all over the web and very widely discussed. There was much general disparagement of WebM.

In October 2010 Google announced the first upgrade release of WebM, showing that according to objective measurements Google had achieved about a 6% improvement in quality per bit compared to the launch release.

Not a peep from any of the sites that had compared the launch release of WebM to h.264. Complete silence. Not the slightest whisper.

In March 2011 Google announced the second upgrade release of WebM, showing that according to objective measurements Google had again achieved a further improvement once of about a 6% in quality per bit compared to the first upgrade release (almost 13% in total over the launch release).

Once again not a peep from any of the sites that had compared the launch release of WebM to h.264. Nothing. Utter silence.

Funny, that, don't you think?

WebM player vs flash

[AbRASiON]

I just want to know one thing.
Have they stopped the RIDICULOUS policy of when switching a video to full screen, it re-buffers the whole damned thing again?
As an Aussie with mid speed internet links, it's just wasteful in both my time and bandwidth. Not all videos stream faster than you can watch :/

Yes, I've posted on their forums no response.

Re:WebM player vs flash

[Anonymous Coward]

This is usually because it also changes to a higher resolution when you switch to full screen, thus needing to re-buffer.

Re:WebM player vs flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, I find performance to be much better when downloading the videos off youtube (I'm using the Firefox 'DownloadHelper' addon) and watching them at your leisure.
It downloads faster (you can download using multiple streams),
It plays smoother (using a real player such as Zoom Player outside the browser gives you access to much better hardware acceleration),
You can seek instantly, go fullscreen and it just works.

Re:WebM player vs flash

[hoelk]

You can also just open youtube URLs in VLC

Re:WebM player vs flash

[rjstanford]

Not really. They could continue to show your previously buffered content, appropriately upscaled, and then download new content (possibly, if they were nice and you had bandwidth to spare, back-filling over your existing buffer as well so you'd get the higher definition stream sooner). This is, for example, how Netflix streaming does it.

Re:WebM player vs flash

[Twinbee]

Well said. It is absolutely ridiculous, and I thought it was just me having that problem. The partial solution I have found is to make it full screen before the video starts, back to small, and then when you next go back to big it should be okay.

Re:WebM player vs flash

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Wow, that was an easy answer.

Re:WebM player vs flash

[Bitmanhome]

Well then let me answer it right here. It's not a policy, it's a setting. If you turn it off, it won't happen any more.

Log in, click your name in the upper right corner, click Account. On the left, click Playback Setup, then select "I have a slow connection. Never play higher-quality video." Save changes, and you're golden.

Here's a video to test on.

Re:WebM player vs flash

[AbRASiON]

Incorrect - I've set the setting and it still occurs and confirm the same for friends.
Furthermore it's shit policy and practice, I shouldn't need a cookie or login for the site to not behave annoyingly.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Ogg Vorbis absolutely dominates in the gaming market. Nearly every computer game being sold these days uses ogg -- not mp3 -- for their embedded music and sound effects. Puts a bit of a damper on your anti-freedom campaign, now doesn't it?

You beat me too it

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you who haven't tried it, don't give up. Right clicking won't let you down.

The only issues some people might have are the video and audio artifacts introduced. Neither seems to exactly match the original video.

Re:You beat me too it

[amn108]

I have collected a host of content from YT in the form of .webm files and I don't notice any visible degradation in quality. However, even if I would, and since some apparently do, if we assume that YT encodes the WebM content targetting same file size, it will be of lower quality than the corresponding file carrying H.264 video and MPEG-1 audio.

Patents are ONLY about the CLAIMS

[dwheeler]

Actually, to be patent independent does NOT "require significant differences in their implementation". They just need to avoid or invalidate the patent claims, which are often really narrow. For more information, see Andrew Tridgell on Patent Defence. Which is why the statement that "VP8 is similar to H264" can be both true and a non-problem.

Apples and oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

"YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video."

WebM is a codec. 720p and 1080p are measures of resolution.

A WebM video could be 720p, 1080p, or any other size.

A 720p or 1080p video could be encoded in WebM, or any other codec that exists.

Re:Apples and oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you silly little retard... SPED didn't teach you reading comprehension, huh?

Like!

[Trelane]

Errrm, +1. Now, to get Moz to use hw acceleration for webm and to get a webm-enabled crystalhd card for my linu netbook!

Summary missing something

[Anonymous Coward]

whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video.

More specifically, it was on H.264 720p and 1080p video.

There is no one out there.

[westlake]

At any point, someone not part of the group could pipe up and sue h264 for patent infringement

There are about thirty H.264 licensors and one thousand H.264 licensees, who, collectively, manufacture essentially 100% of the hardware and software used in the chain of high definition television production and distribution from the studio camera to the motion picture theater and home television set.

The licensors include global industrial powers like Mitsubishi, Philips, Samsung and Toshiba.

Even the smallest players here would be considered giants in R&D.

Each and every one dangerous adversaries in court - with virtually unlimited funds to defend their position.

H.265/HEVC should be ready in about a year or two.

Scales well from the smartphone to the 4Kx2K projection screen. Half the bitrate of H.264/WebM for the same perceived video quality.

Some meaningful improvements in color reproduction, sound, etc. Content protection when desired.

The geek is like the general who fights the last war when the new war has already begun.

Re:There is no one out there.

[SnowZero]

None of that matters for a non-practicing-entity (aka patent troll). All you need is one successful patent to sink the ship. For example, i4i is much smaller that Microsoft, but that didn't help MS any, did it?

Quality Damage

[Grindalf]

If you re-encode this will blow the quality and compression ratio with this type of codec. Which pixel size ratio / frame rates? Hmmmm...

Mod Parent Up, Please +1 Informative

[billstewart]

Thanks - I've been using html5 on Chrome, hadn't known FF4 supported it yet.

Re:Mod Parent Up, Please +1 Informative

[RobbieThe1st]

Yup; It's been supported in the nightlies/betas since a week or two after Google announced it was being added to Chrome.
It's slightly rough around the edges as of yet: It appears to be single-threaded and if you've got a bunch of javascript timers running code on a dozen+ tabs, it can stutter/drop frames sometimes. This /used/ to be really annoying for high-motion videos, but I haven't noticed it since upgrading to the 6.0 nightlies.
The other thing that would be nice is a OS-plugin option allowing the use of gnome-mplayer or VLC for playing HTML5 content; that way you could have hardware-accelerated video when you've got a native player, and a fallback when you don't.

Is this why some resolutions were failing for me?

[billstewart]

In the last few days, I've found that increasing numbers of videos will work ok at 240, maybe or maybe not at 360, and fail at 480. The failure mode is that the image is a big blob of green, maybe with a few red pixels around the edges.

6 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

6 years worth every day? That doesn't make sense.