Wikimedia Community Debates H.264 Support On Wikipedia Sites.

bigmammoth writes "Wikimedia has been a long time supporter of royalty free formats, but is now considering a shift in their position. From the RfC: 'To support the MP4 standard as a complement to the open formats now used on our sites, it has been proposed that videos be automatically transcoded and stored in both open and MP4 formats on our sites, as soon as they are uploaded or viewed by users. The unencumbered WebM and Ogg versions would remain our primary reference for platforms that support them. But the MP4 versions 'would enable many mobile and desktop users who cannot view these unencumbered video files to watch them in MP4 format.' This has stirred a heated debate within the Wikimedia community as to whether the mp4 / h.264 format should be supported. Many Wikimedia regulars have weighed in, resulting in currently an even split between adding the H.264 support or not. The request for comment is open to all users of Wikimedia, including the broader community of readers. What do you think about supporting H.264 on Wikimedia sites?"

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an encyclopedia, not YouTube.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an encyclopedia

Exactly, it should just support formats that users have and not play politics.

Re:Why?

[Ardyvee]

It's not wikipedia, but wikimedia, which is much more than an encyclopedia. Wikimedia is closer to a library than to an encyclopedia. Wikimedia contains wikipedia, though, if I were to insist on that comparison.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The title contains Wikipedia too, and God forbid anyone get confused by that.

Re:Why?

[multi io]

It's an encyclopedia

Exactly, it should just support formats that users have and not play politics.

Wrong. I think it should "play politics" in this case. Wikipedia is one of the very few sites which, because of its popularity, uniqueness, and non-commercial nature, has some leverage over browser vendors, and has more freedom than others to make use of it.

Almost everywhere else on the web it's the other way round: The browser vendors can force the site owners into compliance. If you have a smallish website and you want to provide video content on it, you often have no choice than to use an encoding like H.264 that all browsers support -- thereby furthering the agenda of consortiums like MPEG LA to steer the market towards a universal adoption of a patent-encumbered "hands off" format, and also lessening the incentive for browser vendors to support open royalty-free encoding formats. But if you run the like 4th most popular site in the world, the only one of its kind, AND you're not commercially bound to maximize your number of visitors no matter what, then you have some power to drive the web (and the whole industry) in the direction of truly open, royalty-free, "free to tinker with" video encoding formats, which would help lower costs and market entry barriers for new companies and individuals. Wikipedia shouldn't throw this leverage away.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

- "Wrong."
- "I think..."

is it objective or subjective?

Re:Why?

[bigmammoth]

We "played the politics" a few years ago, there was momentum with at one point chrome saying it was planing to ~remove h.264~ from its browser. But in the end that did not pan out. Firefox ended up supporting h.264, and wikimedia was left with very little video participation by its exclusive support for royalty free formats.

Assuming the point of wikimedia is promote free codecs ( not get free information to people that want to access it ) ... Its still too late to say to Apple .. hey if you don't support webm, you won't be able to view the near zero percentage of wikimedia articles that have video content. But when it comes to h.265 and vp9 or Daala, if Wikimedia was a large video player similar to youtube it could help add its weight behind free future free codecs guenteeing they have a prominante home on the web with an active video community.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason the fight was given up was because Google gave up. Apparently they had no faith in WebM, despite having both formats on Youtube, so they renegged on their "promise" to drop support for H264 in Chrome.

If you ask me, it's got EVERYTHING to do with politics. Every time they do something like that, it causes trouble for competitors. Mozilla had to implement H264 when they did that. It had to also support VP9 when they introduced that. And they're having to scramble to support Media-streaming Extensions now as well. Opera just gave up entirely and became a Chrome clone. All because Google desired it, not because they had to do so.

You see, Google's about making money. It's not about winning or losing in a codec war, it's about who controls the future of web video. And if you can keep everyone scrambling to catch up, you can dictate what happens next. They're doing this in many areas of the web; SPDY (which basically became HTTP2), Pepper, NaCl, WebP, etc. They won't win them all, but they're all power plays to make sure Google's the one ahead of the curve while everyone else plays catch-up.

If someone can take a principled stance against this, they should. Right now the only entities with a spine are the ones who aren't for-profit, and none of them can stand up to it, and end users should really be supporting them. Do we really want Google and the MPEG-LA to dominate like that, knowing what happens every time companies dominate something like that?

Re:Why?

[morgauxo]

It's an open encyclopedia. They are all about the FREE sharing of information, it's what they are. That IS a kind of political organization. They aren't World Book selling encyclopedias at your door or Encarta helping push Windows PCs in the early 90s!

On the other hand, if the open formats have already lost then they will have to eventually give up and share what they can in the format that people can consume it in.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Freak]

Wow. Troll? No - truth.

Go ahead and play politics - but if your mission is "...to empower a global volunteer community to collect and develop the world's knowledge and to make it available to everyone for free, for any purpose." then to me "make it available to everyone" is primary take away.

"Make available to everyone" means *MAKE AVAILABLE*. They're not the Free Software Foundation. They're not GNU, they're not even Creative Commons. Their mission is to make the information available to as many people as possible. To me, this means that supporting closed FORMATS for open INFORMATION gets to the maximum number of people.

They also specifically call out that they are about "free content" - notably SEPARATING it from "open content". The part of the content they care about is the freedom of the CONTENT itself. Public Domain, CC-licensed, etc. The mission of Wikimedia doesn't mention supporting OPEN content as a priority. And that is as it should be!

Re:Why?

[Twinbee]

H264 is apparently quite a bit better than the alternatives in areas such as playback quality for a given bitrate, and encoding time. It's hard to ignore that. I'm sure if the OS community came up with something that really was better, they'd switch to that shortly after.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go ahead, play politics and see just how fast Wikipedia loses popularity to a competing site that does support the formats that people already use.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. neeetwork effect.

Re:Why?

[Maury Markowitz]

> Wrong. I think it should "play politics" in this case

So do I, by supporting 264.

I'd *love* to see someone try to get money out of them.

Re:Why?

[Maury Markowitz]

> because Google gave up. Apparently they had no faith in WebM

Umm, *thats* what you think happened?

Maybe it was that the most used browsers on the largest platforms didn't support it, and never would?
And that installing the codecs to get support was beyond the abilities of the vast majority of users?
And that, in lots of tests, it consistently did worse than 264 in encoding quality?
And that the implementations had little or no hardware decoding support?

Maybe it was one of those?

Re: Why?

[Mabhatter]

It's not politics, its MONEY. The h.264 codec are "free to play" only because Apple, Sony, and Microsoft and a few other big names throw massive coinage in royalties up front.. And they are part of the royalty board. They don't want their device customers to know how locked down the patents really are on basic stuff like taking video on a phone. If Wikipedia puts up videos, they are too big not to get conned into paying somehow.. No matter what the "industry promises" are.

I'm normally an Apple fan, but when it comes to media formats, they're right next to the Devil. They simply refuse to support non-royalty formats, and they make it harder than snot to even use them even on Macs.

Fact is that we need FREE AND OPEN formats for creating digital libraries. That's an ENTIRELY reasonable request and good for the World, but the large media companies use formats on non-upgradable devices for their own little world-building agendas.

Things like this are how "business" makes sure "capitalism" gets its share of worship before "freedom".

Stand their ground

[wiredlogic]

Wikimedia should stand their ground to provide a good reason for device manufacturers to add support for open video formats.

Re:Stand their ground

[icebike]

I can't see how Wiki has all that much leverage.

When did you last see someone turn down one Smartphone for another because it couldn't play a wiki video?

Re:Stand their ground

[TimMD909]

Android already supports WebM (http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html). I'm thinking this is more of a "should we care about the people with iPhones?" My answer would be "no." That'll add more pressure on Apple to not be jackasses w/ their mobile OS.

Re:Stand their ground

[MrBingoBoingo]

Pretty much. Open standards can't gain ground unless someone insists on using them. It is like Microsoft's Office Documents in their battle agaisnt literally anything else. If no one objects to the propietary lock in, the open alternatives have to fight for their survival at a severe disadvantage.

Re:Stand their ground

[mozumder]

They should stand their ground and consider design usability first and support H.264.

Users don't care about moronic preachy libertarian ideals like open format.

Usability > Idealism.

Don't preach. Just do.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Suggesting anyone stand their ground is a bad idea. Someone will end up dead and it very well could be Wikimedia.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

I would just provide a JS-only decoder, and when it runs really slowly and poorly, I'd say "iPhone's don't support non-commercial video very well. We did the best we could, take it up with Apple".

Re:Stand their ground

[ducomputergeek]

The open formats lost this round. Sorry, but with H2.64 we've finally had a "Standard Codec" and format that allows content creators to encode the media once and just about reach everyone. If the open standards offered a significant technical advantage, i.e. better compression without loss of quality or faster encoding vs H.264 then they'd be open to listening. But as I've talked to a lot of content creators over the past few years, many of whom remember the days of creating a quicktime video, a Windows Media video, a Real Player video and none of them wish to go back to it. And for these people the cost of paying for a H.264 encoder license is trivial compared to royalties they have to pay for images, video, and music.

Re:Stand their ground

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I can't see how Wiki has all that much leverage.

Looking at the list of most popular websites, I think only facebook & youtube would have more influence on video-standards settings.

When did you last see someone turn down one Smartphone for another because it couldn't play a wiki video?

Never, but it can add to a list of small frustrations, getting a user to switch manufacturers next contract renewal. You don't have to be the sole reason for a change to have leverage over manufacturers.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Android already supports WebM (http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html). I'm thinking this is more of a "should we care about the people with iPhones?"

My answer would be "no." That'll add more pressure on Apple to not be jackasses w/ their mobile OS.

Remember Flash? Me neither. Fighting H.264 is tilting at windmills. The vast majority of people couldn't care less about free (to them) video formats as long as stuff works and looks good.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stand their ground" != "consider design usability first"
The Wikimedia projects are all about "moronic preachy libertarian ideals".
We have them to thank for a big chunk of currently available free culture.
Commons's infamously strict licensing rules have resulted in a lot of freely-licensed media that would not have otherwise existed.
And MPEG-LA sucks.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah because people frequent Wikipedia for the videos! NOT. Wikipedia has zero influence here.

