Licensing isn't the (only) issue for asics. Hardware decoders are only reasonably priced if they're being produced at scale. If I'm a device manufacturer and I have a choice between getting h.264 for free because it's on the SoC I'm using and paying multiple dollars (!) for a WebM decoder, not to mention wasting valuable board space and paying for it to be soldered on, which do you think I'll choose?
1) You aren't going to get H.264 decoder for free. There will be always at least license fees to MPEG-LA.
2) Current hardware video decoders are DSPs. You are not going to "waste valuable board space". It is a program in ROM, it is easy to change H.264 to VP8, you will probably even save some space.
Most hardware video decoders are special-purpose DSPs that the manufacturers write firmware/microcode for to decode particular formats. The instruction sets of the DSPs are well suited to operations normally performed when decoding (or encoding) video.
> If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
They are not general-purpose, but that doesn't mean they're not easily re-programmable either. Consider the example of GPUs.
I want to say some SNES games used a DSP chip, there are several known to emulator authors, including two versions that used the exact same hardware with different microcode (and therefore different abilities). So it's been done before at least.
DSP's are like processor units in GPU. Optimized for fast and parallel multiply and add computations (and some other basic signal processing stuff). One codec is not that much different from other from computation point of view.
The accelerator units are usually filters that operate over a region of memory while processor is busy computing something else. These can be made fixed function, however most of them are programmable to support multiple steps in codec processing.
Your assumption is valid only in case when you don't count smartphone makers that actually design their own complete phones and not license baseband implementation from someone :)
None. And its likely that software decoding of WebM will behave on mobile devices the same way Flash behaves. Okay in newer devices, but laughable in previous generation devices.
The Oulu team will release the first VP8 video hardware encoder IP in the first quarter of 2011. We have the IP running in an FPGA environment, and rigorous testing is underway. Once all features have been tested and implemented, the encoder will be launched as well.
No, there are hardware webm decoders. Eg:
"Broadcom Accelerates WebM Video on Mobile Phones" from
http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=s471536
And that's from eight months ago.
Broadcom is a huge maker of mobile SOCs; I haven;t checked the others, but I bet they support webm too.
The problem is that content providers have yet another option to choose from, but so far one that is supported by almost no one. Firefox will support WebM, and so will Chrome, so to reach those browsers you either need WebM, or Flash.
Flash also supports h.264 video, as do most mobile devices (Android, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows Phone 7, Zune even) and game consoles (XBox, PS3, and afaik the Wii). In fact from what I can tell, the only platform that doesn't support H.264 is Firefox without Flash. Compare that to the massive amount of existing platforms and devices which don't support WebM (and have no hardware WebM decoding), and it seems like moving to WebM makes much less business sense.
I don't disagree, but Android users seem to get by more or less "ok" without hardware 264 decoding (at least the ones who have devices without hardware decoding).
Personally, I just leave my mobile devices plugged in most of the time anyway so they're always topped off, but that's just me.
Well, having a desk job does tend to make me stay in one place for the most part. If I know I'm going to be sitting there for longer than an hour -- I plug it in.
(09:50:48 PM) sjuxax: Guy on HN said this: "ffmpeg only has a working webm decoder. xvp8 (the x264-based encoder) hasn't been touched for a few months and is basically vaporware"
(09:50:50 PM) sjuxax: true?
...
(09:52:34 PM) Dark_Shikari: not quite true
(09:52:42 PM) Dark_Shikari: close, but not quite.
(09:52:58 PM) Dark_Shikari: 1) the github tree hasn't been updated
(09:53:05 PM) Dark_Shikari: there is more stuff that isn't in the tree yet
(09:53:13 PM) Dark_Shikari: 2) Ronald is dealing with his first baby boy, give him some slack
(09:53:20 PM) Dark_Shikari: 3) Google just hired him full-time for a year to work solely on xvp8
and later on...
(10:12:27 PM) Dark_Shikari: tl;dr: it's kinda vaporware, there's a bit of work done, but it will stop being vaporware in march when Ronald goes to work for Google.
Assuming you're sjuxax, thank you for the research! I think a lot of us sometimes forget how simple it is to go to the primary sources in cases like this.
As much as google can seem pretty sinister these days, it's reassuring that their strategy for implementing a video decoder is "hire the dev on the leading open source project for a year."
Google as always wants us to use their beta software. This thread has generated much debates. I'm always suspicious when big corporation touts ideology as their cause. Don't fall into the pray. Just asked the question "Where is the money?" and you can guess the real reason for their move. Google seems to think that they have the clouts to influence all area of humanity, in this case the audio/visual entertainment industry that includes set top boxes, chip and hardware makers etc. They are fighter all wars (MS Office, iPhone, Bing, Facebook) by spreading themselves thinly. I believe these few years will see the start of decline of Google as a company.
IE8 is at 33% share now. IE7 is about 7%. I expect most on IE6 are still on XP. So I'd expect that we'll see similar uptake rates for IE9, if not more given the HTML5 benefit (IE8 doesn't have much clear benefit over IE7 from what I can tell).
So I'd say expect IE9 to be closer to 27% in 3 years.
Of course this ignores two big questions:
1) Is IE still hemorraging market share?
2) Does IE9 actually reverse the trend of people using Chrome?
And why will that happen? Because people like to pay license fees so much they will be all too eager to pay the fees for both h.264 encoding and flash?
Yes, businesses that already use h.264 and flash will probably continue using them. But the bootstrapped websites and startups will opt for the free stuff at least initially, and of all those bootstrapped startups some will be successful enough to make some noise. And then some of the established companies will have cost cutting rounds and will look at those license fees and think about whether they really need to pay them when some of their brand new competitors aren't paying them. At this point the iPhone will start looking bad for not supporting the newest and coolest video startups that are supported on android and Jobs will eventually cave too and add WebM support to the iPhone.
Everything in the web thus far has gone towards the lowest cost and easiest alternative that is still effective, and this will not be different.
You're dreaming if you think Apple is going to add WebM hardware decoding support to iPhones. That would basically mean that all previously sold iPhones would be marginalized, it would increase the hardware costs and space/power requirements, and there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.
I believe lukeschlather provided a good response, but I would like to add something more about the hardware side. It is a mistake to believe that one needs an entirely newly designed hardware chip to handle the WebM standard. Those hardware accelerators are not pure hardware. They are like little computers, with their own processors, and their own instruction memories, and their own software (or firmware). The processors are designed to efficiently compute the most commonly used math operations of the standard (which are usually Fourier transforms, matrix operations, etc.). The firmware causes the processor to apply the mathematical operations properly to the data to decode the video.
The thing is that all of those video standards use more or less the same basic math operations, just in a different way. This means that a WebM hardware accelerator would look very similar hardware wise to a h.264 one but would have different firmware.
In practice, I am sure that the hardware companies will make one hardware accelerator that can handle both h.264 and webm through different firmware programs. So you wont need much additional silicon or power to handle WebM. It might cost more, if the hardware companies decide to charge extra for WebM support, but that surcharge will not be much, because (i) they do not need to pay license fees, and (ii) there is a lot of competition in that field.
Or another way to view it is that if you factor in Flash support for H.264, the only clients that can't view H.264 content are Firefox, Opera, and IE 8-or-earlier installs without Flash installed.
I'm not sure what percentage of the market that is, but I'm pretty sure it's pretty small.
In comparison, all mobile devices, game consoles, and Blu-Ray players support H.264, as do all Flash installations (including the one bundled with Chrome that users can't remove), and all installations of Safari and IE9 (when it arrives).
Maybe that is somehow what Google wants? It has cozied up to Adobe to the point of including flash in Chrome itself. And YouTube apparently can't be bothered to make html5 video work reliably.
I can't think of why anyone would want to promote flash, though.
YouTube depends on Flash for its most profitable enterprises, which are advertisements before the video you're trying to watch, rental, and so forth. I don't know why they can't implement pre-show ads in HTML5, but rentals, etc., can't be done in HTML5 because they require DRM.
There was a big post a while back about all the things YouTube needs to do in Flash instead of HTML5. The fact of the matter is that HTML5 video puts several of YouTube's main money-makers out of order, at least temporarily while the logic is re-implemented.
Really? You must be much, much luckier than I. I just headed over to YouTube, disabled the (excellent) YouTube5 Safari extension, and tried 20 random videos. Only two worked (but fullscreen is still broken).
Completely agree bonaldi. What a stupid move by Google. In order to promote their own technology they are setting back HTML5 video another year or 2 so they can fluff around and whine about which video codec is better.
I could understand other companies not implementing WebM because it was a new codec developed by Google with no existing community or anything around it.
