This is true... for now. Android developers don't make as much money as iPhone developers... unless you're one of the iPhone developers who's app doesn't match Apple's whims that month.
There are reasons for this, some of which are inherently temporary. Yes, Android device sales beat iPhone sales 1Q2010, and they probably will this quarter too. But there's a vast installed base for iPhoneOS apps... that's where your sales materialize.
The other thing is that paid apps are an evolving thing on the Android Marketplace. Still much of the world can't buy applications yet. This has not only lead to fewer sales, but a better selection of free software, as developers want to get their feet wet in the Android market, even if they had to do it free. Presumably, Google will get their act together on international sales, just as Apple ultimately did.
When Microsoft was brought to court, it was over software. They weren't running on the most popular CPU of any kind, probably not even the most popular operating system in use. But they did have over 90% of the OS market for applications processors -- computers that let other people run arbitrary applications. That gave them the market. Then things they did, like effectively forcing OEMs to put MS-DOS and WIndows on every PC, tying apps to the OS, etc. were considered abuse of this monopoly.
According to some counts, Apple has 97%-99.4% of sales in the applications market for handheld devices (PDAs, Smartphones, etc). It's not identical circumstances, but it's the same kind of thing that gave Microsoft dominance. If that's considered, they may have some kind of monopoly. They certainly do have the power to affect the applications markets on other small device platforms.
And what did they just do -- they changed the rules of their development contract, precisely in order to make development for other platforms more difficult and more expensive for iPhone developers. Who are apparently most developers working in the applications device market.
I don't think it's really the same.. they've peaked, Apple's percentage of the apps market must certainly be falling. Some developers are even leaving for other platforms, tired of being Steve Jobs' playthings. But if you had to make any kind of anti-trust argument or even just general anti-competitive behavior, this one seems the most likely.
Opera currently supports only Ogg Theora. And it's apparently built-in, as you'd expect for "only support", rather than using the OS. That's a shame.. they are trying to dictate user choice. They do mention that Firefox and Chrome also support Theora... Chrome offering the choice, though I don't know hoe much choice.
The Opera folks also point out that (on the Mac anyway, probably the PC too), Safari is actually doing the right thing. Despite all of Steve Jobs yaking about H.264. Safari uses the Quicktime subsystem to decode the tag. So, if you install the Quicktime CODEC for Ogg Theora, it'll play in Safari. Go here: http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/
Apple is pushing for H.264 because of their devices. iPod and iPad and iPhone only have hardware for H.264 decoding. So Apple's not about to support another CODEC if they can get H.264 in there as the de-facto standard. That gets their devices closer to being first-class web residents. And the gravy... the FOSS people, in refusing to run H.264, will now be the second class netizens. This means less competition, maybe people moving from Firefox to Safari, whatever.
Microsoft is thinking the same thing. Like Apple, they have patents in the H.264 pool, so they're not spending money to support H.264...and they're probably making a little if everyone uses it. They want a full web experience on the X-Box or a Windows Phone, and that means H.264, particularly in the latter case. Plus, they'll have Silverlight on the devices they care about, so they have the DRMed alternative to all set up, using VC-1 (WMV9) for video. So they're equally happy to watch Apple duke it out with Adobe, given that Flash is the same kind of thing as Silverlight.
For the user, more CODECs are good... with some caveats. We benefit in the long run if web sites can make their own decisions about the video they stream. And if it's very easy to route around expenses like licensing fees. But we also want it to "just work", and that does mean on mobile devices. Apple and Microsoft are not wrong about mobile being H.264 friendly these days. Theora may be possible on some of these, but it's likely to be lower quality and more battery on many if not most. VP8 sounds great if Google does what we hope with it, but that's a long-term thing for mobile devices.
Any video CODEC other than H.264 gaining traction in the HTML5 world is a direct threat to Apple, because they only plan to support H.264 on their devices, and right now, iPhones and iPads are far more important to Apple's future than the Mac or anything else in the desktop world. Not to mention that Apple and Microsoft both have patents in the MPEG-LA patent pool on H.264. So ensuring its dominance is even a bit of pocket change.
Yup. And the sad thing is, most of the industry is letting Steve Jobs lead it around by the nostrils, trying to equate Flash with "closed and evil", HTML5 with "open and good", and in addition, making the argument only about video... just the low-hanging fruit in what Flash is doing these days.
Never mentioned are Apple's ulterior motives. Hurt or kill Flash to the extent it's no longer needed to be a first-class resident of the web. Then Apple customers stop pressuring Apple to support Flash, and they protect the ability to do any significant programming of the iPxxx devices outside of the iTunes walled garden. Next, ensure that really means H.264, so that all iPxxx devices will support video online, everywhere. They don't really want "open", because if most browsers support any old video CODEC, other standards could prevail, those that won't play well on iPhones. They're going to bute force this as much as possible, and try to make it sound like they're being the good guys.
And unfortunately, Jobs is largely getting away with it. I think the best chance of that not happening is Google... they have the ability to, single-handedly, make VP8 just as important to the average web user as H.264. And once you have two, hopefully most browsers will just defer to the OS for their video decoding, which will let people use Theora where they want to use it. Let the web ultimately decide, not a few greedy bastards at Microsoft or Apple.
Opera and Firefox don't have to support ANY video CODEC... that's the thing. They simply had the job of decoding video off the OS, where it belongs. Presumably, if H.264 decodes, that means an H.264 video CODEC has been installed. Even if it's not a legal one, how is that Opera or Firefox's problem, any more than any other illegality in an OS they run on but don't control?
Their support of "only Theora" is the same kind of political statement Microsoft might be making by saying "only H.264". And as well intended as it might be, neither of these guys are Microsoft. And in either case, it's the users caught in the squeeze.
The tag really needs to use the OS. This will ensure that efficient, hardware accelerated CODECs get added at the pace of the OS, not the pace of browser developers working hard to support multiple platforms. It also means that individuals can route around the patent issues as they choose, or even adopt advances like VP8 or Dirac. Locking it into the brower ensures horrible performance (the main reason Flash sucks on the Mac is that Apple doesn't expose the proper video acceleration APIs) and lets the few in charge of making browsers define the formats supported. Which of course is why it's guys like Apple and Microsoft trying to force the issues on one side, and the FOSS people trying to force it on the other. But "what's best for the user" is generally not being forced at all. Give the users the option, and let the web evolve it's own way.