Re:Stand their ground

[Mister Liberty]

How did the koolaid taste? I didn't even have to mod you down cause
you're doing great at -1.
Case of 'just do', I suppose. Cheers dickhead!

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Android supports WebM, but most Android devices do not support it in hardware. This is a big deal for mobile battery life. But congrats for getting your Apple-bash on.

Re:Stand their ground

[ducomputergeek]

Depends on your traffic. I run a content rich site for a client of mine and we realized something as we did our quarterly review: Mobile users are now 60% of all traffic to her site. Of that, the biggest block of users are from iPad at almost 30% of all traffic. iPhone makes up another 18% and all Android devices make up about 13% of our traffic. There is another 6% of traffic that is iPods. So as it stands right now iOS is over 50% of all traffic.

Think we are going to ignore iOS? Think again. Instead we've decided that it's time to add a native mobile app for iOS targeting specifically iPad.

Re:Stand their ground

[tlhIngan]

Pretty much. Open standards can't gain ground unless someone insists on using them. It is like Microsoft's Office Documents in their battle agaisnt literally anything else. If no one objects to the propietary lock in, the open alternatives have to fight for their survival at a severe disadvantage.

Or prove superiority.

Right now, there is NO advantage to WebM or VP8 over h.264. The only reason to choose it is purely philosophical, especially since it's inferiority.

No, if you want to push an open standard, you go to prove its superiority. Why do you think Google has basically abandoned VP8 (which is a crap unimplementable standard) and pushing hard for VP9? Because the next-generation codec war has just begun. And it's between h.265 and VP9.

h.264 war is lost - there is too much entrenched.

But the next gen codec war is not, and in the battle between h.265 and VP9, there aren't as much legacy to worry about. If VP9 is completely royalty free, guess what? The industry consortium will pick it, even if it is inferior to h.265 because being able to crank out parts with VP9 decoders for free means more profit for them. (And didn't Google pretty much pay off all royalties for VP9?).

Standing your ground may win you the battle, but if you lose sight that h.264's relevance is going to diminish in the next few years to be replaced by the next gen h.265, then you've lost the war. Best to move on, and put your energy into promoting VP9 so it becomes standard.

Hell, Google's stopped promoting VP8 a while ago - they wanted to add it as an option for YouTube, and it's fizzled out for that reason - Google realizes it's not worth winning the WebM/VP8 war - it's too entrenched. Just move on to next gen when the standards are still malleable and inclusion and acceptance are easy.

And it'll be an easier sell, too. Right now if you make a graphics chip, you're going to pay the h.264 royalties even if you want WebM/VP9 because it's an expected feature. But in your new chip, you're still paying for h.264, but VP9, you don't have to pay! You as the manufacturer get to keep that extra 25 cents per unit.

Re:Stand their ground

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Wikimedia's mission:

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

The question is does supporting H.264 media files help or hinder their mission?

If their goal is to disseminate the educational content effectively then it would seem logical that they provide a media format that is widely supported.

It's really up to WebM and Ogg to promote their format. Wikimedia should stick to their own mission which is to provide educational content.

Re:Stand their ground

[SuricouRaven]

The iStuff owners are probably more valuable customers too. It's a premium device - people who use them will tend to have above-average disposeable income.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's exactly it: the world doesn't just revolve around people who are paying royalties on image/video/music. If Wikipedia accepts this, then the people who can't afford to pay that (and that includes many people who just don't want to deal with such licenes, for whom even $0.01 is too much) get screwed.

Open codecs aren't about being the best, they're about being for everyone.

Re:Stand their ground

[StripedCow]

Wikimedia should stand their ground to provide a good reason for device manufacturers to add support for open video formats.

The best way to do this, should they choose to support the H.264 format, is to add a tiny annoyance to video files in that format.
Like a 5 second intro that displays their policy in the format war, and how users are better off with the open version of the video.

Re:Stand their ground

[BasilBrush]

Never, but it can add to a list of small frustrations, getting a user to switch manufacturers next contract renewal.

You WANT to add to users frustrations? Bad attitude.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple fix is to allow upload of any format. The first time someone attempts to view it in a format that it is not in, then politely tell them "This video is not available in xxx format, please donate $5 to cover video transcoding costs" and give them a convenient button to do so. After someone has paid (thus shown an interest in wanting that format) it is then available for free to everyone else. People who donate for this will also feel like they are making a contribution to others. Cheaper than a double latte. Make the costs high enough that it would also generate a little revenue.

Re:Stand their ground

[FriendlyLurker]

I have watched Wikipedia being pulled up on two different smartphones simultaneously to settle argument/doubts more times than I can count now over the years.

"Oh, your phone can't play that wikipedia video - ha! - what a crappy phone you should get one like mine next time."

That sort of word of mouth marketing has a subtle hard to measure influence on peoples next phone contract signing agreement choices. I can't say how significant it is, but you would be hard pressed to discount it as not being significant.

Re:Stand their ground

[Dahamma]

Right now, there is NO advantage to WebM or VP8 over h.264. The only reason to choose it is purely philosophical, especially since it's inferiority.

No, if you want to push an open standard, you go to prove its superiority. Why do you think Google has basically abandoned VP8 (which is a crap unimplementable standard) and pushing hard for VP9? Because the next-generation codec war has just begun. And it's between h.265 and VP9.

h.264 war is lost - there is too much entrenched.

This is probably the best point I have seen so far.

H.264 hardware support has been in most SoCs (system on a chip) built into set tops and mobile devices in the last 6+ years. The fight for this generation is in fact over.

H.265 is already planned to go into 2015 devices (TVs and BD players) in order to support upcoming features like 4k and HDR - but, there is still a chance to get VP9, etc in there. And the savings, even if $1 per unit, would be enough to get companies like Google (Chromecast) or Roku (which doesn't support Dolby Digital because they don't want to pay the license fee) very interested. And in the end if a hardware manufacturer sells enough devices, the streaming services will do what it takes (including transcoding to other formats) to support them.

Re:Stand their ground

[Tough Love]

Google's stopped promoting VP8 a while ago - they wanted to add it as an option for YouTube, and it's fizzled out for that reason - Google realizes it's not worth winning the WebM/VP8 war

What nonsense. Google didn't stop promoting VP8, they just started referring to it as WebM.

Incidentally, I much prefer the HTML5 player, it integrates properly with my browser controls as opposed to flash player, which was always infuriorating. And I don't know about your browser, but WebM is is available in my browser and H.264 is not.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

complicated. fragmenting. not necessary. Support open standards on an open protocol at and open foundation, do not allow a small elite to extract rents from software patents.

Re:Stand their ground

[gnasher719]

Android already supports WebM (http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html). I'm thinking this is more of a "should we care about the people with iPhones?" My answer would be "no." That'll add more pressure on Apple to not be jackasses w/ their mobile OS.

I think you got the "jackasses" upside down here. Google, as they have done on other occassions, bought a video codecs with the sole purpose of upsetting the established standard. WebM is not patent encumbered until it is successful, and if it ever is successful, there will be patent owners trying to blackmail. Just as Google / Motorola have tried themselves. I mean that is a pathetic joke, attacking h.264 as being patent encumbered, and then patent trolling.

Re:Stand their ground

[jcdr]

Actually the reality is that the contents creators are locked by the fact that a few majors manufactures refuse to support free formats.

Re:Stand their ground

[gnasher719]

The best way to do this, should they choose to support the H.264 format, is to add a tiny annoyance to video files in that format. Like a 5 second intro that displays their policy in the format war, and how users are better off with the open version of the video.

Your problem is that the huge majority of Wikipedia users would be disgusted at your idea. Wikipedia is about getting information out in the best possible way. And for videos, whether you like it or not, h.264 is the best possible way. Whatever donations Wikipedia is getting today, intentionally messing with videos to annoy people will kill them. It's easier to get donations from people who are used to paying for value products and not from freetards.

Re:Stand their ground

[msobkow]

Flash is still in use at 80% of the sites I visit.

Apple's management are jack-asses. Let the consumer harass them instead of whining to the websites that their iShiny's don't work.

Re:Stand their ground

[xvan]

What about the "under a free license" part?

Re:Stand their ground

[Darinbob]

Flash? People didn't care about free or not, so Flash was big and fighting against Flash was tilting against windmills. But today Flash is greatly diminished. Thus the lesson here is to NOT give up pushing back against H.264.

Re: Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember iOS? Me neither. Apple has been long sliding _toward_ irrelevance even if you are able to make a case they aren't quite there yet. And their shit is pretty much all that is left, which still can't play normal video files. Well, maybe them and Sony. Most of us are not willing to wait for these luddite holdouts.

Re:Stand their ground

[MrBingoBoingo]

Why do we need hardware decoders in this day and age. If you want to offload work from CPU cores why not a fucking FPGA. Is this still the 1980s? Open formats possess an inherent advantage in the decoders being open to review. Who knows what exploit can be overflowed while decoding a video on a closed codec like H.264. The x86-64 still has loads of legacy cruft in there waiting to be exploited. There is abosolutely no reason for anyone purporting to provide open content to lock that content into proprietary formats.

Re:Stand their ground

[icebike]

That wiki is used frequently has almost nothing to do with it.

Lets face it, Wiki uses very few videos anyway, (thank god) and you aren't going to settle fact based arguments by watching videos on a phone.

Re:Stand their ground

[lgw]

Why? I can watch and rip to H.264 with free (as in beer) tools. Is this some political thing? My tools don't convert to *.BasementVirgin, or whatever format this is. Just Works wins for me, sorry.

The "next format" is H.265, as far as I care, but only when that Just Works.

Re:Stand their ground

[Nerdfest]

... you mean upsetting the established business model. There's absolutely no reason someone on *any* mobile device cannot use these open standards, other than being greedy assholes. I can see reasons for not using the codec for which encoders must be licensed for, but not supporting *open* standards is pretty much the definition of greed.

