The iPad by itself is moving a million units a month. They can't make them fast enough. Apparently the 7" Android slates were all over Asia, but we couldn't get them before - but now we can get them on Ebay for $120 and all the major vendors are bringing out their own versions with the newer better processors, video and ports. The app stores and content stores are booming like it's 1849.
There are already thousands of apps for iPad and Android. If you buy one of those you don't have to worry about this "if".
We've tried Windows on tablets, over and over for the past 15 years. It doesn't work. It never gets popular enough to attract the developers who write the apps that make it take off in the market.
Hoping that this time it could be different is a waste of time and money. There are a lot of reasons for the failure of Windows tablets, and the fine article only points out a few - but these few will do. Don't bother trying to imagine your way around these, as the others are even more difficult.
Re:The life span of a cell phone platform=24 month
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H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 1
Apparently somebody went out and shipped a Brazilian Android tablets with a 7 inch screen. They're all over the place out there. Getting the 10 inch screen is going to be pretty tricky - I understand Apple bought them all. Maybe we'll see some Android tablets in the 12 inch display.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why switch to VP8 if everyone already does H.264 in software and in hardware and VP8 also becomes subject to MPEG LA patent licensing?
Because VP8 doesn't belong to MPEG LA. It is owned by Google, and Google has granted all of us not only a freely distributed, royalty free source code reference implementation from which we may derive our own implementations, but an eternal payment free license to use all of the Google patented technologies involved - forever. That is substantially different and advantagious in a number of ways. It extends the uses to which the platform can be put, from what the licensors allow to "whatever the heck you can think of". The difference is important. It's meaningful. It's impactful. It's valuable. In short, it's Progress. You remember Progress, don't you? It's what we had before software patents were the norm.
In the US we have an inflated estimate of US
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Add India and Pakistan to China, and they're most of the civlized world. They're actually more than half of all the people in the world. None of them care about your list (Yes, I know Chinese patents are on your list - even the Chinese don't care about them - China has differring views on intellectual property that are difficult to describe here but can be summarized as: meh).
We forget sometimes in the US that our entire country is not as old as a decent British country house, nor a Taiwan temple, nor even a Chinese family land lease. Hell, the US is not even as old as most decent books. We are notmost people and we're never going to be. Our inflated estimate of our importance is the cause of much misunderstanding in the wider world. The sooner we let it go the better.
We've got some decent insight on human interaction to share, but others may be rightfully suspicious of new ideas when they have a system that's similar that is proven to work over a span of 5,000 years. To those folk a quarter millenium is still just a "noble experiment", and frankly looking at what we're doing with it, we might not make it to a half millennium so who are we to say they're not civilized?
Re:The life span of a cell phone platform=24 month
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 2, Interesting
For the other big non-desktop market, TVs/STBs - that's going to be the biggest resistance to anything non-H.264 (and I say this working in that industry...) The cable and satellite industry just spent a huge amount of money converting all of their broadcast systems and set-tops to H.264, and they don't like doing that very often. Additionally, the chips that go into all TVs and Blu-Ray players all support H.264 (and MPEG2, etc) but not much else - which means the current VOD services that run on them like Netflix, Vudu, CinemaNow, YouTube, etc are all H.264 based.
All of the major video providers on the Web - even the porn ones - are now migrating to HTML5 and seem ready to offer their content on whatever Codec you have handy. They're not choosy. They don't have a dog in this fight. They're all about getting eyeballs on their content so they can sell ads against that, or sell access to their content. They really don't care. If you have flash, they'll give you flash. If you have VP8 or H.264, they'll give you that. They can afford to transcode and store three copies, or transcode on demand. We are after all paying them to serve us up the video we desire.
So have you heard about Google TV? It seems Google is about ready to offer TV over IP. That's going to hose up the business model for most cable TV providers. It's disruptive. If Google delivers TV well I'll be moving to IP only on my Comcast cable connection (right now I have the triple play), and I imagine I'm not alone there. I've got 50Mbps down, and that's more than fine both for my web surfing and to drive all of my TVs with video. It will probably put the brakes on the one hour a year of local programming I usually watch, but I won't miss it.