VP6 isn't as good as H.264... that's the primary reason Adobe went to H.264 for recent versions of flash video. VP8 is widely rumored to be better, and by a fair margin. If it's also somehow free of any MPEG-LA patent entanglements, it'll be a wonderful thing, at least for desktop video. It'll take that success, and another generation of hardware or two, before it's even possible to work well on smartphones. At least most of them.
Of course, the other reason these digital still cameras do MJPEG video -- they already have that JPEG encoder. No extra computation needed, only a little extra code memory for the video mode.
And they're usually dropping it into a Quicktime wrapper... there could still be Quicktime patents active. At least until 2011 or so.
Which is probably one reason the BBC's Dirac/Dirac Pro is very, very different than anything MPEG. Well, either they're working to not infringe (since they wanted this to be a standard for archival purposes, not owned by anyone), or they have some hints from the future. Dirac is based on wavelets, not DCTs, which gets around a very large part of the whole MPEG thing. Dirac Pro is now SMPTE VC-2. Doesn't guarantee it's free, but it does guarantee public documentation.
But you do have to be careful... there are MPEG-LA patents on all kinds of crazy stuff. As the article suggests, the very process used by the MPEG folks ensure that the resulting standards are crazy with patents, as each player tries to get their piece of the pie. So they have patents on video encoding, audio encoding, optimization tricks in code, file and stream formats, error correction, time codes, etc.
They are effectively claiming a software patent, and in fact, a very unusual one. They're basically claiming a patent on encoded H.264, independent of path. Not [just] the encoder, but the product of an encoder is what they're licensing. This is where there's some disclaimer in every AVC camcorder, claiming that the resulting video is for home use only. Yeah, even professional models. I'm sure Panasonic paid their fees on the encoders in my HMC40 and TM700 camcorders. But they can't actually grant me permission to use H.264 in any other way... since the MPEG-LA lays claim to the product of the encoding as being covered by their patent.
This is very different than just about any other kind of patent or copyright coverage, and most of the time, we wouldn't accept it. I may well be using software patents when I design electronics using Altium software, but I'd tell them they were nuts, and switch to OrCAD or Mentor or Eagle or something else, if they also decided I owed them a royalty on my design, simply because I used their software. Or Microsoft claiming royalty on your code or your new book just because you used Windows to create the thing. This is pretty much the same thing.
And not only that.. I can't even figure out why this is legal. Patents... even software patents, only really apply to an actual process, a real thing, some hardware is involved. The original "loophole" that allowed software patents in the USA was basically the notion that just because a system had a software component, it wasn't automatically unpatentable. If you read over any software patent, at least from the early days of software patents (they became accepted in the USA in the early 1980s), you'll find it's actually the hardware executing software that's violating a patent. The software itself, alone, cannot violate a patent, because it's not a process. It's just a document.
And that "document" is useless without the decoder... upon which the patent license had already been paid.
Apple is consistent... it's right there in the developer's contract. Apple can reject your app for any reason, and they don't have to tell you why. Always the same!
Also, consider very carefully the concept of "open" versus "closed", because it's often based on just where you're standing. From the developer's point of view, yes, Flash is a proprietary product. You have to buy the tools from Adobe. And yet, they do...because content people using those tools means you don't have to hire a full fledged web programmer to do the same thing in HTML right now.
From the user's point of view, any additional option I have is moving toward "open", any decision made for me by someone else is moving toward "closed". So from my user's stance, the option to view Flash make a system more open than some restriction against it. Obviously, being forced to use flash would go even more proprietary, but that's not the situation here. If Flash is truly a proprietary evil, it will eventually be replaced by open standards, but that has to start at the tools, not the client end. And maybe it's just not that evil.
Why would I suggest that? Well, let's see... look at who's using Flash. Artists and Web designers, and they're just trying to deliver a good web site. Adobe's supporting the player everywhere... yeah, that makes the authoring tools more valuable. But it's not as if I pay less for Adobe tools based around open standards: both Photoshop and Premiere cost much more.
Now, look at who's actively opposing Flash, by cutting off the client and annoying users. Microsoft. Apple. Can you name any two more traditionally evil companies in the PC business? Certainly not any with that same mix of evil, power, and money. Evil alone? Ok sure... but if SCO were healthy, I'm sure they'd be totally on board with the "replace proprietary flash with proprietary H.264" mission.
You have to love that Steve Jobs. His goals are pretty obvious here: he wants H.264, and only H.264, as the video standard for the web. That's what iPods and iPhones and iPads play, and have always played. They play it well, due to the hardware video acceleration designed specifically for H.264. He also wants to protect his iPhoneOS walled garden from any reasonable way of writing or distributing an app without Apple's explicit approval. Thus, no Flash in your browser, no Commodore 64 emulator, etc. And, in order to make it more work for a developer to support other device platforms, he just cut off the use of application frameworks... so no Flash, even hidding in an iPhoneOS binary.
But the thing you gotta love... he's managed to completely control the discussion about this. First, by framing it all as being about video.... Flash video "bad", H.264 video "good". And then by claiming it all in the name of standards! Of course he wants it to seem standard, after all, that's kind of the point -- get the world to rotate around the Apple axis and deliver H.264 as the only standard for web video. Thus, iPhones re-enter the world as eventually-first-class web clients, rather than the second-class state they occupy today. Well, except for that nasty other use of Flash.. building web sites. Thus his efforts to demonize Flash any way possible... performance (despite Flash being slow on Macs because of Apple, not Adobe) and security (only a PC issue, anyway).
While I'd love to not need Flash myself, I'd like it to be my choice, not anyone else's. And the real fast is, until web development tools for non-programmers work as easily as Adobe's Flash tools, people will still be using "way too much Flash" online.
The bottom line is, any company really worried about standards would be far happier with an open sourced VP8. Apple won't be... they'll fight this just like they fought Flash, if Google does open source it as expected at the Google I/O conference this month. And anyone really wanting to displace Flash would release a tool that works just as well as Flash for non-programmers, using standards. Apple doesn't particularly want that, either... games and apps based on HTML5 would offer the same problem Flash does today.