But such a widely used codec (all my videos are H.264), I don't understand.
Can't they just all support each others codec's, get this stupid war over with and start a large scale push of HTML5.
Yeah. There is no way Google of all people could launch a Cell Phone OS based on a Java variant and beat Apple by the end of 2010. Stupidest idea ever. I'm still laughing.
This seems like kind of an odd comment. How did Android 'beat' Apple? What's the game they're playing? Google is displaying a lot of ads (their goal). Apple is making a shitload of money (their goal). How did Apple 'lose' or Android 'win'?
Also, not to nitpick, but 'Java variant' seems inaccurate. Code is written in actual Java (not a variant, as far as I'm aware), and compiled to bytecode to run on the Dalvik VM (not a JVM variant).
The issue is not whether it's a game changer. Apple's game is to build devices, software, and a highly consistent and polished user experience, irresistable to buyers and app developers, all in an effort to capture maximum profit share. Google's game is to build a similar OS that is irresistible to device makers, all in an effort to maximize market share and the advertising revenues boiling off the free app ecosystem.
With Apple, the product is the device and you are the buyer. With Google, the product is you and the advertiser is the buyer. They are each winning their respective games. Superficially they are competitors, but if there is a winner, then there's a loser. How can you look at either company and consider it the loser?
Putting aside the metaphors, Google's growth is not coming at the expense of Apple's profits. Nor are Apple's seemingly perpetual revenue and profit gains coming at Google's expense. They are attacking different problems from very different angles.
With only three or four percent of the market, Apple swallows up more profit share than the largest three phone makers combined (in the neighborhood of 40 percent). That's an astounding number, and it doesn't even include non-phone devices. At the same time, Android had tremendous growth in 2010, inevitably passing Apple in unit sales rate. It's a bit glib to simply say Google therefore beats Apple in 2010. There is nuance, and either company can be painted in the foreground.
They won't change it for openness reasons, but they will change it if 80% of their visitors support WebM and not h264. It happened before. How longer were people forced to design web pages for ie6 due to its market share.
Content providers already have to support browsers that don't include h.264, and Chrome users are now in the same boat as Firefox users -- which content providers certainly won't ignore.
For sites which only produce h.264, Chrome includes Flash which can play h.264. And every video site is going to support a Flash playback path for older browsers.
The real impact here is pretty small, other than legitimizing a free and open codec. Chrome has just moved from one must-support category to another one. Most people will never notice the difference. How is that a loss?
These changes will occur in the next couple months
By then flash will gain WebM playback support. This move is a good one and it does make sense, I don't think there is room for compromise in regards to the open internet and non-proprietary standards.
Considering how long it took Flash to gain hardware acceleration on platforms aside from Windows, I wouldn't hold my breathe. MobileFlash on Android still ranges from "Sucks" to "it's fine".
I haven't tried Flash video on my android tablet (it has a YouTube app) yet, but I've also rooted it and flashed the firmware to remove a software underclock so my experience may not be representative of any stock devices.
The choice has been made by many places to simply use h264 video via the HTML5 tag to hit the iPhone/iPad and then fallback to a Flash video player which can easily play the h264 source video. Content producers would rather encode videos once, which is why they moved to FLV in the first place. There's no incentive to use anything else here.
This hurts users. I am all for standards, but not for hurting users. And like it or not, content producers are using H264 because the devices people like to use can play that video back.
Apple's stance on Flash does hurt users. But its stance on vodeo? Hardly. They chose an established, proven format that has hardware decoding capabilities. That means they could include it cheaply, and in a way that doesn't drain battery like a software decoder would.
Apple's stance on Flash hurts users _now_. But, I still envy my future self living in a world where Flash is dead. The same can be said about Google hurting users _now_. Pushing content producers towards an open and maintainable format has obvious long term advantages.
That's exactly my view, both moves are good to me. HTML5 video is still young and barely used currently, it's the time to try to shape how it will be used. If you wait 5 years, h264 will be impossible to displace and everyone will have to get software with a license, hurting all of us even more.
But again, H264 is not HTML5 video... H264 is a video codec that just happens to be used with the video tag on Mobile Safari and IE9. It's also how a majority of YouTube's videos are encoded currently, as well as many many other video uplod sites.
It's also the codec used on the Xbox360, the PSP, the PS3, and other pes of consumer electronics. It turns out that to reach the largest audience of consumer electronic devices and computer, H264 happens to be the best choice.
Video production workflows let content producers save as h264 videos.
The adult industry is using h264 videos on their web sites to serve their content to portable "more personal" devices.
Apple's stance is "why should we ship a product with known security holes out of the box and take the heat for it?"
Any user can install Flash. Apple is not depriving the user of anything.
If Google pulls the plug on H.264 on YouTube, they are depriving a lot of users of access. Mobile users (not just iOS users). Wii Users. Blu-Ray players/Web Top boxes.
Will it all eventually get straightened out? Yes, one way or another. But the sudden shift in strategy seems like Google isn't going to care one way or another to who they put out to pasture in order to establish a new de facto standard. It's very 1990s-era Microsoft of them.
Apple didn't previously have Flash support in iOS and then remove it... taking something working out for ideological reasons is much worse than never adding something in for ideological reasons in my book.
Apple could support flash for nothing... Adobe has tried to do it for them, with both direct flash support and this conversion tool. Apple is making a purely idealogical decision.
Because Apple uses h.264 in all their hardware. They have implementations on firmware so they could accelerate video on their iPhones, iPads, iPods, even making specific hardware for it.
This makes this videos to perform great on their hardware, fast and taking less resources(more battery),it lets them make things like editing video in real time on your phone, but only works for one codec.
If they use software codecs, all their competitive advantages are lost on mobile.
His summary: the spec is really terrible, the performance leaves a lot to be desired (though, there is a lot of room for optimization), and it 'copies too much from H.264 for comfort'.
This comment in response to that post makes an interesting point; the most similar bits are likely the most carefully vetted, and may be written deliberately to avoid patent infringement. Patents on standards can be very narrow; as long they cover exactly what's in the spec, then any implementer of the standard still has to pay up:
"Patents are about _details_ so the mere fact that something does something like something else, isn’t necessarily something at all.
As we’ve pointed out before, many codec patents are exceptionally easy to work around: They specify every little detail because it makes it _much_ easier to get through the examination but doesn’t harm the patent’s ability to read on the final standard because the standard specifics exactly the patented behaviour.
D_S, for all his undeniable H.264 experience isn’t an expert on patents or even the H.264 patents. We can assume that in cases where VP8 looks similar to H.264 those would have been exactly the cases where care was taken to differ in the right places. I’d expect the primary risks for VP8 to be anywhere _but_ there."
Sorry for the downvote but that was a very early analysis and the story has progressed a bit since. There's room for a more nuanced evaluation of WebM which I'd like to hear.
How do you know whether anything at all has advanced? One of the most knowledgeable authorities on video compression has called into question VP8's patent situation. Why is there any need at all to imagine a false opposite? Other than optimism?
The whole VP8/webm situation reminds me of when Microsoft tried to do the right thing and open-license VC1, but got clobbered by patent holders and had to reverse themselves.
Dark Shakari's latest pronouncement on video encoding patents was to accuse someone of patenting his idea by reading commit logs, and argue at the same time that the idea was obvious to anyone and therefore not patentable. His evidence that it must have been copied? Because it didn't include some later changes he made. (Note this doesn't even pass a basic logic test, never mind constitute a sophisticated take on the current patent situation). He then retracted the accusation.
Update: Tandberg claims they came up with the algorithm independently: to be fair, I can actually believe this to some extent, as I think the algorithm is way too obvious to be patented. Of course, they also claim that the algorithm isn’t actually identical, since they don’t want to lose their patent application.
I still don’t trust them, but it’s possible it’s merely bad research (and thus being unaware of prior art) as opposed to anything malicious. Furthermore, word from within their office suggests they’re quite possibly being honest: supposedly the development team does not read x264 code at all. So this might just all be very bad luck.
Regardless, the patent is still complete tripe, and should never have been filed.
"This demo was designed with the latest web standards supported by Safari. If you’d like to experience this demo, simply download Safari. It’s free for Mac and PC, and it only takes a few minutes."
Hum, because they're showing the latest HTML features that Safari supports? Not all browsers support the same range of features for a particular HTML standard.
Any organization which denies access to its HTML5 pages to browsers that support them is not fully behind the spirit of HTML. The reason is clear and understandable — marketing their browser — but so are the implications.
Multiple companies, including Apple (and Nokia, which ain't exactly a minor player in the mobile market) objected to HTML5 mandating support for a particular codec, largely on the grounds that we don't really know the patent situations of any of the allegedly-unencumbered codecs.