The company had been around since the early 1990's. They were well aware of video patents, and monitored patent filings quite closely. Many of their features were adopted on the day that the statutory 1 year gap between publication of a method and possible patent filing expired. Much of the VP8 codec is actually prior art for the patents in the H.264 pool. On2 codecs have been used in Theora, Flash and Microsoft video products. If MPEG LA goes after them, it seems likely MPEG LA will lose more than they win - especially since all of us will be against them. Additionally, they'll be in court facing off with their patents against Google, and I hear Google has a few folks who know how to look stuff up like prior art. Heck, Google probably did this looking up before they decided to spend a hundred million dollars on buying the company just to give away its technology. It seems likely Google did look some stuff up before they decided to transcode their entire YouTube library to VP8. They're diligent like that.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 5, Interesting
No, patents are broken. They're intended to work for limited times, but a number of strategies for extending them have arisen that make them indefinitely persistent. They're broken. Even in the best case they prevent progress. Look at the early example of the steam engine. The late movement to change them from first invention to first to patent promises to bring innovation to a grinding halt.
Even Tesla's invention of radio was for a long time blocked by Marconi's patents and only recognized after his death. Patents not only are broken, they have always been. Patents prevent progress, and the prevention of progress is the opposite of the purpose and justification for patents.
Patents are patently bad. The US Constitution grants to Congress the power to grant patents and copyrights - but it does not require Congress to do so. We can fix this.
The life span of a cell phone platform=24 months
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think we need not worry about this in the long term. In the short term people are accustomed to the fact that their 9 month old phone doesn't have the latest technology - it's a phone, and they got it for cheap on contract. When their contract is up they go for the hot new stuff, which next week will include VP8 compatibility on Android phones and iPhones, which are both of the platforms that drive tech today. RIM will come around to whatever's hot because they don't want to lose share. As for the desktop, who needs it? Desks are not comfortable and they're not mobile. We move about now. We go where the work is, or we work wherever we happen to be.
Since I'm posting I might as well throw in some gems I've gleaned from the news. The ringtone hopes of phone vendors of being media content providers is pretty much dead. In the 2009 numbers online distribution has surpassed physical distribution for the first time (and we're not going back). Most audio is now bought online. One in four tracks purchased is bought through iTunes now. Amazon MP3 at about 1% is still in the top 10, but it's not going to be the wunderkind of media distribution once hoped.
If iTunes gets serious traction on video sales we're on our way to an iTunes culture. From my POV that would be unfortunate.
For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent. The purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing alternative to everyone on the same terms and to include as much essential intellectual property as possible for their convenience. Participation in the License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however.
So you are in no way more protected by using the restricted H.264 license than you are by using the open VP8 license in the US. In most of the civilized world there's no such thing as software patents, so the only issue is which one of these is technically best.
And now MPEG LA is trying to form a patent pool for VP8. Will wonders never cease? Patents are broken. Let us hope that Monday SCOTUS rules that software patents are void in RE Bilski.
It's a lot more work to find Moorestown product without Windows attached to it in a complete platform. For whatever reason, if Windows will run on the thing no matter how poorly, it's sold with Windows. No thanks. I do have a few of those inexpensive Atom boards. The video on the early ones was pretty hopeless, and they didn't run Vista well. But attach an SSD for the OS and a 2TB HDD for data with Ubuntu it makes a credible media server, guest workstation, thin client and Citrix terminal. Intel is so terrified that these platforms will "cannibalize" their established and more expensive server, desktop and notebook product lines that they cripple them in various ways - limited memory, video resolution, no PCIe. Intel's suffocating the product line their own selves.