That's why it's cool to be James Cameron! After making the "Terminator" movies, something resembling that same killer robot got to take over and destroy California. After making "Titanic", he just automatically gets to climb abort the submarine from "The Abyss" and travel down to the real Titanic.
So of course Cameron is going into space. Now it's just his cool 3D camera, maybe, but if he makes a sequel to "Avatar", he automatically gets to really go into space.
VP8 support would go out with Chrome updates, if nothing else. Install the new Chrome, and you could have a nice shiny new VP8 video CODEC for all applications to use. Or at least one built in on the web browser, if Google didn't want to get too ambitious. They could get decent hardware acceleration on GPU-equipped PCs, just as H.264 does today.
It's relevant for mobile devices. And Google could hit a bunch by adding VP8 support in Android 2.2 "Froyo"... only, it probably wouldn't work. Today's device won't likely accelerate VP8, certainly not as well as H.264. All current small video devices have hardware optimized for H.264.
It's relevant for web-enabled STBs. You could have VP8 support in the PS3 tomorrow if Sony agreed to it. But H.264 is a "gimme" in any web-enabled Blu-Ray player, simply because it's already in any Blu-Ray player. So on the PS3, maybe, if Google pushed and made it worthwhile. On most others, they're doing decoding in hardware or hardware-assist, much the same deal as the handhelds. That's why a dedicated Blu-Ray player burns 20W to play a video, a PS burns 150W, and a PC burns 500W for that same playback.
Camcorders -- irrelevant. The camcorder records in a format that's a private agreement between the camcorder, the user, and the video editor. Until last year, most camcorders recorded in MPEG-2... before HD, most recorded in DV (which is essentially a form of Motion JPEG), and yet, these videos are delivered in the appropriate playback format regardless. You still encode to MPEG-2 for a DVD, regardless of the video source.
PCs... already covered. They support it tomorrow if Google wants them to. All PC support is via some kind of software, the acceleration is generic code and a few fairly generic hardware functions on the GPU. Same stuff is applicable to H.264, MPEG-2, and VP8.
Editing tools work via CODEC plug-ins. The same day your PC can play back VP8, it can edit VP8. It might be painfully slow editing, as AVCHD is on the average PC today, but edit it will. Professionals will do with VP8 what they usually do with AVCHD or other MPEG-4 -- transcode it to CineForm, DNxHD, MPEG-2/MXF, or (for those Mac weenies) ProRes before they edit it.
Obvious reason, not even slightly unknown: iPhoneOS. And particularly, all of those iPhoneOS devices.
All those devices have H.264 acceleration. None currently play accelerate Theora or VP8 in any way, shape, or form, and even if Apple wanted, they would not play on existing devices as well as H.264. Their hardware was designed specifically to accelerate H.264. ,
And Apple's been serving up H.264 on these devices since the iPod first did video. They have no reason to change, and every reason to try to get the world to change for their advantage.
Naa... I think Google was fundamentally correct about the browser, though they still seem to be wrong about how to do it. The browser should use the OS for video support... it has no business doing the video itself.
But Google has other concerns, namely, YouTube. They came out in favor of H.264, simply because moving all of YouTube to Theora would cost them. Theora isn't as efficient as H.264, and while that's probably not a significant concern for online storage, it's absolutely one for streaming costs. Files get bigger, they pay more (or make less) streaming that video to you. I think it's pretty obvious that Google's thinking this way... their purchase of On2 wasn't remotely necessary for either Theora or H.264 advocacy. But if VP8 actually does offer 40-60% better coding efficiency on small bandwidth video than H.264, that's money in the bank for a company streaming as much video as Google.
And I think that is basis enough for Google being the only major player kinda-sorta standing neutral on the subject, from the browser perspective.
Google also has to be concerned about Android devices, just as Apple has to be concerned about iPhoneOS devices.. they both play H.264 now, neither is likely to have general support for VP8 or Theora. But Google doesn't have to be vocal about this, because they own YouTube, and can serve up whatever benefits them to whatever device they like. So Apple has to convince the world to support H.264 and only H.264, Google kind of wins either way... if H.264 is dominant, Android's happy. If it's not, other sites don't work well on mobile devices, but YouTube does.
They both deploy small devices that play videos, but only play H.264 well... see my other post. Apple's wants H.264, and only H.264, supported in HTML5, so that HTML5 videos always play on the iPhone and iPad. It's not good enough for them to just ensure H.264 can be supported... they need to keep Theora, VP8, or anything else that can't play on the iPhone out of the de-facto standard. Because you know that, despite the tag being neutral, there will be a de-facto standard.
The FOSS and small company folks know this too... they could easily support system-level CODECs, which might allow H.264, but wouldn't get them in any trouble since they're not doing the decoding, just passing it on the OS. This is the right way for anyone to do this, if they have the user in mind... web browsers have no business doing any video decoding. But they're trying to the same thing as Microsoft and Apple -- push the industry their way by limiting consumer choice. Unfortunately, Mozilla is no Microsoft, Opera no Apple.
Well, look at the whole H.264 vs. Ogg Theora debacle.
Both sides COULD just say, "we'll support any video CODEC installed on our system", which is the right answer for both open source and closed source. The simple fact is, the web browser has no more business implementing its own video CODEC than it has implementing its own graphics driver or file system. All modern OSs have multimedia subsystems which support system-provided, hardware optimized CODECs. That's all any browser should support.
But Apple and Microsoft, at least, are not doing that... they're saying "H.264 only". They aren't the whole of the market, but given their weight, it's pretty likely that many video sites will make H.264 their primary video format.
Ok, now, since the "other side" is totally and completely playing into their hands on this, it's easy to see who's affected: small companies and open source. So, Opera and Mozilla, for example, have both drawn their line in the sand and decided to do this just as wrongly, only by building in Ogg Theora as the only HTML5 CODEC they'll support. Either one could use the OS-supplied CODECs without an iota of fear for the need to license H.264 themselves, but I guess they're trying to push the market the other way.
So, in the end, we have this: the big boys all support only H.264. Open source and small companies all support only Ogg Theora. When most web sites support only H.264, we now find that small browsers and Open Source are the new iPhone -- second class citizens of the multimedia web. Mission accomplished, if you're Microsoft and Apple. They don't care about the cost of H.264, now or in the future, but they do care about competition in other areas. They want you to use their web browsers and their non-PC internet devices. Making the free stuff work less well gives them a less powerful potential competitor.