Meanwhile, multiple people objected on the grounds that mandating a current (or, really, several-years-old now since that's what it is) codec in a spec that's not expected to go final for at least a few more years, and which has an expected useful life of around a decade, is just frankly stupid. It'd be like having a spec used today mandate XBM as the standard image format because that was the least-proprietary thing available 15 years ago when early browsers were being written.
Multiple companies, including Apple (and Nokia, which ain't exactly a minor player in the mobile market) objected to HTML5 mandating support for a particular codec, largely on the grounds that we don't really know the patent situations of any of the allegedly-unencumbered codecs.
Now it's my turn to call bullshit. "We don't really know the patent situations of $x" could be used as an argument against ANY piece of software or standard $x. Unless there is real evidence for such concerns, it's FUD.
There ain't no such thing as a free codec. At least, not as long as software patents exist.
Does Google want a Free, interoperable web? Then they should take the money they'd spend re-encoding all of YouTube into VP8 and instead spend it on lobbying to eliminate software patents. Then they could just use whatever's the best option from a technical perspective and we could stop having codec shitstorms every six months.
This is what groups like the MPEG-LA want us to think, but I'm not so sure. The Ogg Vorbis codec used for WebM audio has been in use for a decade, and has shipped in dozens of software and hardware products, some from large companies with big pockets. MPEG-LA made the same vague threats about patent pools against Vorbis, but they never followed through.
Xiph.org conducted a patent search early in the Vorbis process, and believes Vorbis does not infringe on any patents. Google has done their homework on VP8 as well. If they did it right, then VP8 is no more vulnerable to unknown patent threats than any random piece of software. (Sadly, any random piece of software is somewhat vulnerable.)
For that matter, there's no guarantee that H.264 is invulnerable from patent trolls who aren't members of the licensing pool. MPEG-LA doesn't indemnify licensees against third-party patents.
Sadly, any random piece of software is somewhat vulnerable.
Any random piece of software is vulnerable.
Look, if Google's serious about the threat software patents pose to openness, there's an obvious thing they should be doing, and it isn't "switch the video codec we use in our web browser". Until I see them doing some serious (i.e., big-money) lobbying to abolish software patents, I'm going to assume the whole openness thing is just marketing bullshit designed to play into geeks' stereotypes of them and Apple.
Not that I disagree, but a "patent search" early in the process for Vorbis is not that comforting. Vorbis has been around for a while now and new patents are awarded that all the time that are used against prior art. Unless Google/On2 has an inside man at the patent office raising Vorbis as prior art, it's likely that someone could craft a patent specifically intended to target Vorbis, get it approved, and then sue lots of people. Trolls take this approach fairly often.
Apple believes
that it is essential to continued interoperability and development of
the Web that fundamental W3C standards be available on a royalty-free
basis. In line with the W3C's mission to "lead the Web to its full
potential," Apple supports a W3C patent policy with an immutable
commitment to royalty-free licensing for fundamental Web standards.
Apple offers this statement in support of its position.
It's powerful and persuasive stuff, worth reading in full. They only removed this statement from their website about 6 months ago.
Their implementations of the HTML5 <video> and <audio> draft standards work only with royalty-encumbered codecs. (The licensing is currently royalty-free for publishers and end users, but not for device manufacturers or browser vendors.)
Google were also opposed to a format in the spec, they claimed ogg theora was too large in file size. Why do you think they bought On2 and released WebM in the first place? There already was a free video code theora before.
MS didn't commmit to anything, Mozilla essentially blocked H.264 from becoming specified codec too. All had reasonably sound reasons to hold their respective position. Not everything can be explained as good vs. evil.
That's not inconsistent with being "fully behind HTML5". That page is meant to show off how Safari handles various HTML5 features. If you view it in a different browser, it is not showing you how Safari handles those features. Hence, it makes perfect sense for it to try to limit itself to people using Safari.
That page is meant to show off how Safari handles various HTML5 features.
Isn't the point of HTML that all browsers handle it similarly? If that link is restricted to one browser, it isn't better than all the "Designed for IE6" sites you used to see in the early '00s, and absolutely no evidence of Apple being "fully behind HTML5".
HTML5 is not a standard. It does not yet behave the same in all browsers that implement it. Different browsers implement different subsets of it.
The site you cite is meant specifically to show how Apple is doing with their HTML5 implementation. There is simply no point in viewing it in another browser. Viewing it in, say, Firefox would tell you nothing at all about how well Apple has implemented HTML5 in Safari.
This is completely different from the "Designed for IE6" sites. Those sites were generally presenting information that was useful to people regardless of which browser they were using.
Correct, which is probably why Apple says: "The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript".
It's not exactly insightful but it does have some merit. Apple's approach is an odd mix of open and closed. You could describe it as 'strategically open'... (of course - this applies to Google too to a slightly lesser degree).
No company supports open-source if it directly conflicts with their perceived interests. Some companies just take a wider view than others.
However, the devices with the most users which don't have flash (read: iOS), can play h264, not WebM. That would make it likely to be more often h264 with flash fallback.
I like Gruber, but he's almost insufferable on issues like these. These questions are "simple" in the least flattering sense. Let's dispatch them:
If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why?
The premise is that openness is all or nothing. But Google can support Flash and work towards openness, just as Apple can prefer open web standards in lieu of Flash while supporting proprietary systems. There's no hypocrisy or conflict.
Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android?
Maybe in the future. WebM support is new in Android, hardware decoders are really just coming to market, and there are enough existing and in-production phones that rely on H.264. The constraints placed on Google by the handful of Chrome users leveraging H.264 HTML5 video is completely unlike the realities of dealing in the handset market.
YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”?
YouTube continues to support other proprietary formats. As with Sorenson, they're not going to drop H.264 until they don't care about the market share of H.264-only devices. In the meantime, they will try to drive people towards WebM in support of "open innovation". This is not inconsistent or even new.
Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM?
It should be obvious that Google's hope is anyone using HTML5 video will eventually move to WebM exclusively.
If not, how will Chrome users watch this content other than by resorting to Flash Player’s support for H.264 playback?
Content producers won't care if Chrome users end up in Flash, since the content's still available and very few non-mobile users are getting HTML5 video anyway. Flash is still the norm outside of mobile devices.
Who is happy about this?
Were people ecstatic that Chrome supported H.264? Most people simply don't care about this kind of stuff and for good reason.
But Google can support Flash and work towards openness
Here's the thing, though. Mozilla and Google, over the past year, have basically used the video-codecs thing as a publicity stunt. LOOK AT ME I'M SO PURE AND OPEN AND NOT LIKE THOSE VICIOUS CLOSED EVIL APPLE NAZIS (except please please please don't ask us about all that proprietary stuff we still do, please). It's hard not to see this as hypocritical.
So it's perfectly reasonable to, for example, call Google out on that. If they're really serious about openness, but need to make some compromises to deal with legacy proprietary stuff, why was this the specific compromise? Why not, say, keep H264 support in the <video> element while encouraging people to re-encode, and cut Flash? That at least gets you progress toward an open standard -- HTML5 -- if not a completely ideologically pure platform.
And especially given the fact that H264 has already literally won -- in the mobile market, in the broadcast market, in the home-entertainment market -- while Flash players which spool out H264-encoded video are essentially interchangeable with HTML5 <video> elements which spool out H264-encoded video, it's hard to see this as a genuine move in support of "openness".
It should be obvious that Google's hope is anyone using HTML5 video will eventually move to WebM exclusively.
This is the real point, I think. Google, I'm pretty sure, doesn't actually give a shit about openness; they care about getting people to use platforms they can control. See the requirements you have to meet to get the actual Android platform (you know, the one with the useful Google apps). See their ongoing spats with sites like Facebook, which are rooted more in Google not getting access to/control over data than any noble attempt to serve privacy. And see WebM, the codec Google owns, and which they're going to ram down everyone's throat via every channel they can use.
Pretty sure Google open-sourced vp8 (the video codec in webm), which means they don't own it or exclusively control it. I don't know how much more open you can get.
VP8 is open source, but Google isn't accepting patches, and it resembles H.264 in a lot of ways... and H.264 is patented. Google hasn't been sued over it yet, but if they are, it probably wouldn't end well for them.
Without more detailed analysis of the tech and patents involved, this is FUD. Merely noting that it "resembles H.264 in a lot of ways" doesn't mean that it violates (or is even just somewhat likely to violate) any patents.
"Star Wars" resembles "Lord of the Rings" in a lot of ways, but I don't think the Tolkien estate has sued over the hero's journey archetype yet.