Regular Windows doesn't run on ARM, and fewer ARM platforms are shipping with the WinCE version of Windows these days. So we'll get ARM platforms for the most part not because they're better (though all-day battery while playing 1080p is still beyond Moorestown in a practical CE device), but simply because people can get them without Windows attached, and with it Microsoft's control of the software platform, the user interface down to the icons on the desktop, the feature set, the necessary antimalware suite that sucks out any performance and battery life the platform might have.
Moorestown is a cool product and I'll probably get a few platforms of that for various things. For the tablet type devices I think I'll stick with the Android Tegra tablets. Did you know that the manufacturers of Android platforms are allowed to optimize the software and user experience for their platform? Isn't that neat? It can come out of the box ready to use.
Maybe in the next generation the Atom line will be more interesting as the power envelope for the processor and the support chips comes more in line with what ARM can do. For now, not so much. With Windows 7 the product will always be disappointing.
Is it unfair to expect more from the world's largest software company? If we give them millions of dollars each year, and spend millions more training our people on how to use their stuff with best practices and secure it, is it too much to ask that their products be in some way better than the products of the long-haired smelly neckbeards who give us their stuff for free? If we're not getting that for our money, what are we paying them for? To dress well and take the CIO to lunch twice a year?
No, it's that it took this long to resolve the issue. Memory prices had been following Moore's law for a long time (since the last antitrust action) and then for four years they were fairly flat because of prix fixe. The companies made more money in higher prices than they're paying in fines, so for them it's a net win and that's disturbing too.
Now can we get some 8GB DDR3 RDIMMS that cost less than my car? I've got a few high volume VDI deployments that are stalled for economic feasibility and that's not good for the platform vendor, the network hardware vendor, the server processor vendor, the thin client vendor, the software vendor, or me - the integrator/services vendor.
And while we're at it, would somebody please slap the shit out of the enterprise flash SSD vendors for me? I could beat their price and performance and capacity metrics all at once if I cared to design/build an add-in card with a lot of these that would fit and some linux-based os onboard to RAID them in a fault-tolerant way. Maybe I should, just to show that there's nothing magical about multiplexing storage for performance, capacity and reliability yet again. How many times must this simple concept be proved?
On the one hand we have an X264 developer POV. On the other hand we have an On2 POV. I don't want you to believe either of them. They are by their positions biased in obvious ways. I want you to look for yourself and make up your own mind.
In the end though your opinion doesn't matter. Google has many billions to defend their codec. VP8 is open source, patented but a free patent license to all as long as you don't sue. The codec compresses video to an acceptable level, and the decoder presents it well at any relative resolution. Compared to the blocky presentation of low-bitrate H264, I prefer the blurry VP8 because the blur is less distracting to me than the blocks. Check it for yourself. The On2 codecs go back in time as far, or further, than the H.264 licensors (MPEG LA). Google is Google, and patent lawyers are well advised to not mess with a company whose mission is "index the world's information". Google's depth of information gathering is so much deeper than what one would consider "due diligence" that the common usage seems but a shadow of their use. One must consider that they dug down in their trove of information before dishing out $133,000,000 for On2.
So no, I don't want you to believe anything. I don't care what you believe. We'll have our open codec and there's nothing you can do about it. Thanks, Sergey.
You're wrong though. Html5 is "good enough," and maybe it can be secured - Flash can't for sure.
Adobe had best recognize that they need to move quicker, they need to secure their stuff, and they need to learn who their friends aren't. They have to this fast, or they're going to be bickering on the sidelines with the duck-billed playpus and the Baiji Dolphi over who went extinct first.
I doubt it will work with Google. If you want to look for prior art on some patent, where are you going to look? Yahoo? Bing? Google has so well served searching for information that their company name is now the verb for that activity. Anybody who thinks theres a current patent that can't be defeated by prior art is kidding himself. If you're Google, there's always prior art. Even Marconi's radio patents were invalidated eventually in favor of Tesla - who was dead by then.