And they're protecting their small devices. Apple in particular has two motives. One is to separate video from everything else Flash does, because they understand video is both the low-hanging fruit and the largest application for Flash that most consumers care about. They have guided the discussion very well, which is why nearly every discussion about Apple vs. Adobe is about video. Apple needs to ensure H.264 because it's what iPods and iPhones have always supported. And they need to kill Flash, because they don't want people to be able to write good programs, even online Flash-style programs, which might compete with iTunes program sales. So promoting H.264 and only H.264 for gets them video support on the devices, and makes Flash less important on the net.
Today's pocket computers (call 'em PDAs or Smartphones or whatever) are all 500MHz-1GHz ARM 11 or ARM Cortex 8 devices, for the most part. And they all have very nice H.264-optimized video engines that offload that one thing form the CPU. That saves a ton of battery power on the devices, if they could even decode Ogg Theora, much less VP8, without that accelerator. Someone did put a Theora decoder on the TI OMAP3 (the SOC family in the Nokia N900, the Palm Pre and Mototola Droid), and it did a low resolution decode, but it was running mostly on the DSP, not on the H.264 acceleration hardware (which is apparently undocumented): http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3. But even if it worked, it would have to be done on a device-by-device basis, since each bit of video acceleration hardware is different. Lotsa work, and no guarantee it runs well on every device.
It's not a lock-in, it's a lock-out. If H.264 is expensive, than only rich companies can use it in the way Microsoft, Apple, and Google use it. That helps maintain the status quo, at least until someone produces a video CODEC that leapfrogs the existing technologies, and decides to open source that. And even then, it's complex and expensive to prove there's no patent on your shiny new leapfrogging CODEC. And even if you don't see any, Apple, Microsoft, or the MPEG-LA may "think different". In fact, it seems to be MPEG-LA dogma that no video CODEC can exist without stepping on their patents. So you can pretty much bet they'll come after anything new... like VP8, for example. And at least with VP8, it's Google's bank account ready to respond... if they're correctly, they probably win. A small company with great new tech can get stomped anyway, even if they're ultimately in the right.
This is a really good example of why software patents are inherently a problem. Companies are working on this stuff, sometimes for years, without knowledge of what the other guy's doing. A few of the things they come up with are real "inventions" in the classic sense. Far more are pretty obvious things, just, there's this huge prize for being the first to fill out the patent paperwork.
And you need a bunch of lawyers and engineers to even figure out whether one patent reads on a specific thing, much less dozens. The problem is, patents are often very poorly written, by experts in patent law, so that they seem to cover little-to-nothing for the purpose of appeasing the patent examiner, then they cover pretty much everything, for the purpose of suing some other guy's ass off.
On2 released VP3 in 2000, with a set of patents behind it (for various optimizations.. none of these are actually necessary to implement VP3). This was one year after the first MPEG-4 Part 2 work was released, but of course, MPEG-4 Part 2 was based on H.263, which was finalized in 1995. The H.26L committee actually produced its first draft in 1999, though the final H.264 spec wasn't released until 2003. So there's a really good chance everything in VP3 pre-dates H.264, but there is some actual overlap. And of course, VP3 would have to be clear of any patents filed from H.263 or Part 2 work. And of course, On2's TrueMotion goes back to 1992, but it's questionable if anything from TrueMotion was actually used in VP3.
Just that can make your head explode... and it's why this is such an hard thing to know... is there any patent exposure in VP3? On2 and Google believe "no", but the ultimate test is market exposure. Of course, VP3 not so much, but VP6 certainly has had crazy levels of market exposure, between its use in Flash, JavaFX, and lots of Chinese projects. You'd think any exposure would be known, but did On2 have patents on this? Did they cross-license with the MPEG LA or other patent holders? That's the thing you have to know. VP8 may have similar issues, even if Google willing to open source the code and grant perpetual free patent licensing of some acceptable sort.
And to Theora as well. Theora is based on VP3, everyone believes that to be true. But is that all it is? I mean, libtheora came out in 2004, and really hasn't seen much action until recently. They say the bitstream format was frozen, so maybe there's no change over VP3, just optimization... though even that can be patent-entangled, if not a mandatory part of the CODEC. Any improvements might turn out to be patent issues. Now, why would anyone bother going after Theora? Well, they might risk the appearance of patent abandonment if they had patents on Theora and didn't go after it. Of course, they could grant coverage to the project, but that might cause licensing issues. And it's pretty clear, there are companies out there that don't want options. In fact, the only people who want options seem to the be the users... and maybe Google. Everyone else is adopting the "one video only" position. Which is just going to keep HTML5 from taking over from Flash in the first place.
And it's not just the video CODECs.. some of the audio formats are in these patents, and the streaming containers (MPEG-TS, MPEG-4, etc). Obviously the Theora people use Ogg, but Ogg is totally brain damaged, never intended for anything but audio, and it wasn't very good at that. The obvious way forward is Matroska, but there, again... more patent issues may apply.
Precisely! If the iPhone's no good, don't buy an iPhone. I mean, why support a platform you're against (he says, typing on a Windows machine) if you can help it.
I had a Palm Treo that failed in 2008. And I was sick of the lack of support or new products from Palm, and to an extent, just how lame PalmOS was after all those years. I knew Android was coming, but the G1 was no solution... particularly because it was on T-Mobile, which doesn't even reach my house. So I waited. It's not like most people live or die by Smartphone.... if I did, I could have grabbed a used Treo off eBay relatively cheap, while I waited. As it was, a $2.00 dumb phone at a yard sale got the job done.
And of course, I was there in line at 6AM on "Droid Day", and it's great. I don't have any problems with the Droid or with Google, I'm not angry at their stupid policies or how they lock down or prevent multitasking on my phone. In short, I knew what I wanted, and waited for it to exist, rather than supporting something lesser and making myself angry about it in the process.
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This is true... for now. Android developers don't make as much money as iPhone developers... unless you're one of the iPhone developers who's app doesn't match Apple's whims that month.
There are reasons for this, some of which are inherently temporary. Yes, Android device sales beat iPhone sales 1Q2010, and they probably will this quarter too. But there's a vast installed base for iPhoneOS apps... that's where your sales materialize.