Also the definition of public domain varies by country, and it's actually safer (for the rest of us) to prefer stuff under BSD-like licenses, although I prefer APL the most because it also has an explicit patents grant.
I really agree with you, this is the first move in a larger push to make WebM the standard for the web, but I don't yet see what google stands to gain from controlling the video standard on the web. What do they get out of that ownership they dont get out of H264?
What I don't understand is how Chrome can remove h.264 (which is widely used) because they want 'openness', while at the same time shipping a browser (Chrome) where you cannot remove Flash (which continues to support H.264). It seems here that keeping H.264 support and dropping Flash would be more in the name of openness.
(Edit: bane points out that you can disable Flash in Chrome. My original point still stands, but my wording was misleading.)
As with most things Google does, I don't see this as being in the interest of 'openness' at all. I feel more like what they really want is a format that they can control and add features to (such as, for example, embedded advertising).
In the end, Google is a business, and its business is ads. Everything Google does is about either delivering ads to people (Google Mail), making sure it's their ads that are delivered (YouTube), or about making sure they don't get locked out of a market (Android).
So here's my question: where's the money here? It's obviously far more expensive at this point to use WebM than H.264, so what financial motivation is there for them to push the WebM codec this hard this fast?
Flash is fading away, and should be kept for legacy reasons for a while. But not dropping h.264 now would make for another proprietary decade on the web.
I think a proprietary video codec is significantly less open-threatening than a proprietary runtime. For one thing, the codec will eventually lose its patent protections. The runtime will continue to evolve at the platform owner's discretion.
Regardless of how you feel about h.264 in general though, the decision to not support h.264 video in the browser through the video tag means that Flash is going to be sticking around just so we can watch videos.
Right now as a software developer you have the option of not using Flash.
Depending on your constraints, that may be a difficult choice to make, but it's a choice nonetheless: HTML5 is getting more popular, the JVM was always capable and popular enough for many scenarios, and there's also Silverlight.
But choosing another codec for your multiple TB (and growing) of video you want to serve on the web? You've got no choice but H.264, as anything else would cost you dearly.
And I'm pretty sure you don't know how software patents work.
Companies apply for the same patents with different wording all the time. And there will also come a time when H.264 will not be enough, with MPEGLA in their infinite resourcefulness offering an easy upgrade to the next version under "reasonable" terms. By the time the standard will be patents free, H.264 will be as relevant as GIF is today.
What, you mean only useful for web comedy and image boards?
> And I'm pretty sure you don't know how software patents work. Companies apply for the same patents with different wording all the time. And there will also come a time when H.264 will not be enough, with MPEGLA in their infinite resourcefulness offering an easy upgrade to the next version under "reasonable" terms.
I really don't understand what your first part is getting at. MPEGLA will re-patent h.264 technologies under similar patents? As for the second part: Well, that gives Google a number of years to develop a codec that's actually really good and has hardware vendor support and is still free and all that. Just because you have multiple TB of video doesn't mean that different videos can't be encoded for web differently.
And your argument is moot anyway because this is introducing a significant fracture between Apple/mobile devices and desktop devices. People are still going to have to use another codec for their multiple TB and growing amounts of video!
But the runtime will fade away. This is Google making a fresh start for the years to come. Shouldn't that start be with a open codec instead of a closed one?
The de facto standard for serving <video> today is making a h.246, WebM, a OGG and a FLV (for fallback). Look at videoJS.
So it doesn't mean Flash for video is sticking around.
The premise is that openness is all or nothing. But Google can support Flash and work towards openness, just as Apple can prefer open web standards in lieu of Flash while supporting proprietary systems. There's no hypocrisy or conflict.
The difference is that one company is claiming to champion open left and right whereas the other company focuses their discussion of open to very specific areas. There is hypocrisy with the former company in this case.
Maybe in the future. WebM support is new in Android, hardware decoders are really just coming to market, and there are enough existing and in-production phones that rely on H.264. The constraints placed on Google by the handful of Chrome users leveraging H.264 HTML5 video is completely unlike the realities of dealing in the handset market.
The point is that many view Chrome's move to eliminate H.264 as rushed, so why not rush Android's move? It's rhetorical. Google can't rush Android's move because it would kill Android to be unable to view 99% of online video.
It should be obvious that Google's hope is anyone using HTML5 video will eventually move to WebM exclusively.
Again, rhetorical. These companies won't move to WebM any time soon. It's interesting to me that very few of the comments here bring up the issue of encode quality. Netflix and Amazon are two companies that regularly deal with Hollywood studios, who have review policies for distributed video quality. WebM is inferior and very likely to remain inferior to H.264. One question Gruber failed to pose is: Does Google expect everyone to accept across the board lower quality of video content in the name of marginal "open"?
Content producers won't care if Chrome users end up in Flash, since the content's still available and very few non-mobile users are getting HTML5 video anyway. Flash is still the norm outside of mobile devices.
There are numerous reasons that's an unsupported blanket statement. Of course content producers will care. Why would they not care about how to support various and incompatible distribution and playback methods?
Were people ecstatic that Chrome supported H.264?
Clearly, there's a difference between caring about something that works as is generally expected and caring about something that doesn't work in opposition to expectations. People care when things break. The correct answer to that final question is: Adobe. Hurrah for them?
As a person who encodes video for the web for a living I can tell you we won't be switching to WebM because of iOS and other hardware devices that have hardware based decoding.
H.264 is the closest thing to a ubiquitous codec there is and assuming Chrome correctly updates the "canPlayType" javascript function I won't even have to update our players to provide Chrome users with the crappy Flash player.
As a Chrome user, I'll be switching to Safari so I can continue to get the working HTML5 player.
We'll consider switching once Apple adds support for WebM and the millions of old iOS devices are obsolete. In other words it's H.264 for us for the next 3 years.
Cost/benefit. We outsource encoding to Zencoder which costs $.02 to $.05 per minute. Then there is also the price of disk space and the amount of time it takes for the video(s) to be available. Maybe one day the cost/benefit will change.
A big step backwards for HTML5 video adoption and premature IMO. Other than Android there isn't an existing consumer device out there that plays WebM that I know of. Certainly there is no hardware decoding. Now content creators who host their own video will have to double storage costs or be relegated to Flash and the smallest of the big browsers.
For full compatibility, yes, but realistically there was no reason to use to WebM. With h.264 you cover the following:
1) All browsers with Flash players
2) Any "web connected" set top device/TV
3) About 50% of HTML5 video compatible browsers
With this move by Google #3 falls to 25% or less. And they're looking to add WebM support to #2. At some point consumer demands you support both because their shiny new Macbook Air/Chrome OS tablet/TV doesn't play video. Good move by Google to justify their $125M investment in On2, but end users will end up being inconvenienced as the splintering continues.
This is just going to feel like a regression to most end users who really don't give a crap about who holds what patents.
Firefox has something like twice the browser share of Chrome. If you were OK sticking Firefox users with Flash video, I don't see how that's hugely different from sticking Firefox AND Chrome users with Flash video.
If you want to support all modern browsers, you used to have to do two encodings. After this announcement, you will still have to do two encodings.
That's true, my only point is that it's a trend in the wrong direction: after Google makes this change there will be people will be using Flash for playback than there were before.
Adobe announced that Flash is going to support WebM. When that happens, landscape will look like this:
1) All desktop browsers play WebM natively or via Flash/OS codec.
2) (perhaps no change, as I don't expect GoogleTV to go anywhere)
3) Majority of HTML5 implementations, and also market-share wise, support only VP8/Theora (with Google flipping the switch it's already the case)
In that landscape it might make sense to encode WebM for desktop and low-res H.264 for mobiles.
Flash will support vp8, that should level the playing field. IE can be extended to use vp8 also, google chrome frame should be a required install everywhere ;p
People should really blame MS and Apple for only supporting their own video codec here.
I am fully behind the decision of Mozilla, Opera, Google and others to support open and patent unencumbered video formats.
Can someone just look at the table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video and really tell me that this mess isn't the fault of MS and Apple in the first place? Ogg is ready to play a big role and WebM is catching up. The only blocking factor here is Internet Explorer and Safari, not Chrome.
As others have said, it's not "their own video codec." Also, it's not clear that WebM is not patent-encumbered in some way.
Secondly, Apple "picked" H.264 as a format nearly four years ago when they built the original iPhone with hardware decoding, before WebM existed and likely before some of the code for WebM was written.
Third, whatwg tried to pick one single codec in 2009. Again, this was well before WebM existed in its current state. Back then, the two options were:
As you'll note, it boiled down to "we're okay with H.264 because we can afford it and want to support something now" vs. "it's too expensive and we'll wait." Microsoft was late to the game or apathetic.
