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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.'"
When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?
If I had to venture a guess, somewhere around April 1st next year.
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.
Actually its been around for a while While
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.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
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.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
Help! Help! Someone is trying to give me something for free!
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.
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.
Are they transcoding from the original upload materia going back to 2005, or are they transcoding from 240p .flv in many cases?
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.
Wished I knew how t o/ if i could mod you up.
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?
This sentence no verb.
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.
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
"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."
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.
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...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
"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?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
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.
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.
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.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
exp(i*pi)+1=0
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
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.
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?
You mean VP8, not H.264
> 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.
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.
So let's take a step backwards here from the ubiquitous, standards-backed h.264
Where does it say they're abandoning H.264?
It's like saying "Ford are now making Focus cars in black, whereas previously only Fiestas were available in that colour".
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)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
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.
About damn time!!
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
Property for sale in Nice, France
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's great but how many of the 1 year or less Android phones and Tablets have that? Oh yeah, none of them.
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.
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But plugins make itunes handle it and put it on ipods as aac
You have to enable the HTML5 beta, silly!
http://www.youtube.com/html5
Works with my 6.0a1 nightly.
err... just be patient and the world as u know it has changed.
Any cost at all is enough to make it impossible to include in GPL software, legally anyways.
SSC
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.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
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.
Yeah, zero penetration indeed. As in products that allow me to play the formats I want don't try to penetrate me.
Errrm, +1. Now, to get Moz to use hw acceleration for webm and to get a webm-enabled crystalhd card for my linu netbook!
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
All should have similar stand
Fuck off. I'm not supporting a patented standard that requires royalties.
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.
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.
"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.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
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.
YouTube is Google's product. They can encode their video as dog poo if they want to.
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?
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.
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.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Yeah, this is a case of, "what the hell else do you want?" They blew it as wide open as possible.
I8-D
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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).
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Thanks - I've been using html5 on Chrome, hadn't known FF4 supported it yet.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
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 ;)
exp(i*pi)+1=0
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.
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 ;)
exp(i*pi)+1=0
First you need mod points, then the comment has be below maximum moderation (+5). No one can up-mod a +5 comment.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
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).
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).
YouTube is Google's product. They can encode their video as dog poo if they want to.
To match the content you mean?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Its royalty free for non-commercial use. You must pay royalties for commercial use.
Wow, that's pretty fucking evil.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Actually its been around for a while While
There seems to be some sort of red ghosting effect on that video.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You haven't managed to address a single point I made, though.
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.
Ever heard of development... one version may be free, the next may not.
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.
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.
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.
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