Google paid $133,000,000 for On2 and they didn't just buy their VP8 Codec, they bought the entire company including customers, patents and cross-patent licensing agreements that date back as far as the early 1990's, engineers, executives and lawyers. Google got an awesomely good deal here - the price of On2 was severely depressed below its true value by the market conditions, which is why wise companies save up their cash in good times by the way. If there were a better company to buy for video encoding, who would know that better than Google? Google is Google. They know stuff. On2 by itself has a long history of mergers and acquisitions - it was once valued at $1B. On2's VP6 was selected as the Macromedia Flash 8 video codec. VP3 was the basis of Theora. In 2005 Skype licensed the On2 codecs, all current and future versions. It was licensed by AOL. Even Microsoft has licensed On2 technologies since 1997. Oh, and China. China's big, right? China's DVD format is based on On2 codecs.
If the H.264 patent licensing consortium MPEG LA (Founded, 1996) wants a fight, I think Google's got a fight for them and Google's loaded for bear.
So we've got On2 codecs and technologies used in Flash, YouTube, China, Microsoft's video, and vastly many others over a nearly 20 year span. It's endorsed and supported by ARM, AMD(ATI) and Nvidia. Um, this one is completely over. The guy that thinks the On2 codecs are derivative of H.264 may be reversing his entropy arrow, but really it doesn't matter any more than the squeaking of a mouse blocking a tank tread.
We've also got a proponent with deep pockets. Google turns a profit of $2B a quarter. That's $22M a day, 7 days a week. They can afford some good lawyers, and lots of 'em. Maybe all of 'em. And that's not considering they have enough cash on hand to buy Kansas. They can afford to keep up the good fight forever without so much as an entry on their SEC forms. They can be stubborn, too... who walks away from the China market? Stubborn and well funded does not a good troll target make.
Somebody might try to get an edge here, but to steal a Star Wars quote: "These Federation types are cowards. The negotiations will be short."
Or not... this is the sort of epic "Clash of the titans" legal brawl I'd like to see play out on groklaw, now that the SCO thing is pretty much over.
So you did get the joke then. That's good. I had thought my sarcasm might be a little too subtle.
It's comforting to know that when we've sucked the Arctica and Antarctic oil reserves dry there's still far more carbon fuels tied up in clathrates sitting on the floor of the oceans than all the oil and coal fuels we've used so far, waiting for anybody who wants to scoop them up and liquefy them. That's nice because I bought my daughter a '69 Camaro for her high school graduation and she's only three. It would be a shame if she couldn't afford gas for the thing in 2025. I should have it running by then. It's a convertible so if the climate is warmer by 2025 then she can tour Canada in it with the top down.
But if somebody does want to get into a patent fight over codecs, I imagine that some targets are less attractive than others.
Google? Would some lawyer want to bring his patents into court against Google? There can't be a company on Earth better prepared to find prior art to invalidate any plaintiff's entire patent portfolio than Google. They're Google. They index the world's information. It's what they do. It wouldn't surprise me if Google had prior art on trellis quantization based on translation of Olmec temple ornamental carvings.
Lawyer fights are usually such dry, boring drawn out things that they don't get much attention. That, though? That would be such a one-sided brutal crushing of the plaintiff that if it were televised I'd like to pay-per-view it.
Or they won't, and they'll bear the consequences of attempting to stifle this real progress. Their choice.
Once the majority of online video content is transcoded and the majority of users support an open codec, I can see a business case for deprecating H.264. It costs money to store data in multiple formats, and H.264 encoding licenses aren't free for commercial use.
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Lack of offsite backups.
Until we achieve that we have no good claim to superiority over an extinct dinosaur that ruled the Earth for millions of years.
The iPad by itself is moving a million units a month. They can't make them fast enough. Apparently the 7" Android slates were all over Asia, but we couldn't get them before - but now we can get them on Ebay for $120 and all the major vendors are bringing out their own versions with the newer better processors, video and ports. The app stores and content stores are booming like it's 1849.