WebM was released by Google 7 months ago. Think about that! You expect a company like Apple whose business lies primarily in mobile devices that are capable of hardware decoding H.264 video to suddenly pivot and widely implement a codec released by a company that is increasingly competing with its core business and that has an unclear patent future and inferior technology.
A table of the current state of implemented tech features is not the same as knowing the history behind these decisions.
Afaik, HTML5 is not finished yet.
They could still settle for a codec, i guess?
Will this happen? Not with all the money that is to be made out of license fees in the future. But nevertheless, it's the right move to drop support for H.264, imo.
No single part of the internet as we know it should be "owned" by a few companies (see the very good comment about the GIF format at http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2094591 ).
Why are so many against the proprietary Flash format but embrace the H.264 codec? Google even invested 133 million dollar to buy On2 and offer the world an alternative.
I'm not for or against either—that's why I wanted to step back and make sure we're talking about this in terms of the history of the issue. Sure, I have my preference for how I'd like to see things pan out as a developer who just managed a 6 month project deploying video to a large client base.
> Why are so many against the proprietary Flash format but embrace the H.264 codec?
This is the wrong question to me. A more apt comparison is to JPEG or GIF. Considering the work I just did, it's like comparing JPEG to Bitmap—of course I like JPEG better, and its licensing issues have been transparent to me as a developer and end-user.
As a developer, I dislike Flash because:
1. it's slow on my computer
2. it requires another language for client-side development,
3. it breaks how the web "works" (open in new window, back button, etc.)
4. it costs me a developer money as opposed to the browser vendor
If you look at the above list, the web going the way of H.264 has none of these problems. Personally, I'd like a single video format but wish that WebM had come along two years ago instead of causing another transition in video formats.
WebM is a relatively new entrant into the encoding field, Only getting opened up in the last 8 months. Ogg has always been a fairly significantly worse codec then H264. "Even the 1mbps Ogg Theora clips are not on par with the 468 kbps h264 clips."[1]
Considering that MS and Apple have been working in video for a long time now they chose the codec with the best available experience for their users (who aren't the ones picking up the licensing fees).
Instead of embracing the patent encumbered codec we should be thankful for Google to actually buy a codec (VP8) and release it _for free_. I couldn't imagine this from any other company.
Still many people just want their h.264 no matter what. It's bad for a free and open internet, that's my belief.
> People should really blame MS and Apple for only supporting their own video codec here.
H.264 is not Apple's codec, nor is it Microsoft's. Both of them have to license it, just like any random company off the street would. Apple does own one or two of the several hundred patents involved, so might get a very slight discount on their license.
> I am fully behind the decision of Mozilla, Opera, Google and others to support open and patent unencumbered video formats.
WebM is probably patent encumbered. We just don't know who owns the patents yet.
> WebM is probably patent encumbered. We just don't know who owns the patents yet.
Actually we do, because Google used the very clever strategy of essentially copying the H.264 algorithm and then methodically working around all the patents. This means that if there are outstanding patents on WebM they are probably on H.264 as well. But the great likelihood is that there are not outstanding patents because any such patent holders would have long ago put their hands up to join the H.264 patent pool and reap the benefits.
Can you support this statement? Because Google didn't even create VP8 - they bought it with ON2. I can't find anything that supports your statement.
H264 isn't "an algorithm" its a pretty massive collection of different algorithms. I actually find it a bit difficult its not infringing in some way and this analysis seems to confirm this.
Unfortunately I'm just quoting my own anecdotal knowledge of the discussions that raged about VP8 when Google released it.
I don't think your link contradicts what I said - in fact, in a way it gels very well with it: the conclusion is that VP8 is essentially H.264 with all sorts of bits missing and tweaks that in most cases make it worse than H.264. That's exactly what you would expect if someone took a patented algorithm and went through it point by point to work around the patented parts.
That very link describes multiples places where VP8 does things different to H.264 and basically calls them idiots for not doing it the H.264 way yet doesn't connect this to the patent situation that he is simultaneously accusing them of being idiots about because it is too similar to H.264. He can't have it both ways.
You mean http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx ?
That's the list of companies that license the codec to others and of course they get money for that.
You do see Apple and Microsoft on the list, do you? What you don't see is Google, Mozilla, Opera and every other competitor..
According to my logic i can tell if a company is giving the right to license its product to others, that this company will most likely get money for it.
Do you really think Mircrosoft is like "oh, well. MPEG-LA, we hand over the rights for our patens to you. Do as you wish with those patents and also please give the license fees to the other companies. But please don't give us money!"? ;)
You do know that the MPEG-LAs purpose is to collect the rights to those patents from those companies (the licensors) and collects money from the licensees, redistributing it to the licensors.
Now Apple and MS are on the list of licensors. And they don't get money, you say? And never will? sure... :)
Fantastic. Much as I enjoyed Burn All GIFs back in the day, I don't think Burn All H.264s sounds nearly as catchy or fun. Glad Google is doing the Right Thing on this front -- however convenient or entrenched they might be, hairy patented messes like H.264 have no place on an open web.
Initially, Google drops H.264 in favor of WebM in Chrome. YouTube begins serving WebM in an HTML5 wrapper to Chrome clients. Mozilla, in search of open codecs with wide support implements WebM in Firefox. Other video services begrudgingly make the leap and start encoding their video in WebM format to support a growing number of users.
Google extends an olive branch to Adobe in order to get WebM support in Flash, ensuring that desktop computer users on all platforms will be able to play back WebM content, hardware support or not.
This gives Google the coverage they need to start turning the screws. While the events outlined above are unfolding, handset manufacturers see the writing on the wall and start including WebM hardware support in Android handsets.
Apple, being fully involved with H.264, fights all of the above every step of the way. The stubborn company that they are, they will not adopt hardware WebM support in their devices in favor of uniform H.264 support across their product line. This will hurt battery life during video playback for non-Apple sourced video on iOS devices and will erode the Apple user base because of competitive disadvantage.
======
None of the above may be true, but it sure would make for a great "Pirates of Silicon Valley 2".
>Other video services begrudgingly make the leap and start encoding their video in WebM format to support a growing number of users.
Or they just support those users instead by serving them Flash - which they have to do anyhow to support IE6/7/8 and Firefox 1/2/3, avoiding the hastle and cost of more video encoding and storage. And none of the rest then happens.
That doesn't preclude the rest of the scenario from playing out. To the contrary, Flash and WebM support is a critical component. Google needs two things to apply pressure to Apple with WebM:
* Widespread WebM support in web browsers (Flash is a good vehicle for this)
* WebM exclusivity (or at least preference) on Android handsets
I'm not sure how they'd execute the latter. The handset manufacturers pick the chipsets and build the drivers, so it's not clear to me how that part plays out.
Like I said, it's a stretch, but given that Google seems to want to go head-to-head with Apple, it's plausible, IMO.
The alternate explanation is that Google simply wants a win for "openness" wherever they can get it, and they recognize that they can't win the war in a single battle.
Google are not removing video tag support, they are removing the h264 codec. h264 is pretty damn well established and is actually a standard without the quotation marks, and an open one at that.
The problem is a standard can be 'open' yet restricted, i.e. you have to pay to distribute software using it. Can't pay? Can't give people the program. The tricks that LAME uses to work around MP3 encoding patents aren't going to work for browsers.
Of course it will go away once the patents expire, just like with GIF, but calling it 'open' now is just marketing speak which doesn't come close to the actual nature and purpose of open-source software.
well they are nothing alike. Flash player is a free but proprietary implementation of an swf player. H264 is a licensed and patented codec specification.
Speaking as someone who works for a browser vendor: There's a big difference between dropping support for entrenched technologies, and choosing which emerging technologies to support.
Certain formats and practices are already part of the web, for better or worse, and it's not fully within the browser vendors' power to change that. If any browser dropped Flash support, it would break thousands of popular web sites, and users would simply switch browsers.
What is within our power is to decide which emerging standards to support. Dropping H.264 in <video> at this point won't cause users to flee the browser. And it does give us some chance of avoiding another patent-encumbered format becoming a de-facto standard on the web.
We don't control existing sites, but we do control our own actions which influence new sites. We can't alter the past, but we can change the future.
That's true, which is why I referred specifically to H.264 in the <video> element (which is the only case affected by this change). There are mature implementations, but as a part of the web platform it is still in very early stages.
While H.264 <video> is already deployed widely thanks to iOS, it's generally with a fallback for the majority of users whose browsers don't support it. Removing it from Chrome will not break the web for users, in the way it would if they removed Flash or GIF or JavaScript semicolon insertion, or any other of the many web technologies we'd like to retroactively wish away.