The other thing is that paid apps are an evolving thing on the Android Marketplace. Still much of the world can't buy applications yet. This has not only lead to fewer sales, but a better selection of free software, as developers want to get their feet wet in the Android market, even if they had to do it free. Presumably, Google will get their act together on international sales, just as Apple ultimately did.
Apple is very definitely lawful evil.
Apple doesn't just sell hardware.
When Microsoft was brought to court, it was over software. They weren't running on the most popular CPU of any kind, probably not even the most popular operating system in use. But they did have over 90% of the OS market for applications processors -- computers that let other people run arbitrary applications. That gave them the market. Then things they did, like effectively forcing OEMs to put MS-DOS and WIndows on every PC, tying apps to the OS, etc. were considered abuse of this monopoly.
According to some counts, Apple has 97%-99.4% of sales in the applications market for handheld devices (PDAs, Smartphones, etc). It's not identical circumstances, but it's the same kind of thing that gave Microsoft dominance. If that's considered, they may have some kind of monopoly. They certainly do have the power to affect the applications markets on other small device platforms.
And what did they just do -- they changed the rules of their development contract, precisely in order to make development for other platforms more difficult and more expensive for iPhone developers. Who are apparently most developers working in the applications device market.
I don't think it's really the same.. they've peaked, Apple's percentage of the apps market must certainly be falling. Some developers are even leaving for other platforms, tired of being Steve Jobs' playthings. But if you had to make any kind of anti-trust argument or even just general anti-competitive behavior, this one seems the most likely.
Opera currently supports only Ogg Theora. And it's apparently built-in, as you'd expect for "only support", rather than using the OS. That's a shame.. they are trying to dictate user choice. They do mention that Firefox and Chrome also support Theora... Chrome offering the choice, though I don't know hoe much choice.
The Opera folks also point out that (on the Mac anyway, probably the PC too), Safari is actually doing the right thing. Despite all of Steve Jobs yaking about H.264. Safari uses the Quicktime subsystem to decode the tag. So, if you install the Quicktime CODEC for Ogg Theora, it'll play in Safari. Go here: http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/
A telling thing is Opera's informative introduction to HTML5 video:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/everything-you-need-to-know-about-html5-video-and-audio/
You may notice that this has actually made playing video more complex than it was when if was Flash or "just embed a file".
Microsoft, basically, just copied Apple.
Apple is pushing for H.264 because of their devices. iPod and iPad and iPhone only have hardware for H.264 decoding. So Apple's not about to support another CODEC if they can get H.264 in there as the de-facto standard. That gets their devices closer to being first-class web residents. And the gravy... the FOSS people, in refusing to run H.264, will now be the second class netizens. This means less competition, maybe people moving from Firefox to Safari, whatever.
Microsoft is thinking the same thing. Like Apple, they have patents in the H.264 pool, so they're not spending money to support H.264.. .and they're probably making a little if everyone uses it. They want a full web experience on the X-Box or a Windows Phone, and that means H.264, particularly in the latter case. Plus, they'll have Silverlight on the devices they care about, so they have the DRMed alternative to all set up, using VC-1 (WMV9) for video. So they're equally happy to watch Apple duke it out with Adobe, given that Flash is the same kind of thing as Silverlight.
For the user, more CODECs are good... with some caveats. We benefit in the long run if web sites can make their own decisions about the video they stream. And if it's very easy to route around expenses like licensing fees. But we also want it to "just work", and that does mean on mobile devices. Apple and Microsoft are not wrong about mobile being H.264 friendly these days. Theora may be possible on some of these, but it's likely to be lower quality and more battery on many if not most. VP8 sounds great if Google does what we hope with it, but that's a long-term thing for mobile devices.
Any video CODEC other than H.264 gaining traction in the HTML5 world is a direct threat to Apple, because they only plan to support H.264 on their devices, and right now, iPhones and iPads are far more important to Apple's future than the Mac or anything else in the desktop world. Not to mention that Apple and Microsoft both have patents in the MPEG-LA patent pool on H.264. So ensuring its dominance is even a bit of pocket change.
Yup. And the sad thing is, most of the industry is letting Steve Jobs lead it around by the nostrils, trying to equate Flash with "closed and evil", HTML5 with "open and good", and in addition, making the argument only about video... just the low-hanging fruit in what Flash is doing these days.
Never mentioned are Apple's ulterior motives. Hurt or kill Flash to the extent it's no longer needed to be a first-class resident of the web. Then Apple customers stop pressuring Apple to support Flash, and they protect the ability to do any significant programming of the iPxxx devices outside of the iTunes walled garden. Next, ensure that really means H.264, so that all iPxxx devices will support video online, everywhere. They don't really want "open", because if most browsers support any old video CODEC, other standards could prevail, those that won't play well on iPhones. They're going to bute force this as much as possible, and try to make it sound like they're being the good guys.
And unfortunately, Jobs is largely getting away with it. I think the best chance of that not happening is Google... they have the ability to, single-handedly, make VP8 just as important to the average web user as H.264. And once you have two, hopefully most browsers will just defer to the OS for their video decoding, which will let people use Theora where they want to use it. Let the web ultimately decide, not a few greedy bastards at Microsoft or Apple.
Of course, Netflix isn't using Flash, but an older form of Windows Media Video, and more recently, Silverlight with VC-1.
But yeah, they want the DRM. So does any other commercial concern doing video streaming. doesn't do that.
Opera and Firefox don't have to support ANY video CODEC... that's the thing. They simply had the job of decoding video off the OS, where it belongs. Presumably, if H.264 decodes, that means an H.264 video CODEC has been installed. Even if it's not a legal one, how is that Opera or Firefox's problem, any more than any other illegality in an OS they run on but don't control?
Their support of "only Theora" is the same kind of political statement Microsoft might be making by saying "only H.264". And as well intended as it might be, neither of these guys are Microsoft. And in either case, it's the users caught in the squeeze.