It's not broken. There is nothing to fix.
There are already thousands of apps for iPad and Android. If you buy one of those you don't have to worry about this "if".
We've tried Windows on tablets, over and over for the past 15 years. It doesn't work. It never gets popular enough to attract the developers who write the apps that make it take off in the market.
Hoping that this time it could be different is a waste of time and money. There are a lot of reasons for the failure of Windows tablets, and the fine article only points out a few - but these few will do. Don't bother trying to imagine your way around these, as the others are even more difficult.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBfYQOSSPqc
Apparently somebody went out and shipped a Brazilian Android tablets with a 7 inch screen. They're all over the place out there. Getting the 10 inch screen is going to be pretty tricky - I understand Apple bought them all. Maybe we'll see some Android tablets in the 12 inch display.
Here you go. We already have that.
Why switch to VP8 if everyone already does H.264 in software and in hardware and VP8 also becomes subject to MPEG LA patent licensing?
Because VP8 doesn't belong to MPEG LA. It is owned by Google, and Google has granted all of us not only a freely distributed, royalty free source code reference implementation from which we may derive our own implementations, but an eternal payment free license to use all of the Google patented technologies involved - forever. That is substantially different and advantagious in a number of ways. It extends the uses to which the platform can be put, from what the licensors allow to "whatever the heck you can think of". The difference is important. It's meaningful. It's impactful. It's valuable. In short, it's Progress. You remember Progress, don't you? It's what we had before software patents were the norm.
Add India and Pakistan to China, and they're most of the civlized world. They're actually more than half of all the people in the world. None of them care about your list (Yes, I know Chinese patents are on your list - even the Chinese don't care about them - China has differring views on intellectual property that are difficult to describe here but can be summarized as: meh).
We forget sometimes in the US that our entire country is not as old as a decent British country house, nor a Taiwan temple, nor even a Chinese family land lease. Hell, the US is not even as old as most decent books. We are not most people and we're never going to be. Our inflated estimate of our importance is the cause of much misunderstanding in the wider world. The sooner we let it go the better.
We've got some decent insight on human interaction to share, but others may be rightfully suspicious of new ideas when they have a system that's similar that is proven to work over a span of 5,000 years. To those folk a quarter millenium is still just a "noble experiment", and frankly looking at what we're doing with it, we might not make it to a half millennium so who are we to say they're not civilized?
For the other big non-desktop market, TVs/STBs - that's going to be the biggest resistance to anything non-H.264 (and I say this working in that industry...) The cable and satellite industry just spent a huge amount of money converting all of their broadcast systems and set-tops to H.264, and they don't like doing that very often. Additionally, the chips that go into all TVs and Blu-Ray players all support H.264 (and MPEG2, etc) but not much else - which means the current VOD services that run on them like Netflix, Vudu, CinemaNow, YouTube, etc are all H.264 based.
All of the major video providers on the Web - even the porn ones - are now migrating to HTML5 and seem ready to offer their content on whatever Codec you have handy. They're not choosy. They don't have a dog in this fight. They're all about getting eyeballs on their content so they can sell ads against that, or sell access to their content. They really don't care. If you have flash, they'll give you flash. If you have VP8 or H.264, they'll give you that. They can afford to transcode and store three copies, or transcode on demand. We are after all paying them to serve us up the video we desire.
So have you heard about Google TV? It seems Google is about ready to offer TV over IP. That's going to hose up the business model for most cable TV providers. It's disruptive. If Google delivers TV well I'll be moving to IP only on my Comcast cable connection (right now I have the triple play), and I imagine I'm not alone there. I've got 50Mbps down, and that's more than fine both for my web surfing and to drive all of my TVs with video. It will probably put the brakes on the one hour a year of local programming I usually watch, but I won't miss it.