Re:Stand their ground

[Nerdfest]

There's also no reason they can't be the best, but certain media cartels have packs of lawyers that are certainly going to take a run at making sure it doesn't happen.

Re:Stand their ground

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I believe they meant the content to be under a free license not necessarily the media itself. Besides H.264 is free for the content consumer.

Re:Stand their ground

[symbolset]

My first reaction was "how much is MPEG-LA offering to pay?"

Re:Stand their ground

[symbolset]

This course of derision has not worked out well for fans of MPEG-LA so far. So by all means keep it up. God forbid you people take a civil, persuasive tack to win friends and influence people - you might somewhere.

Re:Stand their ground

[jonwil]

I suspect many of the manufacturers will ignore VP9 and go with H.265 anyway because many of the big boys in consumer electronics are part of the H.26x patent pools through their codec patents and dont have to pay as much in royalties as the little guys do.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's exactly it: the world doesn't just revolve around people who are paying royalties on image/video/music. If Wikipedia accepts this, then the people who can't afford to pay that (and that includes many people who just don't want to deal with such licenes, for whom even $0.01 is too much) get screwed.

Open codecs aren't about being the best, they're about being for everyone.

I wish people who talk about "open" like this would just man up and just say it's about FREE, as in COST.

It's not as if women, black people, men under 30, or people with pointy ears are not allowed to use x264.
ANYONE can, you just have to pay for it.

You mean FREE AS IN COST, so say that instead of free as in whatever else, or open, you damned liars.
Nowhere in the real world does liberty or open mean: to any person, for any reason, _at no cost_.

Re:Stand their ground

[Kjella]

Looking at the list of most popular websites, I think only facebook & youtube would have more influence on video-standards settings.

People don't visit Wikipedia for the videos any more than they read Playboy for the articles. That you even put it in the same class as YouTube only makes you sound delusional, they are 99.99% video and Wikipedia is 99.99% not. When Google that owns the VP8 codec, owns YouTube and makes Android and Chrome don't want to eat their own dog food and push their own codec on their own site to their own devices and browser it'll never be more than an obscure alternative for ideological circlejerks, like art critics patting each other on the back for recognizing true art while the rest of the world watches Hollywood blockbusters.

Even Firefox has surrendered on this one and said they'd use the binary blob Cisco provides, if Wikimedia wants to be the Japanese soldiers hiding in the forest 10 years after the war is over and keep denying it's over and that they lost it's their problem. And by forest I mean /. where Ogg Vorbis never dies even though it totally* failed to catch any mainstream use. * Cue the counterexamples, the way Munich shows that Linux is totally going to take over the desktop. But to use an old proverb, one swallow does not a summer make.

Re:Stand their ground

[viperidaenz]

The only reason Flash fell out of favour was because Steve Jobs didn't want to install it on iPhones.

Re:Stand their ground

[viperidaenz]

FPGA's are not very power efficient.
They're also very expensive too.

Re:Stand their ground

[viperidaenz]

Spending donations on H.264 licenses doesn't help either.

Re:Stand their ground

[viperidaenz]

Latte costs $4.80

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

So would wikimedia have to pay for a transcoder?

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking the FOSS fanatics don't want to hear this. The free web is fast coming to an extinction (other than though wifi hotspots). Wikipedia is about promoting educational material for all. I'm thinking that is a higher priority than promoting FOSS stuff.

If half the authors in Wikipedia are up in arms about the issue, then I think they can make their own version of FOSS Wikipedia... Which I would doubt would even be successful enough to supplant Wikipedia...

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

but it costs Wikimedia more money to create the H264 content specifically; when it doesn't cost Wikimedia more money to create the WebM version.

So you are advocating less Wikimedia-produced content, because they have to allocate some percentage (however small) to the license fee to encode H264.

Re:Stand their ground

[melikamp]

Please, stop spreading the myth of "standard codec" and "quality". Anything will be a standard if it is crammed down the people's throats. As for quality, please. All Web video is shit. Talking about the differences in "quality" between mp4, theora, and webm is like talking about the shades of dung. 5 minute videos of cats playing piano and girls masturbating produce exactly the same effect, no matter the codec. On a smartphone screen too. Give me a break. Feeding the patent mafia, who are basically censoring Wikipedia for millions of users, is a much bigger issue than any subjective difference in video quality. Think it through. Thanks to patents, copyrights, and non-free software, many spy-phone users can't see the videos at all, and you keep talking about a marginal improvement in "quality"?

Re: Stand their ground

[tepples]

As far as I know, iOS is the only operating system on mainstream 4" tablets (no well-known Android counterpart to iPod touch) and the only phone operating system that plays Amazon video.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

hasn't worked well for them? soooo completely dominating the format everyone uses for viewing videos is working badly????wtf

Re:Stand their ground

[perryizgr8]

I have always hated the html5 player, it doesn't seek properly, doesn't respond as quickly to pause, play commands, and has far fewer options and features than the flash one. The only disadvantage with flash is that it doesn't work on iShit devices.

Re:Stand their ground

[Hal_Porter]

You can decode/encode to H.264 with FFMPEG and not pay a penny. More to the point most consumer devices support H.264 decode and or encode in hardware. Back when you bought the device your bought the chip and the chip vendor joined the MPEG LA and thus got access to the patent pool.

It's like PCI Express or USB. Sure it's patented but end users don't pay patent fees. Rather they buy hardware from companies who joined an industry body which has a patent pool. All the members paid a few thousand bucks and they all pooled their patents. Also they all get a vendor ID and get to influence the standard. It's all very civilised.

That's why the MPEG LA said this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Patent_licensing

On August 26, 2010 MPEG LA announced that H.264 encoded internet video that is free to end users will never be charged royalties. All other royalties remain in place, such as royalties for products that decode and encode H.264 video. The license terms are updated in 5-year blocks

You know why they could say that? Because their business mode is not to go after Johnny Linux user for watching an H.264 video on Youtube. They don't need to. Johnny Linux user probably decoded that H.264 video using VDPAU or some other API which hands the decode off to his GPU. And the GPU vendor is a member of the MPEG LA and has thus already paid the license fee.

Re:Stand their ground

[Darinbob]

The problem is that the format is not free. I don't care about video at all really, I just don't like to see yet another proprietary format being promoted over open formats. It won't necessarily just work for you if you're a commercial entity. Those tools to rip are not necessarily legal either if they haven't paid the patent license fee.

It is true that more and more people don't give a shit about this stuff anymore with everything and its DNA being patented. They just want convenience and entertainment.

Re: Stand their ground

[LocalH]

That's funny because people do actually read Playboy for the articles.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

it's about hardware support for encoding/decoding. and google might realistically have achieved that, with VP9. it will take another 2 years: http://beta.slashdot.org/story/196403

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a question of "or". They can choose "both". VP9 is free, the only cost is extra chip capacity and testing. http://beta.slashdot.org/story/196403

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

So how about the FLOSS editors and encoders? Will they have unlimited no cost license to distribute their FLOSS any any price?

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

And I would counter, HA, my phone works on all the other video sites, including Amazon (which that other one doesn't). Seems wikimedia is the one with the crappy site.

Re:Stand their ground

[mozumder]

Shouldn't you be fighting for freedom or something?

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

The h.264 is already lost, and at this point, I would venture, so is the next generation.

VP9 doesn't compete with h.265 -- It almost competes with h.264, but it is still worse than that. All the 4k video devices have already included h.265 hardware decoders because there isn't an alternative. No one wants to use VP9 when it will use 60% more bandwidth than h.265. Many don't even have internet connections that could handle 4k video using VP9, and even if it did, you'd hit your monthly bandwidth cap 60% faster. It's pretty much a dead deal unless google can pull some serious magic out of VP9 that they haven't shown yet.

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

And what browser is it that you have that supports WebM but not h.264?

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

There is abosolutely no reason for anyone purporting to provide open content to lock that content into proprietary formats.

Absolutely no reason, except:
* Using less battery
* Less studder/jitter
* Better looking videos
* Less cost in serving the content
* Less cost in receiving the content (assuming a non unlimited "unlimited" plan)
* Broader support

But besides the obvious less cost, better quality, easier to implement, you are right.

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

By "spy-phone" I assume you are referring to android and it's default to send everything you type into your address bar to google.

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

On the flip side, wikimedia also pays bandwidth fees, and they can save money by sending videos using h.264 over the larger VP8/WebM format, likely a LOT (1000x) more than for any license fee.

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

Or perhaps they should change their mission statement to include being freetards first?

Re:Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

Spending donations on bandwidth to cover the less efficient VP8/WebM video format doesn't help either.

Re: Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I'm sure you can name many people who have purchased a Playboy in the last 20 years for "the articles" and aren't just regurgitating some third-hand story about the Norman Mailer Pac 10 Issue from 1977.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Flash is still in use at 80% of the sites I visit.

Apple's management are jack-asses. Let the consumer harass them instead of whining to the websites that their iShiny's don't work.

Have you been under a rock for the past couple years? Flash is dead, and Apple killed it. It went from being used on damn near every site around to less than 15% today. It cannot be used on an iOS or Android device. Adobe has abandoned it. You should be thanking Apple for leading the charge to kill that turd instead of cursing them as jackasses.

Re:Stand their ground

[Dahamma]

And often not even much on the chip - for a decent implementation it's mostly microcode running on the same hardware...

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

> Right now, there is NO advantage to WebM or VP8 over h.264

And the other way 'round?

Given how things stand (and the stakes involved) I'm experiencing something which could be described as an "inversion of Hanlon's razor"[1]: everyone promoting h.264, especially with the "WebM ain't technically better!" is suspect of being payrolled by the Mpeg LA.

[1] Inverted Hanlon's Razor: "This time, attribute to malice what might be explained by stupidity"

Re:Stand their ground

[lgw]

And why shouldn't they, is my point. The system is working fine if people get convenience and entertainment. Freaking out over DRM etc on principle is irrational. If it blocks normal people just trying to watch/play/shift/whatever their paid-for entertainment, as game DRM has a habit of doing, then it's a problem. But we've seen companies get bitchslapped by their customer base when they cross that line, and accepted when they only cross obsessive geeks making philosophical points. I see no problem with this.