Well, Mozilla's already gone down the road of hypocrisy ("H264 bad! Plugins insecure! Keep shipping Flash!")
Sigh! When did the Mozilla ever claim that they do not ship H.264 because it's insecure? They stated, as far as I recall, that they do not wish to support a patent crippled technology in their browser. A decision a lot of the more technically inclined users, who remember the GIF fiasko fully support.
In addition: The Mozilla project does not ship Flash. You have to download it from Adobe's website and install it yourself.
I'm calling bullshit, badly disguised as a strawman.
Sigh! When did the Mozilla ever claim that they do not ship H.264 because it's insecure?
Mike Shaver and Robert O'Callahan both -- during the early attempt to frantically spin this as more than just an ideological PR stunt -- pointed to security as a reason why they didn't feel comfortable delegating to other software. See the following posts:
Of course, they did eventually come clean and admit this was just a naked ideological PR stunt. O'Callahan's quote about the fact that delegating to OS codecs would mean giving up Mozilla's control -- sorry, "leverage" -- over what users can do with their own computers is particularly telling, especially in a debate that's ostensibly about "freedom".
I'm calling bullshit, badly disguised as a strawman.
I'm calling "do your homework, lest you look like a badly-informed fanboy".
And I want that not only altruistically, but also because I want the crazy awesome video (animation, peer-to-peer, *security*, etc.) ideas that will come from having more people, with more perspectives, fully participating in the internet.
and
(about 60% of our users are on Windows XP, which provides no H.264 codec), *to security* (exposure of arbitrary codecs to hostile content), and to user experience
None of them even slightly imply that the Mozilla team thinks H.264 is insecure.
This is an FAQ or rant if you will, which goes on and on about why Mozilla does not want to implement H.264. Oh yes, not one single word about security
indeed discusses security. It is however not geared towards H.264, but towards Microsoft's DirectShow. Using this article as a reference regarding Mozilla's stand on security on H.264 is at best a stretch and at worst intellectually dishonest.
I'm calling "do your homework, lest you look like a badly-informed fanboy".
I never thought of myself as a fanboy, but be my guest to dive into ad-hominem, when you're out of arguments.
In addition. I'm rather an uninformed fanboy then an intellectually dishonest fanboy, which surprises me looking at your Kharma.
What's sad is that I just realized you've been arguing with a straw man; you've decided I said "H264 is insecure", a phrase which never passed my keyboard, and then went on a rampage against that.
When Mozilla announced its stance on H264 many people, including myself, wondered why they didn't just let some standard third-party plugin do H264 and worry about the licensing, or delegate to the operating system (which, these days, is pretty likely to ship an H264 codec). Their response included a fair bit of hand-waving about security, as you can see clearly from the references I linked. This has been demonstrated to be bullshit, seeing as Microsoft itself released a Firefox extension to get H264 video support through the operating-system media framework, and the world hasn't ended because of it.
Now, how about you add reading comprehension to the list of skills you're going to be working on?
I dont think the open web is up for compromise, I was happy to see mozilla take a stand on h264, glad to see google follow suit.
Sure this hurts users in the short term, but a single standard format has not been settled on, this could be much more disruptive if google had of left it in
I'm kinda tired of this Google openness, especially when it so congenially damage their competitors. It would have been different if they never implemented it in first place, but this now it just looks like a move to target Apple.
Well, it's better than Apple's strategy of using closed-ness to damage their competitors. All companies make strategic decisions. But if you're going to use ideology strategically, it might as well be a good ideology.
Note: I'm a huge Apple fan and I use lots of their products with alacrity.
One of the biggest criticisms against Microsoft over the years is that they suffer from Not-Invented-Here syndrome.
Is it just me, or does Google seem to be increasingly heading down this path? Granted, Google tends to go down the open-source route, where Microsoft has tended not to, but I'm not sure that excuse holds up well over the long-term.
Either way, I'm genuinely curious if anyone else feels this.
Google dropped their own O3D plugin to adopt the open standard WebGL. They also sunsetted Google Gears to push HTML5 offline storage (some say prematurely)
They also based their browser around Webkit which is promoted by their main rival Apple (although based on the original KHTML) and many Google engineers are bullish about the Apple endorsed LLVM for the Portable Native Client code.
You're deriding Google for only supporting open standards that everyone can use instead of supporting closed formats that require you to pay money to a bunch of patent holders?
Yeah, they sure are evil. I hate freedom, especially when it means I will have to add a command-line argument to my video encoding process!
If that's true, at what point does that trait change from an advantage to a liability? Is it purely about openness? Or is it more subjective (e.g. I don't like Silverlight, so Microsoft should support standards vs. websockets sound awesome, and I'm glad Google is innovating)?
I see couple of other things, apart from free and royalty side of arguments. My story goes like this:
when Apple released iOS device in 2007, H264 was the better choice for mobiles with hardware decoders. Google converted Youtube videos to H264 to support iOS devices. Rest of the world followed. Both Apple and Google wins and they are happy to promote H264 for the wider adoption.
Then after three years, a different competitive landscape, with Android popularity even without H264 hardware decoders advantage, at the same time Apple support to H264 but not to flash, gives big strategic advantage to Goolge to move world away from H264 to its own alternative (openness helps the cause). Win to Google, Lose to Apple.
Its not important anymore which desktop browser support what. We can work with multiple browsers on our desktops/laptops. Its all about to whose advantage it plays out in mobile devices space.
That is why we will see lot of FUD in future in this space while Google and Apple fight for their interests in name of openness.
What the hell? It's sad that Google's corporate strategy is starting to override what's in the best interests of it's users. Web video is finally, after so many years, actually encoded in H.264. Who besides YouTube uses WebM or Ogg? I'll be going back to Safari if this happens.
An open solution isn't the best interest of the users?
Surely this is just like Apple not supporting Flash in the hope that people go create HTML5 stuff which is open.
Both companies have taken strategic and gutsy moves that will temporarily inconvenience users in the hope that long-term it pays of to both the companies and the users.
> An open solution isn't the best interest of the users?
An ubiquitous solution is in the best interests of users. My parents could care less about whether the video is encoded in H.264 or Ogg. They just want it to work on their iPad.
> Surely this is just like Apple not supporting Flash in the hope that people go create HTML5 stuff which is open.
It's not the same at all. Google, through YouTube and Chrome, helped make H.264 the defacto standard it is. Now they are trying to pull the rug out from under it. Apple never had support for Flash. Not to mention that Flash is a POS and doesn't work well on mobile devices anyways.
> Both companies have taken strategic and gutsy moves that will temporarily inconvenience users in the hope that long-term it pays of to both the companies and the users.
Long-term this isn't a game that Google wins. They've inconvenienced their users and the web will go on with H.264.
<rant>
"de facto standard" is a meaningless, self-contradictory phrase that really boils down to saying "But this is the way we've always done it!"
Standards are not de facto. Standards are things created by standards bodies. The word has an actual meaning. Trying to twist it to mean "the way we do stuff now" (as your argument for h.264 does) or "the way I want to do stuff" (as many arguments for HTML5 (which doesn't have a standard yet) do) is intellectually dishonest.
</rant>
"Standard" has more than one meaning. In the phrase "de facto standard" I think the meaning is more in the direction of "something considered by an authority or by general consent as a basis of comparison."
Or to put it another way, standards bodies do not, as you seem to be implying, have a monopoly on the word "standard".
If you look at it from the perspective of the provider, the standard is h.264 files on the server, and various avenues through which you can deliver it. Saying WebM is tied for second place is vastly overstating its proximity in popularity space to h.264.
Whatever bro. WebM isn't and will never be a browser standard so I'm not sure what you're getting at. None of the codecs will as stated in the HTML5 Specification.
If you don't think de facto standards are important then you are clueless about the history of the internet and technology in general.
In fairness, bro, I never mentioned WebM in the post you are replying to, nor did I suggest that "de facto standards" are irrelevant. I merely disagreed with your use of the phrase "de facto standard" in and of itself.
An ubiquitous solution is in the best interests of users. My parents could care less about whether the video is encoded in H.264 or Ogg. They just want it to work on their iPad.
Depends on how you look at "best interests". Another way to look at it is that it's in your parents' best interest to see for themselves what a closed platform entails, and to think twice before investing in one in the future.
I suspect they think forcing open standards is in the best long term interests of users, much the same way Apple has chosen to support HTML5 by shunning Flash.
Also, keep in mind that use of the HTML5 <video> tag is quite limited at the moment. The impact is quite minimal.
If Google didn't make a move like this, WebM might not take off the way it needs to to challenge the closed alternatives.
Firefox has got some kind of auto-installer for Flash (and notifies you if it needs updated, for security reasons).