The company had been around since the early 1990's. They were well aware of video patents, and monitored patent filings quite closely. Many of their features were adopted on the day that the statutory 1 year gap between publication of a method and possible patent filing expired. Much of the VP8 codec is actually prior art for the patents in the H.264 pool. On2 codecs have been used in Theora, Flash and Microsoft video products. If MPEG LA goes after them, it seems likely MPEG LA will lose more than they win - especially since all of us will be against them. Additionally, they'll be in court facing off with their patents against Google, and I hear Google has a few folks who know how to look stuff up like prior art. Heck, Google probably did this looking up before they decided to spend a hundred million dollars on buying the company just to give away its technology. It seems likely Google did look some stuff up before they decided to transcode their entire YouTube library to VP8. They're diligent like that.
And so having done the math, MPEG LA is investigating creating a patent pool to support VP8. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. It seems unlikely they'll find success in this, but they will try.
No, patents are broken. They're intended to work for limited times, but a number of strategies for extending them have arisen that make them indefinitely persistent. They're broken. Even in the best case they prevent progress. Look at the early example of the steam engine. The late movement to change them from first invention to first to patent promises to bring innovation to a grinding halt.
Even Tesla's invention of radio was for a long time blocked by Marconi's patents and only recognized after his death. Patents not only are broken, they have always been. Patents prevent progress, and the prevention of progress is the opposite of the purpose and justification for patents.
Patents are patently bad. The US Constitution grants to Congress the power to grant patents and copyrights - but it does not require Congress to do so. We can fix this.
I think we need not worry about this in the long term. In the short term people are accustomed to the fact that their 9 month old phone doesn't have the latest technology - it's a phone, and they got it for cheap on contract. When their contract is up they go for the hot new stuff, which next week will include VP8 compatibility on Android phones and iPhones, which are both of the platforms that drive tech today. RIM will come around to whatever's hot because they don't want to lose share. As for the desktop, who needs it? Desks are not comfortable and they're not mobile. We move about now. We go where the work is, or we work wherever we happen to be.
Since I'm posting I might as well throw in some gems I've gleaned from the news. The ringtone hopes of phone vendors of being media content providers is pretty much dead. In the 2009 numbers online distribution has surpassed physical distribution for the first time (and we're not going back). Most audio is now bought online. One in four tracks purchased is bought through iTunes now. Amazon MP3 at about 1% is still in the top 10, but it's not going to be the wunderkind of media distribution once hoped.
If iTunes gets serious traction on video sales we're on our way to an iTunes culture. From my POV that would be unfortunate.
MPEG LA, the group that formed a patent pool for H.264, does not protect their licensees against all patent infringement - but just against patent infringement suits by their licensors, and only then in the limited case of the specific case of patents included in the pool, and only then for limited times.
Q: Are all AVC essential patents included?
A: No assurance is or can be made that the License includes every essential patent. The purpose of the License is to offer a convenient licensing alternative to everyone on the same terms and to include as much essential intellectual property as possible for their convenience. Participation in the License is voluntary on the part of essential patent holders, however.
So you are in no way more protected by using the restricted H.264 license than you are by using the open VP8 license in the US. In most of the civilized world there's no such thing as software patents, so the only issue is which one of these is technically best.
And now MPEG LA is trying to form a patent pool for VP8. Will wonders never cease? Patents are broken. Let us hope that Monday SCOTUS rules that software patents are void in RE Bilski.
And then be surprised that it's difficult to reach the goal. Brilliant!
It's a lot more work to find Moorestown product without Windows attached to it in a complete platform. For whatever reason, if Windows will run on the thing no matter how poorly, it's sold with Windows. No thanks. I do have a few of those inexpensive Atom boards. The video on the early ones was pretty hopeless, and they didn't run Vista well. But attach an SSD for the OS and a 2TB HDD for data with Ubuntu it makes a credible media server, guest workstation, thin client and Citrix terminal. Intel is so terrified that these platforms will "cannibalize" their established and more expensive server, desktop and notebook product lines that they cripple them in various ways - limited memory, video resolution, no PCIe. Intel's suffocating the product line their own selves.