Re:Stand their ground

[Hal_Porter]

Well no, however consider this

http://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html

Q: Bottom line: Should I be worried about patent issues if I use FFmpeg?
A: Are you a private user working with FFmpeg for your own personal purposes? If so, there is remarkably little reason to be concerned. Are you using FFmpeg in a commercial software product? Read on to the next question...

Q: Is it perfectly alright to incorporate the whole FFmpeg core into my own commercial product?
A: You might have a problem here. There have been cases where companies have used FFmpeg in their products. These companies found out that once you start trying to make money from patented technologies, the owners of the patents will come after their licensing fees. Notably, MPEG LA is vigilant and diligent about collecting for MPEG-related technologies.

So what happens in practice is if you use FFMpeg non commercially there's no reason for them to pursue you for license fees. However if your company uses H.264 commercially and starts to make money they would.

It's sort of like if you violate a software patent in your FOSS library you will not be sued. However if someone uses that FOSS library in a device and they start to make money the patent holder may well come after you.

A good example would be Linux. Linux implements things like FAT32 long filenames which are most likely patented. You don't get sued as an individual user. However suppose TomTom make millions selling GPS devices in the US. Then there is a fair chance they helpful folks at Microsoft may sue you and demand you sign a license. At that point you can pony up the cash or counter sue them

E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._TomTom_Inc.

Note there actually is a lot wrong with this system. It gives old, large companies with an extensive patent portfolio an advantage over new, small ones with a smaller portfolio for example and that seems to me to be the opposite of what the law should do in the interests of competition. Many software patents are of dubious originality. Even companies like Google and Microsoft have fallen victim to dubious patents. In fact the reason they build up patent portfolios is primarily defensive - it means that if they are sued for patent violation they most likely have a patent which the company suing them is violating too.

Still the idea that people will be sued because they encode or decode videos using FFMPEG is bogus. As is the idea that putting a H.264 video on the internet will mean you need to pay a license fee. In practice only people who are making enough profit to make them a target get sued for patent infringement. Or that the Linux Foundation of people like Canonical will be sued for infringing patents. Canonical declined to discuss patents with Microsoft but they did license the MPEG LA patents. They also joined the PCI SIG. So it seems like industry standards with a patent pool are something they accept. Microsoft trying to collect royalties on their patents unilaterally they won't. There's a certain amount of sense in this position.

Incidentally once you understand how the system works you can see why FFMPEG or other open source products don't get granted 'unlimited no cost license'. Not to distribute - they can already do that for free. What they can't do is to offer a free license to their end users to decode or encode H.264. If they could do that people would just use FFMPEG in their products and not pay the license fee to the MPEG LA.

Of course another point people miss is about video is that 'not patent encumbered' is a rather dishonest phrase. With something like WebM all you can say is that they are not currently known to use any technology, rather than they ar

Re:Stand their ground

[FriendlyLurker]

Only that is not true, assuming we are talking about Android/Firefox OS vs iPhones. Only people that can't play open formats is Apple. Sheesh, if they had their way they would replace http with a proprietary transport if they could. Why? It insulates their walled garden market.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! I was just thinking to myself "what I really need is for yet another web site to release an app to repeat the same function as the web site". I'll just add it to the 500 other ones I don't use.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget that after you release the app, when users visit the site from a mobile device, you need to have a big javascript pop up nag screen reminding them that there's an app they can download. Every. Single. Time.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash? People didn't care about free or not, so Flash was big and fighting against Flash was tilting against windmills. But today Flash is greatly diminished. Thus the lesson here is to NOT give up pushing back against H.264.

Steve Jobs killed flash by pulling it off iOS, if it wasn't already killing itself with poor performance.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution: Allow ads on the site? Make access to the pages available to paying members only?

The donations to wikipedia are made to keep the encycloedia free. Spending donations on the extra bandwidth needed to cover less efficient FREE video formats makes perfect sense. Spending money on a license to create and distribute information in a non-free video format is much harder to defend, hence the controversy.

Re:Stand their ground

[dave420]

Shh. Grown-ups are talking.

Re:Stand their ground

[FriendlyLurker]

Even Firefox has surrendered on this one and said they'd use the binary blob Cisco provides

In their own words, Firefox developers were betrayed by Google for not honoring its promise to drop h.264 from chrome. Google really dropped the ball on that one.

"We lost, and we're admitting defeat. Cisco is providing a path for orderly retreat that leaves supporters of an open Web in a strong enough position to face the next battle, so we're taking it,"

The battle was lost and does weaken the open Web supporters position, but the war rages on in the likes of formats such as VP9 and Daala ("Daala is a novel approach to codec design. It aims not to be competitive, but to win outright," Montgomery said).

This pressure of Wikimedia is just another salvo from the proponents of software patent encumbered video codecs trenches, attempting to extract rents and further erode an open free for all web. For those that support an open Internet it is our duty to reject closed software patent encumbered/DRM measures that want to turn our web into a glorified AOL, no matter how inconvenient it may be in the short term to do so.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Because this is a website with a predominantly technically minded demographic, and as it happens, the end-user experience is not necessarily representative of the impact this issue has on said demographic.

Might I suggest a more approparate place for you?

Re:Stand their ground

[Aleksej]

Fighting H.264 is tilting at windmills..

And accepting H.264 is being beaten by a windmill.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Being an open standard makes it far superior.

Re:Stand their ground

[Aleksej]

Would you accept a format that can only be played with proprietary freeware on Windows or only on Mac OS X?

Re:Stand their ground

[manquer]

It's like PCI Express or USB. Sure it's patented but end users don't pay patent fees.

Perhaps you did not pay it directly but if you bought the device then you did pay the fees for the patents, along with the illegal pollutants in it, the Chinese sweatshops making it for you. The minute you pay for it, It is your endorsement of all the things behind making that product.

Re: Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

So you are trying to say that you have the only android phone in the world that plays amazon prime videos? Cool!

Re: Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

In addition to the other 3? Sure! Why not add h.265 as well and reduce their costs further?

Re: Stand their ground

[FriendlyLurker]

Note that I saId "Only people that can't play open formats...". Amazon prime hardly qualifies.

Re: Stand their ground

[Aleksej]

What about storage costs? Videos are viewed or downloaded once in a while, but they are stored always and forever.

Re: Stand their ground

[Aleksej]

(non-original versions can be deleted, of course, but until they are, everything is stored, or it has to be generated when someone follows the link the first time)

Re:Stand their ground

[VGPowerlord]

Right now, there is NO advantage to WebM or VP8 over h.264. The only reason to choose it is purely philosophical, especially since it's inferiority.

Sure there is. One has had hardware decoding in nearly all graphics processors released in the last decade and the other hasn't.

In fact, considering h.264 has been the de facto accelerated video codec in graphics processors since 2005ish, why are we even having this debate in 2014?

Re:Stand their ground

[archen]

Firefox on Mac OSX perhaps?

Re:Stand their ground

[Fippy Darkpaw]

The biggest question: what format is fastest for Editors to delete?

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

It CAN be used on an Android device. It needs to be side loaded though. Adobe still provides the APK from their site.

Re:Stand their ground

[msobkow]

cbc.ca. global.ca ctvnews.ca cp24.com aljazeera.com presstv.com

Yeah, Flash is dead, except for at media sites.

Re:Stand their ground

[msobkow]

Flash the scripting and site building language may be dead, but the media player is most emphatically alive.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Flash? Me neither.

Don't worry, grandpa. We're getting closer to a cure every day.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowhere in the real world does liberty or open mean: to any person, for any reason, _at no cost_.

Uh. Are you familiar with 'civil liberties?' Pretty sure I can't legally enslave/murder you and your family if you can't afford to pay me.

Re: Stand their ground

[KingMotley]

Firefox on the Mac can view h.264 videos by using flash.

Re:Stand their ground

[lgw]

This used to be a website for people who were not just "interested in technology", but actually working to produce new products. I hope to some extent it still is.

It's quite important when making new technology to make stuff that appeals to most people in society, not just to a like-minded few (unless you want to make less of a contribution to society from the same amount of work - which is actually fine for a hobby, don't get me wrong). Wikim/pedia isn't a geeks-for-geeks niche project! It's a mainstream product, and should as such offer what most people want, in terms of formats.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

"I have watched Wikipedia being pulled up on two different smartphones simultaneously to settle argument/doubts more times than I can count now over the years."

Its never safe to extrapolate to the outside world behaviors youve witnessed on the third floor dorm for all the years youve lived there.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

The "end user" is the ultimate purpose of technology. Anything else is ideological bullshit that only exists in peoples minds.

Re: Stand their ground

[Mabhatter]

Wikimedia is at that point though. You cannot have h.264 without bowing to the DRM at some level... Even if YOUR CONTENT IS FREE. The PATENT owners around the format don't allow "free"... Fees are "differed" right now as long as you only shoot HOME video with equipment that pays the royalties they've "promised" not to charge you the per-hour/device fees as a CONSUMER of happy devices.

Ask why Apple REFUSES to play along with open and free formats if they are TRULY a company for "creatives"?

Why is it so important only patented MEDIA codec be used all the time as we hit 20 years of The Web? What if IBM still held the patent on .txt? Microsoft on .rtf? Or Unisys still held .gif? OrMOEG still held .jpeg? And they all still demanded a dime per hosted item on the Internet!! Or .html/.css/.svg were NEVER FREE?

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead we've decided that it's time to add a native mobile app for iOS...

Nice work. Sounds like you are milking that cash cow for all she's worth.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about saving a few hundred dollars per month in bandwidth costs? If bandwidth caused by VP8 overhead really was a problem for Wikimedia Commons, they'd just lower the quality settings for the auto-generated WebM transcodes. Resulting in a lower bit rate and file size of the scaled down videos being severed to the articles on Wikipedia.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox on Linux

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care about video at all really, I just don't like to see yet another proprietary format being promoted over open formats.