The tag really needs to use the OS. This will ensure that efficient, hardware accelerated CODECs get added at the pace of the OS, not the pace of browser developers working hard to support multiple platforms. It also means that individuals can route around the patent issues as they choose, or even adopt advances like VP8 or Dirac. Locking it into the brower ensures horrible performance (the main reason Flash sucks on the Mac is that Apple doesn't expose the proper video acceleration APIs) and lets the few in charge of making browsers define the formats supported. Which of course is why it's guys like Apple and Microsoft trying to force the issues on one side, and the FOSS people trying to force it on the other. But "what's best for the user" is generally not being forced at all. Give the users the option, and let the web evolve it's own way.
VP6 isn't as good as H.264... that's the primary reason Adobe went to H.264 for recent versions of flash video. VP8 is widely rumored to be better, and by a fair margin. If it's also somehow free of any MPEG-LA patent entanglements, it'll be a wonderful thing, at least for desktop video. It'll take that success, and another generation of hardware or two, before it's even possible to work well on smartphones. At least most of them.
android.media.MediaPlayer
Of course, the other reason these digital still cameras do MJPEG video -- they already have that JPEG encoder. No extra computation needed, only a little extra code memory for the video mode.
And they're usually dropping it into a Quicktime wrapper... there could still be Quicktime patents active. At least until 2011 or so.
Which is probably one reason the BBC's Dirac/Dirac Pro is very, very different than anything MPEG. Well, either they're working to not infringe (since they wanted this to be a standard for archival purposes, not owned by anyone), or they have some hints from the future. Dirac is based on wavelets, not DCTs, which gets around a very large part of the whole MPEG thing. Dirac Pro is now SMPTE VC-2. Doesn't guarantee it's free, but it does guarantee public documentation.
But you do have to be careful... there are MPEG-LA patents on all kinds of crazy stuff. As the article suggests, the very process used by the MPEG folks ensure that the resulting standards are crazy with patents, as each player tries to get their piece of the pie. So they have patents on video encoding, audio encoding, optimization tricks in code, file and stream formats, error correction, time codes, etc.
They are effectively claiming a software patent, and in fact, a very unusual one. They're basically claiming a patent on encoded H.264, independent of path. Not [just] the encoder, but the product of an encoder is what they're licensing. This is where there's some disclaimer in every AVC camcorder, claiming that the resulting video is for home use only. Yeah, even professional models. I'm sure Panasonic paid their fees on the encoders in my HMC40 and TM700 camcorders. But they can't actually grant me permission to use H.264 in any other way... since the MPEG-LA lays claim to the product of the encoding as being covered by their patent.
This is very different than just about any other kind of patent or copyright coverage, and most of the time, we wouldn't accept it. I may well be using software patents when I design electronics using Altium software, but I'd tell them they were nuts, and switch to OrCAD or Mentor or Eagle or something else, if they also decided I owed them a royalty on my design, simply because I used their software. Or Microsoft claiming royalty on your code or your new book just because you used Windows to create the thing. This is pretty much the same thing.
And not only that.. I can't even figure out why this is legal. Patents... even software patents, only really apply to an actual process, a real thing, some hardware is involved. The original "loophole" that allowed software patents in the USA was basically the notion that just because a system had a software component, it wasn't automatically unpatentable. If you read over any software patent, at least from the early days of software patents (they became accepted in the USA in the early 1980s), you'll find it's actually the hardware executing software that's violating a patent. The software itself, alone, cannot violate a patent, because it's not a process. It's just a document.
And that "document" is useless without the decoder... upon which the patent license had already been paid.
Apple is consistent... it's right there in the developer's contract. Apple can reject your app for any reason, and they don't have to tell you why. Always the same!
Right.
Also, consider very carefully the concept of "open" versus "closed", because it's often based on just where you're standing. From the developer's point of view, yes, Flash is a proprietary product. You have to buy the tools from Adobe. And yet, they do.. .because content people using those tools means you don't have to hire a full fledged web programmer to do the same thing in HTML right now.
From the user's point of view, any additional option I have is moving toward "open", any decision made for me by someone else is moving toward "closed". So from my user's stance, the option to view Flash make a system more open than some restriction against it. Obviously, being forced to use flash would go even more proprietary, but that's not the situation here. If Flash is truly a proprietary evil, it will eventually be replaced by open standards, but that has to start at the tools, not the client end. And maybe it's just not that evil.
Why would I suggest that? Well, let's see... look at who's using Flash. Artists and Web designers, and they're just trying to deliver a good web site. Adobe's supporting the player everywhere... yeah, that makes the authoring tools more valuable. But it's not as if I pay less for Adobe tools based around open standards: both Photoshop and Premiere cost much more.
Now, look at who's actively opposing Flash, by cutting off the client and annoying users. Microsoft. Apple. Can you name any two more traditionally evil companies in the PC business? Certainly not any with that same mix of evil, power, and money. Evil alone? Ok sure... but if SCO were healthy, I'm sure they'd be totally on board with the "replace proprietary flash with proprietary H.264" mission.
You have to love that Steve Jobs. His goals are pretty obvious here: he wants H.264, and only H.264, as the video standard for the web. That's what iPods and iPhones and iPads play, and have always played. They play it well, due to the hardware video acceleration designed specifically for H.264. He also wants to protect his iPhoneOS walled garden from any reasonable way of writing or distributing an app without Apple's explicit approval. Thus, no Flash in your browser, no Commodore 64 emulator, etc. And, in order to make it more work for a developer to support other device platforms, he just cut off the use of application frameworks... so no Flash, even hidding in an iPhoneOS binary.
But the thing you gotta love... he's managed to completely control the discussion about this. First, by framing it all as being about video.... Flash video "bad", H.264 video "good". And then by claiming it all in the name of standards! Of course he wants it to seem standard, after all, that's kind of the point -- get the world to rotate around the Apple axis and deliver H.264 as the only standard for web video. Thus, iPhones re-enter the world as eventually-first-class web clients, rather than the second-class state they occupy today. Well, except for that nasty other use of Flash.. building web sites. Thus his efforts to demonize Flash any way possible... performance (despite Flash being slow on Macs because of Apple, not Adobe) and security (only a PC issue, anyway).
While I'd love to not need Flash myself, I'd like it to be my choice, not anyone else's. And the real fast is, until web development tools for non-programmers work as easily as Adobe's Flash tools, people will still be using "way too much Flash" online.