Regular Windows doesn't run on ARM, and fewer ARM platforms are shipping with the WinCE version of Windows these days. So we'll get ARM platforms for the most part not because they're better (though all-day battery while playing 1080p is still beyond Moorestown in a practical CE device), but simply because people can get them without Windows attached, and with it Microsoft's control of the software platform, the user interface down to the icons on the desktop, the feature set, the necessary antimalware suite that sucks out any performance and battery life the platform might have.
Moorestown is a cool product and I'll probably get a few platforms of that for various things. For the tablet type devices I think I'll stick with the Android Tegra tablets. Did you know that the manufacturers of Android platforms are allowed to optimize the software and user experience for their platform? Isn't that neat? It can come out of the box ready to use.
Maybe in the next generation the Atom line will be more interesting as the power envelope for the processor and the support chips comes more in line with what ARM can do. For now, not so much. With Windows 7 the product will always be disappointing.
Is it unfair to expect more from the world's largest software company? If we give them millions of dollars each year, and spend millions more training our people on how to use their stuff with best practices and secure it, is it too much to ask that their products be in some way better than the products of the long-haired smelly neckbeards who give us their stuff for free? If we're not getting that for our money, what are we paying them for? To dress well and take the CIO to lunch twice a year?
No, it's that it took this long to resolve the issue. Memory prices had been following Moore's law for a long time (since the last antitrust action) and then for four years they were fairly flat because of prix fixe. The companies made more money in higher prices than they're paying in fines, so for them it's a net win and that's disturbing too.
Now can we get some 8GB DDR3 RDIMMS that cost less than my car? I've got a few high volume VDI deployments that are stalled for economic feasibility and that's not good for the platform vendor, the network hardware vendor, the server processor vendor, the thin client vendor, the software vendor, or me - the integrator/services vendor.
And while we're at it, would somebody please slap the shit out of the enterprise flash SSD vendors for me? I could beat their price and performance and capacity metrics all at once if I cared to design/build an add-in card with a lot of these that would fit and some linux-based os onboard to RAID them in a fault-tolerant way. Maybe I should, just to show that there's nothing magical about multiplexing storage for performance, capacity and reliability yet again. How many times must this simple concept be proved?
On the one hand we have an X264 developer POV. On the other hand we have an On2 POV. I don't want you to believe either of them. They are by their positions biased in obvious ways. I want you to look for yourself and make up your own mind.
In the end though your opinion doesn't matter. Google has many billions to defend their codec. VP8 is open source, patented but a free patent license to all as long as you don't sue. The codec compresses video to an acceptable level, and the decoder presents it well at any relative resolution. Compared to the blocky presentation of low-bitrate H264, I prefer the blurry VP8 because the blur is less distracting to me than the blocks. Check it for yourself. The On2 codecs go back in time as far, or further, than the H.264 licensors (MPEG LA). Google is Google, and patent lawyers are well advised to not mess with a company whose mission is "index the world's information". Google's depth of information gathering is so much deeper than what one would consider "due diligence" that the common usage seems but a shadow of their use. One must consider that they dug down in their trove of information before dishing out $133,000,000 for On2.
So no, I don't want you to believe anything. I don't care what you believe. We'll have our open codec and there's nothing you can do about it. Thanks, Sergey.
You're wrong though. Html5 is "good enough," and maybe it can be secured - Flash can't for sure.
Adobe had best recognize that they need to move quicker, they need to secure their stuff, and they need to learn who their friends aren't. They have to this fast, or they're going to be bickering on the sidelines with the duck-billed playpus and the Baiji Dolphi over who went extinct first.
I doubt it will work with Google. If you want to look for prior art on some patent, where are you going to look? Yahoo? Bing? Google has so well served searching for information that their company name is now the verb for that activity. Anybody who thinks theres a current patent that can't be defeated by prior art is kidding himself. If you're Google, there's always prior art. Even Marconi's radio patents were invalidated eventually in favor of Tesla - who was dead by then.