The rest of us care about ALL the factors that go into a video codec. Quality, encoding/decoding speed, versatility, and availability. Vorbis and Opus are 2 great examples of a free codecs that perform better than their competitors, despite being free. When you have a video codec that meets or exceeds the standards of proprietary codecs, then you have something to talk about. As you said, you don't care about video. I doubt you've ever even shot, edited, and encoded your own video. Thus, you should go fuck yourself and let the rest of us use what works better for us.

Re:Stand their ground

[msobkow]

Ooohhhh. Look. I pissed off the Appletards again. :P

Re:Stand their ground

[symbolset]

That's the history they started with, not the current story. The current story is that if you want to be Android 4.x compatible, you have to support VP8 in hardware. Since Android is moving over a billion units this year, the battle is over.

Re: Stand their ground

[lgw]

Why is it so important only patented MEDIA codec be used

You seem to have jumped from "h.264 allowed" to "h.264 required". I agree that it would be silly for Wikimedia to have only h.264 video, but that's not the question on the table.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

> Right now, there is NO advantage to WebM or VP8 over h.264

And the other way 'round?

Given how things stand (and the stakes involved) I'm experiencing something which could be described as an "inversion of Hanlon's razor"[1]: everyone promoting h.264, especially with the "WebM ain't technically better!" is suspect of being payrolled by the Mpeg LA.

[1] Inverted Hanlon's Razor: "This time, attribute to malice what might be explained by stupidity"

So the "who disagrees is a shill" crap again?

The problem with your statement however is that you are somewhat mistaken in the comparison.
The reality is not "WebM ain't technically better!", but "WebM is technically inferior."

If want you go inverting that, then yeah - Romans brought us wine, irrigation, roads, public safety, aqueducts etc etc... but what ELSE have they ever done for us besides that?

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

H.264 is openly developped standard. VP8/Webm is proprietary single-vendor thing. NObody besides On2/Google had any say in the design (and it shows). For VP9, there is even no specification. Want to implement? Study how libvpx does stuff.

If you have said "royalty-bearing" versus "no royalties" then you would be perhaps right. But don't redefine language to push your opinion.

co to jest?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://jan.imghost.us/3uel.jpg

http://jan.imghost.us/3unc.jpg

http://jan.imghost.us/3uo2.jpg

Sounds good

[Anonymous Coward]

If it means I can consume the non-text/image content on more devices than those that support webm/ogg then all the better.

Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

By failing to support MP4/H264 they are defacto creating a means of censorship , i.e. denying the ability to watch the videos to those who do not share the same ideological stance.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it also a form of censorship that they don't support everything else on this list?

What if I need my video in Indeo or Bink or RealVideo or WMV? They're denying me the ability to watch them! Ermahgerd!

Re:Censorship

[DexterIsADog]

By failing to support MP4/H264 they are defacto creating a means of censorship , i.e. denying the ability to watch the videos to those who do not share the same ideological stance.

This is bullshit. You're abusing the definition of censorship the way politicians abuse the word "terrorist".

Re:Censorship

[bloodhawk]

MP4 is the industry standard, by choosing a non standard format they are knowingly limiting the amount of people that can view the format, really it is a braindead decision, information sharing shouldn't be about ideology. We have enough shit forced on people by governments already.

Re:Censorship

[Nerdfest]

Why exactly is Apple not supporting the open standard? I'd really like to hear the defence of that decision, from both Apple and you. That's what this whole thing really comes down to ... why is Apple explicitly not supporting open formats.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

The industry has adopted a standard and EVERYONE supports. Wikimedia have decided to use a adopted "standard" on ideology grounds as they don't like industry standards.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually information sharing is an ideology, it is the ideology that started the project. Open formats are the best way to do so because they are the only way to actually share it (as opposed to allow to consume).
Not allowing open formats and standards is to knowingly limit the content users can view. While I do think it is braindead to buy something that does that, Apple users seem to think it's cool to have limited knowledge and accessibility. If they don't think that's the case, they should force their devices to comply to standards. The industry or the market "standard" is not the information sharing standard, it's not even a standard, it is just whoever is on top at the moment.

Re:Censorship

[Nerdfest]

This doesn't answer the question.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Why exactly should they? I am no apple fan. But the onus is not on them, it is on the creators of the format to provide a convincing argument as to why they should. As far as I can see the formats have no technical, quality, or resource utilisation benefits, it comes down to licensing. On top of that there is already an excellent format in place which these formats are only looking to replace based on licensing model. actions that block users from media is only ever going to alienate people even more.

Re:Censorship

[bloodhawk]

probably because it is the WRONG question. The question is why should they support it? They already support the industry wide adopted standard, the community is asking them to support something that is not industry accepted at this point.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

This very forum called it censorship when a government site published apps that didn't support Linux and were screaming for the injustice to be rectified. Either both actions are wrong or both are fine. Personally I am in the camp that both are wrong. Industry standards are there to make everyones life easier. If you want to support a new format then by all means support it AS WELL, but don't sacrifise the general public to your jihad.

Re:Censorship

[Nerdfest]

One of the biggest sites on the web uses it, as well as many others.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

and millions more use the H.264. besides which one of the biggest sites is only using it out of self interest because they created it. take them away and it has almost non existent support in the industry.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

and what is this giant media site that exclusively supports webm as opposed to h264? not even youtube does that?

Re:Censorship

[VortexCortex]

By failing to support MP4/H264 they are defacto creating a means of censorship , i.e. denying the ability to watch the videos to those who do not share the same ideological stance.

This is bullshit. You're abusing the definition of censorship the way politicians abuse the word "terrorist".

I can not view H.264 video on my system. I compile everything myself, and the source it is not available in a form that is legal for me to compile the codec, or interact with hardware that can decode it.

Re:Censorship

[DexterIsADog]

By failing to support MP4/H264 they are defacto creating a means of censorship , i.e. denying the ability to watch the videos to those who do not share the same ideological stance.

This is bullshit. You're abusing the definition of censorship the way politicians abuse the word "terrorist".

I can not view H.264 video on my system. I compile everything myself, and the source it is not available in a form that is legal for me to compile the codec, or interact with hardware that can decode it.

Thanks for this, but um, why did you post it to me? It's irrelevant to my point. It's meaningless.

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

"It has no support if you ignore the fact that it has support."
Stunning argument.

Flash Back

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the whole 'GIF vs PNG' battle in the mid 90's.

Re:Flash Back

[mythosaz]

And mid 2000's, and early 2010's.

FYI, I'm still not sure how to pronounce either of those :)

Re:Flash Back

[ericloewe]

After having my life turned upside down by the revelation (well, at least the part of my life that deals with pronouncing file format extensions) and a short adaptation period, I now say "Jiff", as stupid as it sounds (It's Graphics, not Jraphics).

As for PNG, how else would you pronounce it if not "Pee En Gee"?

Re:Flash Back

[rourin_bushi]

Thank the good dude I have more conversations in text-mode than in voice-mode these days.

Re:Flash Back

[Anonymous Coward]

If the pronunciation in the original word determined the pronunciation in the initialism, SCUBA would be "scubba".

Re:Flash Back

[mcl630]

The patents on GIF compression expired in 2003 and 2004... the battle ended then.

Re:Flash Back

[Ichijo]

And mid 2000's, and early 2010's.

FYI, I'm still not sure how to pronounce either of those :)

"Twenty-oughts" and "twenty-tens."

Re:Flash Back

[Em Adespoton]

2000's: naughties
2010's: twenteens (or just teens)
GIF: Ghiff
PNG: Ping
LOL: ell-oh-ell (lolling is something different)

Shall we play again?

Give In

[GrahamCox]

Yes they should do this. Sometimes, you can't fight City Hall - you just have to go with the flow so that your website becomes more useful to people. It's annoying that media files on Wikipedia don't "just work" on most devices, not even desktops.

I appreciate their position and somewhat support it, but they've been holding out for so long now with absolutely no effect. The only losers are the site's users. At least Mp4 is a standard, albeit not as free as idealists would like.

Function over Ideals

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia should focus on creating the best possible experience for its users rather than using its sites as a platform for ideology.

Windows 8 support

[Anonymous Coward]

If it makes Windows 8 stop annoying me I'm for just about anything.

Re: Windows 8 support

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, nothing can do that.

Not necessary

[Burz]

This is not YouTube we're talking about, where its 100% about immediacy and convenience. People can download a free player--or use a non-Microsoft/Apple browser--when they're good and ready to view the Wikimedia content.

Re:Not necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely people will simply choose to go elsewhere. Any website that forces you to install, plugins, addons or different browsers needs to die in a fire. Wikimedia is hardly an essential service for people.

Re:Not necessary

[Burz]

...or maybe IE and Safari need to "die in a fire"... they're not very good and people don't need them. These companies want their tollbooths on standard formats.

As an iphone user, I would vote 'No'.

[Anonymous Coward]

So many exceptions/compromises have been made to make iphone/apple inc. to continue their abusive practice. (Even mosh, a GPL v3 software, made an Apple store exception for it !) Doing so can only enhance their position. Their next step is to do more.
Supporting open format is snap for them to do. They should also compromise sometime.

MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

In every meaningful sense, MP4 is the most 'open' useful video CODEC every made available. The world's BEST video encoder, x264, is open-source and free. Every worthwhile tool you need to encode, process and watch H264 video is FREE. H264 decoding is supported almost universally in hardware by everything made today.

Meanwhile, the dreadful CODEC that Google bought was created illegally by using close-source development as a method of hiding the fact that it ripped off (badly) patented MPEG standards. After Google released the source, and the truth became obvious, Google simply used its billions to pay off the various IP owners whose patents the code infringed on. Google offers its CODEC for free ONLY because Google chooses to bear the IP costs inherent in the use of its CODEC.

It gets worse. The hardware support of Google's dreadful CODEC is almost non-existent, so Google class videos are frequently decoded on the CPU, using insanely greater amounts of energy. Encoding Google class video (which always gives worse results than x264 when other metrics are equivalent) also uses far more power. And you thought Google was "politically correct" and "green"?