The bottom line is, any company really worried about standards would be far happier with an open sourced VP8. Apple won't be... they'll fight this just like they fought Flash, if Google does open source it as expected at the Google I/O conference this month. And anyone really wanting to displace Flash would release a tool that works just as well as Flash for non-programmers, using standards. Apple doesn't particularly want that, either... games and apps based on HTML5 would offer the same problem Flash does today.
That's why it's cool to be James Cameron! After making the "Terminator" movies, something resembling that same killer robot got to take over and destroy California. After making "Titanic", he just automatically gets to climb abort the submarine from "The Abyss" and travel down to the real Titanic.
So of course Cameron is going into space. Now it's just his cool 3D camera, maybe, but if he makes a sequel to "Avatar", he automatically gets to really go into space.
Well, some of that's relevant.
VP8 support would go out with Chrome updates, if nothing else. Install the new Chrome, and you could have a nice shiny new VP8 video CODEC for all applications to use. Or at least one built in on the web browser, if Google didn't want to get too ambitious. They could get decent hardware acceleration on GPU-equipped PCs, just as H.264 does today.
It's relevant for mobile devices. And Google could hit a bunch by adding VP8 support in Android 2.2 "Froyo"... only, it probably wouldn't work. Today's device won't likely accelerate VP8, certainly not as well as H.264. All current small video devices have hardware optimized for H.264.
It's relevant for web-enabled STBs. You could have VP8 support in the PS3 tomorrow if Sony agreed to it. But H.264 is a "gimme" in any web-enabled Blu-Ray player, simply because it's already in any Blu-Ray player. So on the PS3, maybe, if Google pushed and made it worthwhile. On most others, they're doing decoding in hardware or hardware-assist, much the same deal as the handhelds. That's why a dedicated Blu-Ray player burns 20W to play a video, a PS burns 150W, and a PC burns 500W for that same playback.
Camcorders -- irrelevant. The camcorder records in a format that's a private agreement between the camcorder, the user, and the video editor. Until last year, most camcorders recorded in MPEG-2... before HD, most recorded in DV (which is essentially a form of Motion JPEG), and yet, these videos are delivered in the appropriate playback format regardless. You still encode to MPEG-2 for a DVD, regardless of the video source.
PCs... already covered. They support it tomorrow if Google wants them to. All PC support is via some kind of software, the acceleration is generic code and a few fairly generic hardware functions on the GPU. Same stuff is applicable to H.264, MPEG-2, and VP8.
Editing tools work via CODEC plug-ins. The same day your PC can play back VP8, it can edit VP8. It might be painfully slow editing, as AVCHD is on the average PC today, but edit it will. Professionals will do with VP8 what they usually do with AVCHD or other MPEG-4 -- transcode it to CineForm, DNxHD, MPEG-2/MXF, or (for those Mac weenies) ProRes before they edit it.
Obvious reason, not even slightly unknown: iPhoneOS. And particularly, all of those iPhoneOS devices.
All those devices have H.264 acceleration. None currently play accelerate Theora or VP8 in any way, shape, or form, and even if Apple wanted, they would not play on existing devices as well as H.264. Their hardware was designed specifically to accelerate H.264. ,
And Apple's been serving up H.264 on these devices since the iPod first did video. They have no reason to change, and every reason to try to get the world to change for their advantage.
Naa... I think Google was fundamentally correct about the browser, though they still seem to be wrong about how to do it. The browser should use the OS for video support... it has no business doing the video itself.
But Google has other concerns, namely, YouTube. They came out in favor of H.264, simply because moving all of YouTube to Theora would cost them. Theora isn't as efficient as H.264, and while that's probably not a significant concern for online storage, it's absolutely one for streaming costs. Files get bigger, they pay more (or make less) streaming that video to you. I think it's pretty obvious that Google's thinking this way... their purchase of On2 wasn't remotely necessary for either Theora or H.264 advocacy. But if VP8 actually does offer 40-60% better coding efficiency on small bandwidth video than H.264, that's money in the bank for a company streaming as much video as Google.
And I think that is basis enough for Google being the only major player kinda-sorta standing neutral on the subject, from the browser perspective.
Google also has to be concerned about Android devices, just as Apple has to be concerned about iPhoneOS devices.. they both play H.264 now, neither is likely to have general support for VP8 or Theora. But Google doesn't have to be vocal about this, because they own YouTube, and can serve up whatever benefits them to whatever device they like. So Apple has to convince the world to support H.264 and only H.264, Google kind of wins either way... if H.264 is dominant, Android's happy. If it's not, other sites don't work well on mobile devices, but YouTube does.
They both deploy small devices that play videos, but only play H.264 well... see my other post. Apple's wants H.264, and only H.264, supported in HTML5, so that HTML5 videos always play on the iPhone and iPad. It's not good enough for them to just ensure H.264 can be supported... they need to keep Theora, VP8, or anything else that can't play on the iPhone out of the de-facto standard. Because you know that, despite the tag being neutral, there will be a de-facto standard.
The FOSS and small company folks know this too... they could easily support system-level CODECs, which might allow H.264, but wouldn't get them in any trouble since they're not doing the decoding, just passing it on the OS. This is the right way for anyone to do this, if they have the user in mind... web browsers have no business doing any video decoding. But they're trying to the same thing as Microsoft and Apple -- push the industry their way by limiting consumer choice. Unfortunately, Mozilla is no Microsoft, Opera no Apple.
Well, look at the whole H.264 vs. Ogg Theora debacle.
Both sides COULD just say, "we'll support any video CODEC installed on our system", which is the right answer for both open source and closed source. The simple fact is, the web browser has no more business implementing its own video CODEC than it has implementing its own graphics driver or file system. All modern OSs have multimedia subsystems which support system-provided, hardware optimized CODECs. That's all any browser should support.
But Apple and Microsoft, at least, are not doing that... they're saying "H.264 only". They aren't the whole of the market, but given their weight, it's pretty likely that many video sites will make H.264 their primary video format.
Ok, now, since the "other side" is totally and completely playing into their hands on this, it's easy to see who's affected: small companies and open source. So, Opera and Mozilla, for example, have both drawn their line in the sand and decided to do this just as wrongly, only by building in Ogg Theora as the only HTML5 CODEC they'll support. Either one could use the OS-supplied CODECs without an iota of fear for the need to license H.264 themselves, but I guess they're trying to push the market the other way.