Google paid $133,000,000 for On2 and they didn't just buy their VP8 Codec, they bought the entire company including customers, patents and cross-patent licensing agreements that date back as far as the early 1990's, engineers, executives and lawyers. Google got an awesomely good deal here - the price of On2 was severely depressed below its true value by the market conditions, which is why wise companies save up their cash in good times by the way. If there were a better company to buy for video encoding, who would know that better than Google? Google is Google. They know stuff. On2 by itself has a long history of mergers and acquisitions - it was once valued at $1B. On2's VP6 was selected as the Macromedia Flash 8 video codec. VP3 was the basis of Theora. In 2005 Skype licensed the On2 codecs, all current and future versions. It was licensed by AOL. Even Microsoft has licensed On2 technologies since 1997. Oh, and China. China's big, right? China's DVD format is based on On2 codecs.
If the H.264 patent licensing consortium MPEG LA (Founded, 1996) wants a fight, I think Google's got a fight for them and Google's loaded for bear.
So we've got On2 codecs and technologies used in Flash, YouTube, China, Microsoft's video, and vastly many others over a nearly 20 year span. It's endorsed and supported by ARM, AMD(ATI) and Nvidia. Um, this one is completely over. The guy that thinks the On2 codecs are derivative of H.264 may be reversing his entropy arrow, but really it doesn't matter any more than the squeaking of a mouse blocking a tank tread.
We've also got a proponent with deep pockets. Google turns a profit of $2B a quarter. That's $22M a day, 7 days a week. They can afford some good lawyers, and lots of 'em. Maybe all of 'em. And that's not considering they have enough cash on hand to buy Kansas. They can afford to keep up the good fight forever without so much as an entry on their SEC forms. They can be stubborn, too... who walks away from the China market? Stubborn and well funded does not a good troll target make.
Somebody might try to get an edge here, but to steal a Star Wars quote: "These Federation types are cowards. The negotiations will be short."
Or not... this is the sort of epic "Clash of the titans" legal brawl I'd like to see play out on groklaw, now that the SCO thing is pretty much over.
So you did get the joke then. That's good. I had thought my sarcasm might be a little too subtle.
It's comforting to know that when we've sucked the Arctica and Antarctic oil reserves dry there's still far more carbon fuels tied up in clathrates sitting on the floor of the oceans than all the oil and coal fuels we've used so far, waiting for anybody who wants to scoop them up and liquefy them. That's nice because I bought my daughter a '69 Camaro for her high school graduation and she's only three. It would be a shame if she couldn't afford gas for the thing in 2025. I should have it running by then. It's a convertible so if the climate is warmer by 2025 then she can tour Canada in it with the top down.
But if somebody does want to get into a patent fight over codecs, I imagine that some targets are less attractive than others.
Google? Would some lawyer want to bring his patents into court against Google? There can't be a company on Earth better prepared to find prior art to invalidate any plaintiff's entire patent portfolio than Google. They're Google. They index the world's information. It's what they do. It wouldn't surprise me if Google had prior art on trellis quantization based on translation of Olmec temple ornamental carvings.
Lawyer fights are usually such dry, boring drawn out things that they don't get much attention. That, though? That would be such a one-sided brutal crushing of the plaintiff that if it were televised I'd like to pay-per-view it.
But aren't you at least a little concerned that Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012? And what of the Bats eating kids? Won't anyone think of the children?
Intel is not an MPEG LA Licensor. They don't have a dog in this fight. They'll come around.
Or they won't, and they'll bear the consequences of attempting to stifle this real progress. Their choice.
Once the majority of online video content is transcoded and the majority of users support an open codec, I can see a business case for deprecating H.264. It costs money to store data in multiple formats, and H.264 encoding licenses aren't free for commercial use.
Here's a contrary point of view, with video.