All Google wants is control. And Google's incompetent rip-off of H264 and now their new rip-off of H265 are all about control. With H264 and H265, the user has control, and Google hates this. So Google seeds forums like this with the usual vile shills that seek to take advantage of people whose knowledge of the facts behind H264 and its horrifically bad, originally unlicensed copy, VP8, is non-existent.

PS putting Ogg (a TRUE free sound CODEC) and WebM (Google's licensed AFTER-the-fact terrible rip-off of H264) in the same sentence is as misleading an attempt at pro-Google propaganda as you can get.

Re:MP4 is open

[SuricouRaven]

Part of the issue, I think, is that there is no 'truely open' video codec worth using. There are a few truely open video codecs, like Theora and Dirac, but they all suck - the best algorithms are patented.

Re:MP4 is open

[Nerdfest]

It is not open in any sense of the word. The decoder is free as in beer, the encoder is not.

Re:MP4 is open

[jimshatt]

FYI, Ogg is the container, Vorbis is the sound codec and Theora is the video codec.
H264 tools aren't free, as the codec is patent encumbered, so you have to pay license costs (one way or another). Officially, you can't use x264 either without paying royalties. So, yeah, I'm opposed to the use of H264 in open works such as wikemedia.

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU should REALLY learn THE definitions of FREE and OPEN. And I mean FREE as in SPEECH, not BEER.

Sounds like you REALLY hate Google. I just hate all of them EQUALLY ;)

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

In every meaningful sense, MP4 is the most 'open' useful video CODEC every made available.

Only for a very narrowly defined sense of the word "meaningful", and a particular meaning of "open".

The H.264 video standard is patent-encumbered. In some countries, the government doesn't grant or enforce patents on software, so this may not matter to you. But the USA is one country with software patents, and I live in the USA, so it matters to me.

And it matters to anyone in the USA who would like to use Wikimedia, even if they don't understand the issues yet.

The world's BEST video encoder, x264, is open-source and free.

But still patent-encumbered. Thus, the nice folks who wrote x264 and gave away their work do not charge you to use it; but in the USA, if you use it, you must obey the demands of the MPEG-LA and pay the royalties they require.

Thus, x264 is free and open-source software for a non-free and non-open standard.

Meanwhile, the dreadful CODEC that Google bought was created illegally by using close-source development as a method of hiding the fact that it ripped off (badly) patented MPEG standards.

Are you a lawyer? Is this legal advice?

I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but my layman's opinion is that you are just completely wrong on all points here. VP8, as I understand it, was created by people who studied H.264 and made sure that VP8 did not infringe on any patents. Many things VP8 does are similar to things H.264 does, but that's not illegal.

Here's an example that may shed some light, from the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel had a driver for "VFAT" file systems, which can have "long filenames" (also known as "non-broken filenames" or just "filenames"; compare with older FAT file systems that can only have "short filenames" of 8 letters followed by a 3-letter extension). It turns out that Microsoft had a patent that covers VFAT, so for a while VFAT support was ripped out of the Linux kernel. But someone studied the patent and saw that it was a patent on a particular method of storing two filenames for each file: a long filename and a short filename. Thus, the Linux VFAT driver was re-written, such that when writing a file, it wrote a nice legal "long filename" and put garbage bytes in the "short filename" field. Since the garbage bytes were chosen to not be a valid filename, the Linux VFAT driver was not infringing on a patent that covers writing two filenames.

The above hack figured out what was patented, figured out a workaround, and implemented the workaround. The "long filenames" are written exactly as described in the patent, but the patent was not on "a method of storing long filenames" it was on a method of storing two filenames for each file.

Returning to VP8, my understanding is they did this sort of thing for video coding. They avoided patents but found similar things that would work.

Did they succeed? Well, there was a delay of many months after Google bought On2 and before Google released their free version of VP8, and I believe during that period Google had their lawyers reviewing all the patent issues. They thought they succeeded. And then, MPEG-LA announced that they were forming a patent pool on VP8, but over a year later there were no patents in that patent pool. That is the best possible evidence that On2 did succeed: even with the source code to study, no patent owner was able to find infringing code.

On2 also claimed that VP8 was "better" than H.264, but we know that is definitely not true. But it's the next best thing, and it's way better than older standards like H.263.

After Google released the source, and the truth became obvious, Google simply used its billions to pay off the various IP owners whose patents the code infringed on.

Nope. Factually untrue. After the patent owners failed to find any patents that infringed, Google was able to strike a deal with MPEG-LA where Google admitted no wrongdoing, gave MPEG-LA some money, and MP

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, I have no love of Google, but H264 is hardly the blessing you seem to think it is. It's a licensing nightmare that is mostly to blame for the problems you see with Google's "dreadful" codec. It's a ball and chain on the world of video, and its replacement H265 is no less insidious.

If the creators of H264 were interested in being benevolent, they wouldn't make it impossible to create a competing product without "closed-sourcing" its development. They've created an artificial bubble where H264 cannot be competed against without being sued into the ground, or the competition being so inferior that weirdos like you come out of the woodwork to say so.

Frankly, I find it bizarre that anyone would take this stance. H264 is not your friend. Theora, WebM, Daala and others are trying their best to break free of that artificial bubble, because lord knows those patents won't become public domain while there's money to be made.

Besides, I think Google's efforts were really just for goodwill, because they've really done nothing to upsell WebM. They renegged on dropping H264 support in Chrome, and the best they've been able to do with it is some ludicrously useless 4k resolution BS that nobody will use because H265 will support it by the time 4k displays are common enough that it will matter.

In short, your stance is bizarre and your conjectures about Google misplaced.

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

So where is my royalty free assurance that I have unlimited permission to host videos that use H264 technology? As far MPEG-LA are concerned, I do not have unlimited permission to host videos (in H264 format) in countries that respect H264 patents.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/02/royalty-free-codec-still-needed-despite-no-cost-h264-license/

Re:MP4 is open

[Aleksej]

PS putting Ogg (a TRUE free sound CODEC) and WebM (Google's licensed AFTER-the-fact terrible rip-off of H264) in the same sentence is as misleading an attempt at pro-Google propaganda as you can get.

Why not combine H.264 with Vorbis or Opus, then? Why does the format MP4 promoters propose, as far as I know, require MP3 or AAC?

Re:MP4 is open

[GuB-42]

If the word CODEC is so important to you that you write it in all caps, at least use it correctly.
A codec is not a standard nor a format, it's software or hardware that deals with compession and decompression. x264 is a codec, h.264 is not.

And BTW, x264 is free software, that's for sure. But if you use it as a h.264 encoder, you have to comply with the conditions imposed by MPEG-LA. It includes paying royalties in some cases.

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

People here don't seem to understand: x264, or any h264 encoders or decoders, whether open source or not, are NOT FREE. NOT FREE! You are supposed to pay an AVC royalty to MPEG-LA, and to cover encoders costs more. Certainly companies distributing h264 decoders should have licensing agreements to cover it or MPEG-LA might sue them.

   

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the best ones in current codecs. Daala is taking a different approach and is currently (in pre-alpha state) close to H.264 for a number of test encodings.

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the best ones in current codecs. Daala is taking a different approach and is currently (in pre-alpha state) close to H.264 for a number of test encodings.

Any reference? The pre-alpha status is true, the "close to H.264" one sounds unlikely to me. Is that your evaluation (hopefully with valid methodology...)? Developping a video codec is very hard and from what I see (I sorta follow whot goes on in Daala), they are far from a point where they could start to compare themselves against current state-of-the-art formats. Sadly; I am looking forward to their stuff.

Re:MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

People here don't seem to understand: x264, or any h264 encoders or decoders, whether open source or not, are NOT FREE. NOT FREE! You are supposed to pay an AVC royalty to MPEG-LA, and to cover encoders costs more. Certainly companies distributing h264 decoders should have licensing agreements to cover it or MPEG-LA might sue them.

 

You are wrong.

1) encoders cost same as decoders - 0.20 cents. First 100k units are free. And the payments are capped at 6,5mil./year. After that, further units are free.
1.5) only binaries count - software distributed in source form is exempted, no payments required.

2) as a user, you don't naturally need to pay anything, duh! Unless you will resell the encoder/decoder or something, and distribute more than 100k units per year.

Go away with your FUD, man. I bet you keep whining about fudding all the time when you think that FLOSS is being hurt.

Wikimedia pay attention

[Mister Liberty]

Go through with your proprietary plans and I will create a bot to edit & subvert each and every page that you publish.

Re:Wikimedia pay attention

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you an idiot? h.264 is the proprietary format in use today.

Re:Wikimedia pay attention

[Anonymous Coward]

While we are be mature about it what prevents someone from creating a bot that searches for your sabotages and submit the source IP address to DDOS?

Support it

[Anonymous Coward]

stop stifling innovation to stroke egos

Re:Support it

[Aleksej]

Looks like a quotation from a press release advocating copyright extension or advertising a new DRM to users.

And to think Timothy calls himself an editor

[wonkey_monkey]

But the MP4 versions 'ould enable...

I think you accidentally a etter.

Many wikimedia regulars

That should, of course, be Wikimedia, with a big wuh.

Can we replace the words "Posted by" with "Blindly rubber-stamped by"?

Re:And to think Timothy calls himself an editor

[maxwell demon]

"Posted by" means "Put online by". Which is accurate.
"Posted by" does not mean "edited by".

"These people?"

[FriendlyLurker]

And for these people the cost of paying for a H.264 encoder license is trivial compared to royalties they have to pay for images, video, and music.

And what about the developing world that is slowly coming online via shared community hubs? Won't they have the right to publish content too without paying exuberant rents compared to their income? The cost is trivial for everyone. I am sorry but open formats are the only way forward for a level playing field. All we are seeing with this WWF/H.264 debacle is a small amount of vested interests trying to justify extracting rents from the world population, when non are really required.