They got accused of the same hypocrisy when they announced a royalty-free codec only strategy. They had some good responses, that I can't find right now but boiled down to "WebM is a fight we can win, removing or banning Flash is suicide".
Firefox (at least on Windows) has a special Flash installer baked into it for several years — if it can't find the plugin, it prompts you with an infobar, which then kicks off a streamlined installer that downloads a xpi package and installs it even without administrative privileges. Theoretically that plugin repository mechanism is crossplatform, and on some Linux platforms it can install a mplayer plugin, but it's purpose-designed for Flash and I'm not sure there are any other plugins for Windows in the repo that Mozilla hosts.
When they first implemented it, they also got a special license from Adobe to distribute the Flash xpi from addons.mozilla.org, and did so happily, but I think the file is hosted by Adobe these days.
I guess I was assuming that the request was to remove flash entirely and prohibit its addition through plugins. If the question is bundle versus don't bundle, my answer is confusion at the difference in end result. It's not an apples to apples comparison because not bundling H.264 is essentially the same as making it entirely unavailable.
> With Chrome(ium) you can just replace the copy of the libavcodec dll/so, and it magically supports whatever codecs the new one is built with.
Yes, that is exactly what every non-technical user is going to do to get HTML5 video working properly in Chrome. If there was a button that popped up saying "Get the h.264 codec for Chrome" whenever there was the possibility of using it, then we'd have a comparison, but I doubt replacing shared libraries underneath Chrome is ever going to be a supported mode of extension.
It's what linux distributions have been doing by default — just replacing it with a symlink to the system's installation of ffmpeg. The sane ones take the added step of not crippling their default ffmpeg :)
Unlike Firefox, Chrome extensions are sandboxed, so they can't automatically replace the file for you. Someone can just make a simple native installer to do so though.
Still, the tide appears to have turned, so the usefulness of restoring h.264 <video> support may decline within a year. People outside the Mac world will probably just standardize on a Flash video player instead of trying to support multiple playback frontends.
....so I'm not clear on what's actually happening here. Is Chrome going to just stop handing off MP4/H.264 from video tags to the bundled Flash Player even though it's there and can play it? Or will it stop bundling Flash Player? Or bundle a crippled Flash Player? None of the above?
They aren't supporting h.264 in the <video> element anymore, meaning there won't be anymore HTML5 video players that use h.264. As for Flash, who knows?
Well, both Firefox and Chrome will be able to do both Theora and WebM in the future, but the problem stands. Notably, the lines seem to splitting along who are licensors of H.264 and who aren't.
The message is that Google is serious about making VP8 competitive. It won't be removing H.264 support from Android and YouTube anytime soon, but this certainly changes the HTML5 video codec battle.
The biggest H264 supporter is Apple, and it kind of worked because Apple has leverage in the iPhone arena. I don't think Google has quite the same leverage in the browser arena. If this happened at the WebKit level, then maybe. But not at the Chrome level.
There is a very clear distinction between an closed standard and a closed implementation.
H.264 is patent encumbered and controlled by an organization that only temporarily does not charge for its use. It will never be open. And btw. Apple is on the H.264 consortium and will profit handily once prices will be charged for H.264.
Flash is an open standard with only one implementation (unless you count gnash and swfdec, etc).
I can't wait for Flash to go away too, but this is certainly the lesser evil.
H.264 is patent encumbered and controlled by an organization that only temporarily does not charge for its use.
What has been the result of H.264 being patent encumbered? Practically: nothing. So though it's true that it is, it has essentially caused no loss.
What has been the result of SWF being open? Practically: nothing. Adobe's closed implementation remains the standard implementation. So though it's true that SWF is open, it is essentially closed.
H.264 ... will never be open.
Patents expire.
Apple is on the H.264 consortium and will profit handily once prices will be charged for H.264.
Not relevant, though I'd point out that Apple has very few patents that comprise H.264 in comparison to the entirety of the pool. The probability that they make or will make any significant money is extraordinarily low.
Fundamentally however, my original post that you replied to is specific to Google's patently arbitrary definition of "open". Google doesn't build an open implementation of SWF into their browser, they build in Adobe's Flash player. Even if they did, it goes to my above point re: SWF is effectively Adobe Flash. Google is not anywhere close to open, no matter how often they repeat the mantra.
I don't see much benefit to support HTML5 in webm or theora. One of the benefits of html5 over flash was the prospect of better resource handling and smooth play, but now as systems get faster, and flash better, there is less and less reason to go down this path. h264 is smooth enough in flash now, and it's about to get even better in the new flash release.
There are no real hardware/product reasons for websites to support webm right now.
h264 on the other hand gets the benefit of working with all the iphone and more recently apple tv.
Promised new update this year will even allow HTML5 video to be streamed to apple TV directly from the browser of iphones, ipads, and i imagine safari. This is one of these technologies that will really increase the use of h264.
I run the larges cycling site and we handle 100s of niche video uploads per day so I follow this closely, and as much as I'd like to jump on webm, I'm going to definitely hold of.
Currently we convert videos to 3 formats to try handle all cases, and having to now multiply that by 2 with another codec is a lot of extra resources.
2.5 mbit h264 web HD/appletv h264
1 mbit h264 for web SD/iphone
300 kbit mobile
- webm makes no sense in the short term.
- you need apple support to make webm happen faster
Think about all the extra resources, time, effort that you are asking from companies in the world to support the 2 formats. If you want to be efficient with society, keep the support of h264 while webm development happens, transition once all the big players support the new format. Alternatively take all the money/time/efforts and get apple to transition. If apple does not jump on the wagon, it's going to be years and years of wasted resources in society.
I think this is bad for HTML 5 video in the short run, but I do not care about it anymore, I wished that everyone supported Theora, and then switched to Dirac in the future, but Apple and Google made me give up of my hopes.
However in the long run I think this will be an example of 'worse is better' happening, I think WebM will win over H.264. If that is bad or no that's depend on how do you see Apple and Google, if you believe this post contain a good message or if you believe Gruber but not both, for me both are just false in their pretense of openness, which is why I supported Theora in the first place.
Theora vs. H.264 was the first big fight that I remember in HN were the majority of comments were just bullshit for me (just like this thread), although there were really good ones from both sides, I also commented in the matter, back then I said that codecs would grow in irrelevance, I belive that H.264, as a patent covered standard, will lose in the future because its licensing terms are not clear and a license for its use can be pretty expensive to people trying to win some money from web video, specially those that have no money initially to spend in royalties (like startups, open source and non commercial projects), my example back them was a cloudy video editor, maybe something that is impractical today, but that I do expect becoming at least practical for simple uses in 2 to 3 years from now.
For this type of user paying for royalties in the beginning just does not make any sense and is stressful for their financial situation, this if they want to win money with their project, it's even more complicated for open source projects, for the case that people want to win some money from their company or project a good comparison would be the college student that take loans, trying to make some potential money in the future while spending money that he does not have in the present.
I think that WebM will have the preference of this public if they are not aiming Apple products. For me this will happen just because MPEG LA was incompetent enough and did not knew how to deal with the situation, opening the standard to small business, not charging users and business that only stream the using codec, things like that that the consortium never clarified (they never defined the "broadcast market" from which they plan to charge royalties from).
More could be said about why I think H.264 will be a thing of the past in the following years, but them my comment would be too big.
I actually see lack of H.264 support as more of a blow for those desktop browsers than anything else. With both Firefox and Chrome on the desktop refusing to support the video codec preferred by most (non-PC) device vendors, and both mobile browsing and video usage on the web dramatically increasing, I can't see this having any long-term effect other than marginalizing these browsers for the majority of users. Users who just want to visit a video site and have it work equally well on any device they happen to be using.
H.264 is royalty-free for at least the next 5 years, has widespread hardware encoding and decoding support and its patents will eventually expire. Removal of this codec from Chrome just doesn't make any sense to me. I'm sure all those people who have recently switched to Chrome won't find it too hard to switch away if the "more open" video support starting burning through their laptop battery three times as fast.
To date Chromium has always supported whatever codecs its bundled copy of libavcodec was compiled with.
Hopefully they do not purposefully constrain the codec support, like Microsoft did. IE9 uses the system's DirectShow plugins, but whitelists the specific codecs because they don't want to dynamically load shitty DivX binaries into the browser and expose them to the DOM. It sucks but it was the right decision considering the circumstances.
Must be part of the long game by Google. Stop supporting h.264 and push their own format in their browser, which also means ChromeOS and GoogleTV.
The format will need hardware because it is so difficult to decode with software.
Google gets hardware support on their laptops and mobile devices, changes YouTube to be WebM only, forcing Apple/Windows/Nokia/SonyEricsson to need hardware to decode.