So, in the end, we have this: the big boys all support only H.264. Open source and small companies all support only Ogg Theora. When most web sites support only H.264, we now find that small browsers and Open Source are the new iPhone -- second class citizens of the multimedia web. Mission accomplished, if you're Microsoft and Apple. They don't care about the cost of H.264, now or in the future, but they do care about competition in other areas. They want you to use their web browsers and their non-PC internet devices. Making the free stuff work less well gives them a less powerful potential competitor.
And they're protecting their small devices. Apple in particular has two motives. One is to separate video from everything else Flash does, because they understand video is both the low-hanging fruit and the largest application for Flash that most consumers care about. They have guided the discussion very well, which is why nearly every discussion about Apple vs. Adobe is about video. Apple needs to ensure H.264 because it's what iPods and iPhones have always supported. And they need to kill Flash, because they don't want people to be able to write good programs, even online Flash-style programs, which might compete with iTunes program sales. So promoting H.264 and only H.264 for gets them video support on the devices, and makes Flash less important on the net.
Today's pocket computers (call 'em PDAs or Smartphones or whatever) are all 500MHz-1GHz ARM 11 or ARM Cortex 8 devices, for the most part. And they all have very nice H.264-optimized video engines that offload that one thing form the CPU. That saves a ton of battery power on the devices, if they could even decode Ogg Theora, much less VP8, without that accelerator. Someone did put a Theora decoder on the TI OMAP3 (the SOC family in the Nokia N900, the Palm Pre and Mototola Droid), and it did a low resolution decode, but it was running mostly on the DSP, not on the H.264 acceleration hardware (which is apparently undocumented): http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp-and-omap3. But even if it worked, it would have to be done on a device-by-device basis, since each bit of video acceleration hardware is different. Lotsa work, and no guarantee it runs well on every device.
It's not a lock-in, it's a lock-out. If H.264 is expensive, than only rich companies can use it in the way Microsoft, Apple, and Google use it. That helps maintain the status quo, at least until someone produces a video CODEC that leapfrogs the existing technologies, and decides to open source that. And even then, it's complex and expensive to prove there's no patent on your shiny new leapfrogging CODEC. And even if you don't see any, Apple, Microsoft, or the MPEG-LA may "think different". In fact, it seems to be MPEG-LA dogma that no video CODEC can exist without stepping on their patents. So you can pretty much bet they'll come after anything new... like VP8, for example. And at least with VP8, it's Google's bank account ready to respond... if they're correctly, they probably win. A small company with great new tech can get stomped anyway, even if they're ultimately in the right.
This is a really good example of why software patents are inherently a problem. Companies are working on this stuff, sometimes for years, without knowledge of what the other guy's doing. A few of the things they come up with are real "inventions" in the classic sense. Far more are pretty obvious things, just, there's this huge prize for being the first to fill out the patent paperwork.
And you need a bunch of lawyers and engineers to even figure out whether one patent reads on a specific thing, much less dozens. The problem is, patents are often very poorly written, by experts in patent law, so that they seem to cover little-to-nothing for the purpose of appeasing the patent examiner, then they cover pretty much everything, for the purpose of suing some other guy's ass off.
On2 released VP3 in 2000, with a set of patents behind it (for various optimizations.. none of these are actually necessary to implement VP3). This was one year after the first MPEG-4 Part 2 work was released, but of course, MPEG-4 Part 2 was based on H.263, which was finalized in 1995. The H.26L committee actually produced its first draft in 1999, though the final H.264 spec wasn't released until 2003. So there's a really good chance everything in VP3 pre-dates H.264, but there is some actual overlap. And of course, VP3 would have to be clear of any patents filed from H.263 or Part 2 work. And of course, On2's TrueMotion goes back to 1992, but it's questionable if anything from TrueMotion was actually used in VP3.
Just that can make your head explode... and it's why this is such an hard thing to know... is there any patent exposure in VP3? On2 and Google believe "no", but the ultimate test is market exposure. Of course, VP3 not so much, but VP6 certainly has had crazy levels of market exposure, between its use in Flash, JavaFX, and lots of Chinese projects. You'd think any exposure would be known, but did On2 have patents on this? Did they cross-license with the MPEG LA or other patent holders? That's the thing you have to know. VP8 may have similar issues, even if Google willing to open source the code and grant perpetual free patent licensing of some acceptable sort.
And to Theora as well. Theora is based on VP3, everyone believes that to be true. But is that all it is? I mean, libtheora came out in 2004, and really hasn't seen much action until recently. They say the bitstream format was frozen, so maybe there's no change over VP3, just optimization... though even that can be patent-entangled, if not a mandatory part of the CODEC. Any improvements might turn out to be patent issues. Now, why would anyone bother going after Theora? Well, they might risk the appearance of patent abandonment if they had patents on Theora and didn't go after it. Of course, they could grant coverage to the project, but that might cause licensing issues. And it's pretty clear, there are companies out there that don't want options. In fact, the only people who want options seem to the be the users... and maybe Google. Everyone else is adopting the "one video only" position. Which is just going to keep HTML5 from taking over from Flash in the first place.
And it's not just the video CODECs.. some of the audio formats are in these patents, and the streaming containers (MPEG-TS, MPEG-4, etc). Obviously the Theora people use Ogg, but Ogg is totally brain damaged, never intended for anything but audio, and it wasn't very good at that. The obvious way forward is Matroska, but there, again... more patent issues may apply.
Precisely! If the iPhone's no good, don't buy an iPhone. I mean, why support a platform you're against (he says, typing on a Windows machine) if you can help it.
I had a Palm Treo that failed in 2008. And I was sick of the lack of support or new products from Palm, and to an extent, just how lame PalmOS was after all those years. I knew Android was coming, but the G1 was no solution... particularly because it was on T-Mobile, which doesn't even reach my house. So I waited. It's not like most people live or die by Smartphone.... if I did, I could have grabbed a used Treo off eBay relatively cheap, while I waited. As it was, a $2.00 dumb phone at a yard sale got the job done.
And of course, I was there in line at 6AM on "Droid Day", and it's great. I don't have any problems with the Droid or with Google, I'm not angry at their stupid policies or how they lock down or prevent multitasking on my phone. In short, I knew what I wanted, and waited for it to exist, rather than supporting something lesser and making myself angry about it in the process.