That these closed proprietary formats/DRM are clawing their way back into our "open" standards, services like Wikipedia and browsers is a testament to how committees, foundations (and once democratic institutions serving the public interest) can be infiltrated by vested interest and their purpose corrupted slowly from the inside out. It is a slippery slope, read todays news to see how absolutely low you can slide.

Re:"These people?"

[gnoshi]

They will benefit from Wikipedia adding H.264 support to the same extent everyone else will, because WebM and OGG will remain the reference formats, and content will be automatically transcoded.

It would certainly be advantageous for all devices to have WebM and OGG support, but not having H.264 on Wikipedia isn't going to strongarm Apple into supporting WebM and OGG.

I don't like proprietary formats, but when talking about automatic transcoding for device support it is something that I think is necessary and worthwhile.

Re:"These people?"

[gnoshi]

s/wikipedia/wikimedia

Re:"These people?"

[FriendlyLurker]

Sure Wikipedia isn't going to strongarm Apple into supporting WebM and OGG, and conversely Wikipedia does not need to be strong-armed by Apple or its vocal users into supporting closed software patent encumbered protocols.

Re:"These people?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is strongarming anybody. This is about whether or not wikipedia wants a large majority of their traffic, possibly close to 50%, to be able to see video and audio content at all.

Re:"These people?"

[Nerdfest]

If people see yet another format that Apple has decided they don't want you to see, it's another reason for people to avoid their intentionally crippled environment. What exactly is their reason for not supporting an open format? I'd like to hear their reasoning.

Re:"These people?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is strongarming anybody. This is about whether or not wikipedia wants a large majority of their traffic, possibly close to 50%, to be able to see video and audio content at all.

And why would those 50% be unable to use a free and open format? Because Apple is controlling which formats they are allowed to use, and Apple is pushing H.264 and undermining the free and open formats.

Is "strongarm" an appropriate word for what Apple is doing? Yes, it's a fair cop.

Re:"These people?"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure you problem is with compression formats or capitalism in general.

Re:"These people?"

[KingMotley]

Using h.264 allows for hardware decoding of the videos, which is much more power efficient than the alternative "open" codecs. Therefore, having wikimedia trying to force "open" codecs would cause all users to use up more bandwidth, consuming more electricity, which is generated (mostly) from burning coal, and polluting our planet. Why would wikimedia want to actively pollute our planet like that? Do you know how many people each year die or have their lives shortened due to smog and other airborne contaminants? Do you know how many of them are babies? What does wikimedia have against babies and why are they killing them like that?

Re:"These people?"

[FriendlyLurker]

Fallacy: Appeal to emotions. h.264 has hardware support because the few that seek rents from it (the eight MPEG-2 patent owners -- Fujitsu, Panasonic, Sony, Mitsubishi, Scientific Atlanta, Columbia University, Philips and General Instrument, CableLabs and certain individuals) have organized hardware support, as a good investment. When open codecs are dominant, they too will supported more widely by hardware and these eight companies will have to follow. References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/02/googles-vp9-video-codec-gets-backing-from-arm-nvidia-sony-and-others-gives-4k-video-streaming-a-fighting-chance/

Re:"These people?"

[Anonymous Coward]

vested interests corrupting the purpose of institutions for the gain of a small few is not capitalism.

Re:"These people?"

[Twinbee]

You could look at it as a slippery slope. Or you could look at it as various moral shades of grey. In my opinion, adopting H264 and H265 will push OS communities to work harder and actually try to beat them, rather than just making to do with mediocrity.

Re:"These people?"

[FriendlyLurker]

Why Software Patents are Evil, Video Codec edition.. The problem is not a matter of the OS communities working harder, the problem is having broad software patents effectively stifling innovation in the video codec space, combined with special interest groups pushing patent encumbered formats into our open protocols and services.

Re: "These people?"

[KingMotley]

And 63% of my traffic can't and won't support those open protocols. Can I count on you to pay for a few million people to change their phones and tablets out to the one you prefer, or are we still talking about people and a magical world in your mind?

Re: "These people?"

[FriendlyLurker]

So 63% of your users are in a walled garden that refuses to support openness. Fine, *you* support their needs on *your* system - just do not expect open community run and funded organizations like Wikipedia to put up with the antics of these rent seekers.

The close proprietary platforms that refuse to support open protocols and formats have no right to strong arm free open Web into supporting their closed software patent encumbered versions for their monetary benefit only. These vested interests wish to extract rents from our open communication simply by refusing to support openness inside their captive market. The only weak argument they have for this behavior is the one your presenting: "but, but our users can't see/use open free to use format/protocol" (by design, snicker.)

Re: "These people?"

[KingMotley]

That's fine, just don't expect for us normal nonfreetards to donate to your sites if they don't work for us.

m4v not mp4

[Anonymous Coward]

They should use m4v, not mp4, so that multilingual subtitles can work.

Disconnected from reality

[jcdr]

Now there is a category of people so disconnected from reality that are ok to overpay an already excessively rich phone manufacturer that refuse to support free format, and there only reaction to there frustration is to ask a poor free project to support commercial format. I wonder how many of them have donate something to Wikipedia.

But I am not so surprised. I have observed many times that a lot of people tend to be proud of what there have payed and disregards what there have not payed, even when the reality clearly show that there money was not worth the result. It's a childish behavior to ask others to fix your own false choice.

Re:Disconnected from reality

[jimshatt]

FYI, and not to be a grammar Nazi or anything, but only your first use of the word 'there' was correct :)

Re:Disconnected from reality

[jcdr]

Thanks for the correction. I am not an English speaker.

Re:Disconnected from reality

[Anonymous Coward]

Also "payed" should be "paid".

MOD PARENT +9000

[Anonymous Coward]

INCITEFUL POST SIR
STOP
YOUR INTELLETENT
STOP
  I WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN AS SMRT AS YOU
STOP
THE END

caps aren't like yelling when caps are the truth

Non-sense; publishing in OGG and WebM is easy

[Anonymous Coward]

This idea that publishing in these free formats is difficult is just FUD. I publish videos all the time in these formats. It's just a matter of selecting the codec. The people upset are those who can't access the videos on there iDevices. Sorry- but your poor choice is your own fault. I'll stick to publishing in a format everybody who makes a conscious decision can play. I'm not buying your self-righteous self-indulgence. Be a little less selfish and maybe I'll start actually listening to your argument.

And yea- I've got the $$$ to spend as CEO and owner of a growing corporation.

Just say NO!

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, supporting H.264 is not much less wrong than the W3C moving to support DRM in the web. It ties EVERYONE into proprietary and restrictive data formats.

WTF?

[dudpixel]

The unencumbered WebM and Ogg versions would remain our primary reference for platforms that support them. But the MP4 versions 'ould[sic] enable many mobile and desktop users who cannot view these unencumbered video files to watch them in MP4 format.'

Something is fucking wrong with this situation...

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Freak]

Yes - it's called "most people don't care what their computer or mobile phone runs - they just want things to work when they click/tap them."

When a kid in middle school, working on a Windows XP computer that the district can't afford to replace, and can barely afford to (under)pay an IT staff to maintain, accesses Wikipedia to do research for a report, and can't view the video because IE doesn't support Ogg, that kid gives up on Wikipedia.

When a grandma, working on her iPhone, tries to watch a short video about a topic she's interested in, and can't, she gives up on Wikipedia.

You're absolutely right - it is wrong. And Wikimedia stubbornly sticking to "free only!" doesn't fix it. Even a giant "YOU NEED AN OPEN PLATFORM TO VIEW THIS - CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE!" when you try to view a video will only scare people away, not get them to move to open platforms.

Wikipedia has Videos?

[citizenr]

Never ever seen one.

Re-buy everything after switching

[tepples]

Never, but it can add to a list of small frustrations, getting a user to switch manufacturers next contract renewal.

Someone who switches from an iPhone will lose all his purchased videos, all his purchased books, and all his purchased iPhone apps. Only the music is DRM-free. He would have to re-buy everything else on Android, provided that they're even available on Android and not exclusive to iTunes. The iPhone, for example, is the only phone that can stream video from Amazon.

Encoder license

[tepples]

Right now, there is NO advantage to WebM or VP8 over h.264. The only reason to choose it is purely philosophical, especially since it's inferiority.

Does "purely philosophical" include the simple fact that nobody has yet donated an encoder license to Wikimedia Foundation?

StrongARM

[tepples]

Is "strongarm" an appropriate word for what Apple is doing?

Apple has been strongarming on its mobile platform since around 1998 when the MessagePad 2000 came out.

Battery life and Nokia

[tepples]

What exactly is their reason for not supporting an open format?

One reason is battery life, as it'd have to be decoded on the CPU instead of on the dedicated MPEG ASIC. When you really need to make a call, you don't want to lose touch after having watched a bunch of videos earlier in the day. The other is Nokia's decision to assert its patents against the use of VP8.

Re:Battery life and Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

So you can't modify the software to make use of the same hardware to render VP8?

Re:Battery life and Nokia

[FriendlyLurker]

What exactly is their reason for not supporting an open format?

One reason is battery life, as it'd have to be decoded on the CPU instead of on the dedicated MPEG ASIC.

That is not a reason, it is an excuse. They deliberately do not support or work towards decoding any open formats in hardware as they themselves benefit from shepherding (forcing) their captive markets into only used a closed software patent encumbered formats and protocols that they then receive royalties from. Now they are attempting to co-opt the open Web using the poor excuse: "but, but our users can't see or use open free formats and protocols, or decode them in hardware (by design, snicker), so YOU should compromise the openness of the Internet for our monetary benefit".

What alternative was there at the time?

[tepples]

The people upset are those who can't access the videos on there iDevices.

The HTC Dream didn't exist when the original iPhone came out, and when Android came out, iPod and iPhone were still using DRM on music. What viable alternative was there when people first started to get locked into the iEcosystem?

Provided all your friends have smartphones

[tepples]

You must not have a lot of friends with land-line phones (which can't text) or flip phones (on whose numeric keypad texting is incredibly tedious).