Consumer loses out (the video quality of this, and the image quality of their image format is not exactly what should be expected to be released in a new format for 2011).
I'm sort of happy that Google is doing this. I'm not always happy with google and what they do - not being evil sure as hell doesn't make you a good guy - but if there's another bunch of guys who aren't on the 'good' side, it's MPEG. I really would like to see the HTML <video> tag evolve in a way that doesn't require an MPEG technology.
HOWEVER, I'd like to raise a couple of points.
One is that the x264 devs, easily some of the most codec-knowledgeable people in the world, have raised questions about VP8's patent exposure. It's fair to say that On2 didn't have to worry about getting sued over implementation details of VP8 as long as its design was hidden and proprietary, but I'm quite confident that google is going to get shaken down over webm, a lot like Microsoft did with VC1. Unlike Microsoft and VC1, Google will settle and license the patents in question, with indemnification for webm users, because webm is more important to them than VC1 was to MS. But it's going to cost them.
Second, anyone serving video now has a nice low-resistance path that means encoding exclusively in h264 - served up via the html5 <video> tag for iPhone and newer browsers, and served up inside flv with a flash plugin for older browsers. H264 isn't going to go away anytime soon, so google wants everyone to start encoding 2x now - with h264 and VP8. Or I guess you can just start using YouTube...?
I'm the go-to guy in my office for html5 video(audio) and this just made my job that much harder. Shit, today I just found out that our videos arent playing on android devices now this
Well, when Mozilla drew their ideological line in the sand and said they'd refuse to allow Firefox to use OS codecs, Microsoft responded by releasing a Firefox extension that delegates H264 playback from HTML5 video elements to Windows Media Player.
How about this: I think vp8 is technically a piece of shit but I really like chrome, so if HTML5 video becomes common enough that I need it I will do it myself for OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD.
First, H.264 != VP8/WebM. WebM is roughly equivalent to H.264 Baseline Profile and can't get the quality/compression of even H.264 Main Profile. I won't even mention H.264 High Profile, which is crucial for HD content.
Second, there is no hardware support for decoding VP8 right now, while there is for H.264. Which means that if publishers indeed start dropping H.264 (which I hope won't happen), we'll get stuck for years with mobile devices that get poor battery life. Instead, we'll get promises of Great Things "just around the corner, in a couple of months". That's similar to the perpetual cycle of great, smoothly working Android devices which always exist in the future tense.
Third, no one knows if VP8/WebM is immune from patents. It most likely isn't, it's just that nobody has laid claims yet. Most modern video processing techniques are patented in some way and sticking fingers in your ears won't make those patents magically go away.
However, as far as known patents go, VP8 is clean. I'm pretty sure Google put incredible effort in analysing the risk before making themselves troll target.
The codec is very close to violating many patents, but with "strange omissions" (http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377) that make it non-infringing. IANAL, but that sounds like great strategy — there are unlikely to be two different 99% overlapping patents (that would survive re-examination and apply to VP8 only), and you can be sure you're not infringing the known one.
Sad move, the web take years to more or less standardize on H264. Ain't WebM an inferior alternative at the moment? The reason cited "our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.", so we can expect Flash to be removed as well? I can see next up in the horizon: YouTube to remove H264 support.
This is not an issue. We currently face the same inefficiency of having to encode videos in multiple codecs today. Want your vid on iOS? H.264. Want your vid on other platforms? Pretty open. What's the issue? Just some inefficiency. It means that all videos have to be encoded in a few formats in the backend and a browser detector to tell our server which video to play. As long as the end user isn't harmed I don't see the big deal with Google supporting Google's own format (that they have opened up with a protected royalty-free format).
As it is right now there are probably several elements toyour site that require different rendering depending on the browser (IE6 I'm glaring at you).
> As it is right now there are probably several elements toyour site that require different rendering depending on the browser (IE6 I'm glaring at you).
There's a big difference between an additional CSS stylesheet and encoding and storing every single video on your site twice.
> We currently face the same inefficiency of having to encode videos in multiple codecs today. Want your vid on iOS? H.264. Want your vid on other platforms?
Most companies do not encode their videos with multiple codecs. They encode with H.264 and the video will work with an HTML5 player in IE9/Chrome/Safari on the desktop and Safari/Android on mobile. Fallback to Flash is available for older browsers and Firefox. Companies will continue to use this scheme, it just means that Chrome users will now be stuck with a crappy bug-ridden flash player as opposed to a native player.
You don't need the browser format detection scripts because it's built into HTML5. <video><source codec="video/webm" src="kitten.webm"></source><source codec="video/m4v"></source></video>
Shouldn't video codecs be done as plugins in browsers anyway?
Give us the tags to support it but leave it up to a plugin.
I know that multiple developers can focus on different parts of a browser's codebase at once, but it still doesn't make sense to me that a browser codebase should maintain a video codec as advanced as H.264 which constantly has room for performance/quality improvement.
They have a codec that performs like this other one, but open for everybody to use without paying royalties.
They have an agreement with most browsers to support this codec.
None of the other browsers want to pay royalties for these codecs.
As a content producer, this upsets me. I would only consider WebM if it is superior to h.264. But either way I'm having second thoughts about using Chrome and Youtube if they really nix h.264. Google thinks they are bigger than they really are.
Does anybody know if it is possible to disable Chrome's automatic updates so that one can pin their version of chrome to the last release that supported H.264?
1. I've now switched back from Chrome to Safari.
2. I'm glad that I made the decision to switch my organizations web videos from Akamai to Vimeo & not Youtube.
3. Google is the new Microsoft.
I think you may have misread something there. The link clearly says:
"Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. "
Google is starting to remind me more of Microsoft every day. But at least Microsoft doesn't make their anti-competitive strategic decisions under the guise of being "open" and "not evil".
Has everyone so quickly forgotten that Flash will soon support WebM playback? It's a significant point in the discussion. With any flash capable browser having WebM support, along with native support in Firefox, Chrome, Opera... it seems there is some sense in this move.
It does seem a bold strategy, I would have probably waited at least a bit longer.
Edit: Oh, "These changes will occur in the next couple months"
Performance of what? I'm not defending Flash's performance, but WebM is fine, completely acceptable. With hardware decoding continuing to advance in Flash, I guess I don't see what your complaint is. If it's native in most browsers, fallback in IE (they aren't going to care anyway) and potentially native even in IE on supported hardware...
It took them less time than it took for Mac OS X to support hardware decoding in Macbooks GPUs that already worked if you bootcamped into XP on the same machine. Though it took even longer for Flash on Mac OS X because even after Apple supported it (on limited chipsets) they didn't bother to expose it to third parties.
But now that architecture is in place it won't be difficult to extend it to other codecs. Most of the time it took to get support for hardware decoding in place was time needed for Adobe to wake up and realise there was a problem.
If YouTube goes exclusively to WebM/Flash, who wins that game of chicken? Apple or Google?
I actually think Apple wins it as someone creates iTube. People will switch browsers. They won't give up their iPad (at least not until there are some better Android browsers on the market).
There's lots of ways YouTube could marginalize H.264 without turning it into a full fledged game of chicken. They could make HD content exclusively WebM but still serve H.264 SD. They could prioritize WebM encoding so that there would be a delay before H.264 content was available (imagine getting told "this video is not yet available on your device" once every 6 months or so). They could make the most popular stuff in both formats but only offer WebM for stuff at the end of the long tail. They could offer a more favorable cut of ad revenue to content providers who opt out of H.264 (ostensibly because it saved on licensing fees).
Some parts of Android graphics are GPU accelerated, and the vast majority of Android devices accelerate video decoding (though codec support does vary, and up till now doesn't generally include VP8, though the TI OMAP hardware at least can be updated to support it).
Interesting. YouTube must be a mess with all of these competing formats it needs to support. I assume it will eventually switch to WebM for both HTML5 and Flash by default and just use h264 for compatibility. Still, it must be horrific.
Nope. It was stored as h264 before they released webm (and then flash played it). When they released Webm, they started to convert all that stuff to VP8 (my guess is they should be through by now), so it's only VP8 now (via HTML5 or flash). End of story.
Adobe has not yet shipped a version of Flash which supports VP8, or WebM for that matter. They've remained silent on that matter since their initial announcement at Google IO last year.
Agreed. Why is everyone assuming Google will convert all YouTube to WebM?
That would be the main attack on Apple, not removing support for HTML5 h264 in Chrome (flash is the easy backup here). There's a motive for Google to convert YouTube to WebM to screw Apple, but it doesn't seem likely.
What will actually happen: Chrome will get served h.264 wrapped in Flash.
Lose all round, then.