Re:Provided all your friends have smartphones

[rourin_bushi]

Eh, who knows? Most of my friends I communicate with via IRC.

Battle ended. War continues.

[tepples]

Though the GIF battle ended, the war continues on the MPEG-LA front.

Its to be bloodshed then

[dilvish_the_damned]

Let the contributor opt in/out.
Or doesn't anyone do compromise anymore?

--dant

Another pledge drive?

[tepples]

As far as I can see the formats have no technical, quality, or resource utilisation benefits, it comes down to licensing.

H.264 would require Wikimedia Foundation to utilize more of the resources (that is, money) donated to it.

Re:Another pledge drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

you do realise that h264 is royalty free encoding and streaming for websites that have free video content right?

Re:Another pledge drive?

[tepples]

you do realise that h264 is royalty free encoding

Is it also royalty-free to obtain a lawfully made copy of the encoder software in the first place? Wikimedia is a U.S. company.

Re:Another pledge drive?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think money is the problem here. (In fact Wikimedia would get the AVC for free http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/74/n-10-08-26.pdf )

look into a free MPEG2 for the near future.

[Anonymous Coward]

h.264 war is lost - there is too much entrenched.

But the next gen codec war is not, and in the battle between h.265 and VP9, there aren't as much legacy to worry about. If VP9 is completely royalty free, guess what? The industry consortium will pick it, even if it is inferior to h.265 because being able to crank out parts with VP9 decoders for free means more profit for them. (And didn't Google pretty much pay off all royalties for VP9?).

Standing your ground may win you the battle, but if you lose sight that h.264's relevance is going to diminish in the next few years to be replaced by the next gen h.265, then you've lost the war. Best to move on, and put your energy into promoting VP9 so it becomes standard.

bullshit. h.264 will be around for a long time, and the patents will expire in about a decade. h.265 will be there, but h.264 will be an option in most cases.

A bunch of MPEG2 patents are going to expire in 2015. MPEG2 is popular, it is the compression used in DVDs. I would try to define of subset of MPEG2 that doesn't use any unexpired patents, as of january 1, 2016, or some other date, and use that as the free video format for the forseeable future. Yes, it will use more bandwidth, but there are always tradeoffs.

Open Video Illusion!

[Anonymous Coward]

What open video formats are you talking about? From where I'm sitting, there aren't any.

VP8? Owned by Google. NOT FREE! But it's CC3 ... libvpx is BSD .... No, it's CC3, so non-commercial works only. Yes, I'm talking about commercial works here!
H.264? Owned by MPEG-LA. NOT FREE! That, requires payment of royalties if I intend to sell a video in that format.

So tell me again? What open video format exists that I can sell a video, and not have to pay any royalties out on the format, or is required release as non-commercial? That's right, they don't exist!

Yes! I'd like to sell movies that I make, and not have to pay royalties out for the format they put out under. How hard is that for the tech. community to understand! Because everytime I bring it up, either on the web, or in real life, nobody can speak a word!

And before you get defensive, an Open Video Format does not require that it not be a profitable format!

Not necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

software decoders eat battery.

hardware support for codec is required, and this generation's hardware doesn't have OGG or WEBM

A day late and a dollar short

[westlake]

H.265 is already planned to go into 2015 devices (TVs and BD players) in order to support upcoming features like 4k and HDR - but, there is still a chance to get VP9, etc in there.

Netflix and Amazon aren't waiting until 2015 to anchor their position as the leading providers of 4K video.

Netflix says video streaming of its programming in ultra-high definition will work for buyers of new UHD sets from LG, Sony, Samsung, Vizio and others upon purchase.
That's because Ultra HD models from those makers will include the Netflix app and chips that decode signals in the so-called High Efficiency Video Coding standard, or HEVC.
The chip is required to decode signals that Netflix Inc. will compress by more than 100 times and squeeze through the Internet at a speed of 15.6 megabits per second. That's a download speed widely available from Internet providers in the U.S.

Netflix app to stream "Ultra HD" 4K video on new TVs

Re:A day late and a dollar short

[Dahamma]

That's all pure marketing speak. Netflix can't even do 1080p video at any reasonable quality, so what makes you think they will be a "leading provider" of 4k?

And have you actually *done* any A/B comparisons of 1080p vs 4k on various content at common viewing distances? And more so have you seen 1080p w/ standard vs. HDR color ranges? It BLOWS AWAY 4k resolution for most content. Especially since at the average 10' distance of most home TVs you'd need to have something 80" or more to even notice a difference from 4k.

The manufacturers are pushing 4k like they pushed 3D - because it was cheap to implement and easy to explain. But if you really want better quality, you want HDR color depth, which unfortunately for the CE companies is harder to build and explain to relatively clueless consumers...

It's hardwired

[tepples]

That'd be fine if it were a programmable DSP or a pixel shader doing most of the work. But I've read that a lot of MPEG ASICs have the entropy codes, pixel predictors, transforms, and other parts of an MPEG codec baked directly into the silicon. Some of them just take an MPEG bitstream as input and spit out pixels and audio samples as output.

Best option - insufferable self-righteousness gone

[Anonymous Freak]

If the kerfuffle over this has one positive outcome - it will be the insufferable, ridiculously self-righteous Wikimedia users leaving en masse and making Wikimedia a much nicer place to contribute again...

+5

[FriendlyLurker]

If someone can take a principled stance against this, they should. Right now the only entities with a spine are the ones who aren't for-profit, and none of them can stand up to it, and end users should really be supporting them. Do we really want Google and the MPEG-LA to dominate like that, knowing what happens every time companies dominate something like that?

Well said. A reference on your betrayal of Google: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57612525-76/vlc-steps-into-next-gen-video-wars-with-vp9-hevc-support/

Well, that was a pointless statement.

[Anonymous Coward]

"So one of the MPEG LA companies may well have a patent which would necessarily be violated decoding WebM."

Of course, one of the WebM patents may precede and be unlicensed by MPEG-LA. A patent troll could have a patent necessarily breeched by the H264 license. In neither case are you given a license to the technology nor protected by MPEG-LA from a lawsuit for using it, and being that you will have to pay to use it, you will have to be commercial, making it a ripe target for some more skimming.

So I guess this means that H.264 is not usable, eh?

No?

Well, then, if it's not a sufficient reason to say H264 is unsafe and troublesome, then it's not sufficient reason to say WebM is unsafe or troublesome.

Re:Well, that was a pointless statement.

[Hal_Porter]

Well, then, if it's not a sufficient reason to say H264 is unsafe and troublesome, then it's not sufficient reason to say WebM is unsafe or troublesome.

Except that Google ended up licensing the MPEG LA patents whilst AVC has been in use for ages and no one who has paid the license fee for the MPEG LA patents has successfully been sued by a third party.

If you look here

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/google-and-mpeg-la-sign-licensing-agreement-covering-googles-vp8-video-codec-clearing-the-way-for-wider-adoption/

It looks like Google ended up paying the MPEG LA for the patents that WebM infringed. Google then licenses those patents out for free to anyone who wants to use WebM.

Yeah, stroke hipster egos!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because ONE application maker doesn't want, for reasons unconnected with utility or practicality, to support WebM, why should Wikimedia stroke Apple egos and make an exception for them?

You've heard bullshit. Every verified it true? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

"But I've read that a lot of MPEG ASICs have the entropy codes, pixel predictors, transforms, and other parts of an MPEG codec baked directly into the silicon"

most of the heavy lifting done by ASICs are for processes that are inherent in video compression and out of patent or unpatentable.

Rockbox does slightly (and only slightly) worse on battery life because it cannot take advantage of hidden knowledge of how the hardware is dealt with, but it plays Ogg formats fine, accelerated, and the impact on battery life too small to be measured against the other options for battery differences. E.g. pick a video or music that is more efficient in one than it is in the other and you get a different balance.

Wikimedia can still keep its hands clean

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need to pay for encoder software. Almost everyone by now already has access to a properly licensed h.264 encoder. I've got three, not counting the ones built-in to devices (4 cameras, 2 phones, 1 tablet)- Quicktime, Compressor, Sorenson Squeeze. Wikimedia can just require the proper h.264 formats they want to support (size, bitrate, hinting, etc.). Post it on their video uploader/info page, test for it with a number of utilities, reject it if it doesn't meet the requirements. Presto... no encoder needed. Hands are clean. They can then still support the open video formats and transcode it to those formats just like the Internet Archive does with MP4 files that it receives.

Users: free playback, access to more educational videos
Wikimedia: no encoder license, transcode to open formats
Contributors: already have encoder and can contribute more

Net result: Wikimedia still supporting open formats, adds to the commons by transcoding video, pays nothing to h.264 companies, now has accesses to more videos

Posting anon to keep moderation (Immerial)

Re:Wikimedia can still keep its hands clean

[tepples]

Contributors: already have encoder

Not all of them do. Contributors might have a decoder for use with their cameras but not a licensed encoder to encode footage to the correct bitrate, profile, etc. Besides, the thumbnailer on Wikimedia's servers (for resizing HD video down to SD and LD) still needs an encoder.

The power to Tax

[Mabhatter]

The power to TAX something is the power to restrict or destroy it.

Ask why nearly ALL the device makers are so afraid of unencumbered, "untaxed", video and audio codex?

Re:The power to Tax

[jrincayc]

My personal guess is that the reason Apple is not supporting free formats is directly to make it harder for Linux to compete.

Technically, Safari supports a royalty free format

[jrincayc]

Technically, Apple does support motion JPEG as a video format on OSX which is a royalty free format. MPEG-1 is also probably royalty free as well and is supported on OSX Safari. However, even Ogg Theora beats those formats on compression.

(Of course, without Apple's objection to Ogg Theora, it would probably be a required codec for HTML5.)

Encoded videos vs. encoders

[tepples]

As I understand that press release, MPEG-LA has committed to refrain from charging a royalty for making already encoded videos available to the public without charge. It didn't mention anything about royalties for obtaining lawfully made encoder software in the first place, such as the encoder needed to thumbnail a 1080p video down to 720p, 480p, 360p, and 240p.