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.
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.
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
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.
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>
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
....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?
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.
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)?
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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?
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 :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
(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?
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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... :)
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread[1] http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/features/
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.
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.
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 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.
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>
If you don't think de facto standards are important then you are clueless about the history of the internet and technology in general.
Or to put it another way, standards bodies do not, as you seem to be implying, have a monopoly on the word "standard".
h.264: IE, Safari
WebM: Chrome, Firefox 4
Streaming video with Flash: all of the above
In which case the most standardy standard is "h.264 over Flash", with native h.264 and native WebM tied for second place.
Shame their iPad doesn't support Flash then...
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.
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 doesn't bundle Flash either, and that hasn't killed it.
For Firefox, you'd have to fork it along with Gecko and XULRunner.
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.
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.
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".
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.
They've also baked in a special Flash updater too — if your Flash plugin has known security vulnerabilities Firefox will prompt you to automatically update it: http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/09/16/helping-people-up...
...which supports H.264 in an MP4 container...
http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html
....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?
does it support H.264? if not then play with flash.
which is easy.
Especially compared to - re-encode all my stuff and change complex encoding workflows.
The average user isn't even going to be able to tell the difference.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
I didn't know Google fanboyism existed.
> I didn't know Google fanboyism existed.
Ad hominem is still as bad as it ever was
How's this for a play:
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".
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.
* 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.
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.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even Microsoft's better than this.
edit: could whoever downvoted me explain why he did so?
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".
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.
And yet they're converging to implementing all of it.
The site you cite is meant specifically to show how Apple is doing with their HTML5 implementation.
Then it's a Safari demo, not an HTML5 demo. The Microsoft demos use HTML5 and yet work just fine in other browsers.
Those sites were generally presenting information that was useful to people regardless of which browser they were using.
How is seeing HTML5 working in Firefox or Chrome not useful to people?
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".
"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."
Come see web standards! Using a specific browser.
No company supports open-source if it directly conflicts with their perceived interests. Some companies just take a wider view than others.
What would be the benefit, to them or their users, if they used WebM?
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.
Jason Garett-Glaser put together a great comparison of h.264 vs VP8/WebM. Check it out here: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
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'.
"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."
more at http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/05/20/vp8-adobe-is-the-key-t...
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.
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/589
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.
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.
I'd say h264 is pretty entrenched now.
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 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.
http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/09/apple-loses-game-of-chicke...
The only legitimate concern with this is hardware decoding, largely in mobile devices.
iOS can implement WebM, no problemo. The problem is, it will be pretty crummy.
What will actually happen: Chrome will get served h.264 wrapped in Flash.
Lose all round, then.
Once Apple supports WebM.
Once chipset manufacturers produce WebM optimized hardware decoders.
Once handset, set-top, etc. manufacturers purchase and integrate those WebM hardware decoders.
Once handset, set-top, etc. manufacturers develop or license software players that support WebM encoded video and file format.
Could happen the other way around. But it ain't likely.
Google drove the cost of smartphone OSes down to as near to zero as patent law will allow.
I'd say that is a game changer.
How much does WebM cost?
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?
Actually the more I think about it the more non-sensical your original statement and this conversation becomes. ;)
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.
Both companies seem to be doing wildly well with their respective mobile strategies.
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).
I can't think of why anyone would want to promote flash, though.
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.
Edit: The post from YouTube about why they still need Flash is at http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html .
It has happen possibly twice.
Adobe is gonna support webm. So having only one format is gonna be possible.
Browsers who supported or were gonna support H264 :
- Safari (5% market share) - IE9 (0% market share right now, probably around 15% in 3 years) - Chrome (around 13 %)
Browsers who supports Webm :
- Firefox (30% market share) - Chrome - IE9 will probably support it via codecs which is better than nothing
The big deal breaker i see is the mobile devices who natively support H264. But as a long term move i can only approve what google is doing.
Also :
> People will add WebM encoding to their already complicated video workflows
Most people video workflow is youtube/vimeo/dailymotion video workflow. All of which seems ready to support webm.
You kind of buried this but this is the true deal breaker. There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders.
And Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9).
Well i mentionned it. I'm at least partially intellectually honest :)
> Firefox doesn't support WebM yet. You'll have to wait on version 4 (0% market share right now as you said for IE9)
That's totally true, but from experience and statistical evidence, i think firefox users are more inclined to upgrade their browser than IE user are.
> There aren't (and probably won't be) hardware WebM decoders.
I don't think that's true
Very true. Our site has had for a while only a couple percent of non 3.5+ Firefox traffic.
The very article states that there are hardware WebM decoders, not only that but Google is licensing the technology for free as in zero dollars:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...
2) 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.
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.
TI I believe is the largest vendors of DSPs for hardware decoding/encoding
http://focus.ti.com/dsp/docs/dsphome.tsp?sectionId=46&DC...
is that true? how many released mobile devices have hardware support for the webM decoder?
They link to a relevant announcement in the linked blog post:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8...
And the update rates of Firefox and Chrome and totally different from IE, especially since version 9 doesn't support XP.
http://googland.blogspot.com/2011/01/g-availability-of-webm-...
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.
Thats going to take a while - the lead time on new DSP families isn't quick.
And how long before their are optimized open source libraries like ffmpeg and x264?
Announcing the world’s fastest VP8 decoder: ffvp8
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/499
(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.
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 of coure it's only a coincidence that most of those are the ones competing with a Google product.
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.
(yes, it'll consume battery like a dry horse drinks water in a desert)
For mobile devices, that's a huge deal. There are no resources more scarce than battery power on a mobile device.
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.
DOES NOT COMPUTE.
In the car? Plug it in.
etc.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Battery_memor...
Two things could end the format war. 1. Apple adopts WebM (which requires WebM hardware for iOS devices) 2. MPEG LA removes all royalties from h.264
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).
Why? Aren't the iOS devices powerful enough to software decode WebM streams?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Also, Google controls YouTube. So H.264 <video> YouTube could see a sunset at some point, which would be a BFD.
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.
hristov's entire parent post was about why this sentence should end in "for now."
You're dreaming if you think Apple could ignore WebM if it became the de facto web video standard. It all depends if WebM becomes that popular.
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.
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
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.
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).
[1] http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/ogg-theora-v...
Anyway, i think WebM comes very close already (i actually don't see differences): http://www.quavlive.com/video_codec_comparison
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.
Then they can use a browser whose creators decide to pay for the license.
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.
Nada @ http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/bo...
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... :)
Classic FUD.
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.
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.
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
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.
There's a more thorough discussion of this here:
An analysis of WebM and its patent risk
http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=420
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:
1) Ogg Theora
2) H.264
Read Ian Hickson's summary of the different browser vendors' positions from 2009: http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...
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.
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.
> 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.
You know, for the good of the users.
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.
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.
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.
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:
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codec...
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directsh...
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".
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codec...
We have exactly two references to "security" :
and None of them even slightly imply that the Mozilla team thinks H.264 is insecure.http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_fr...
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
This one:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directsh...
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 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.
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?
Note: I'm a huge Apple fan and I use lots of their products with alacrity.
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"
They have moved fairly quickly since then.
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.
But to remove a feature you currently support that works well...that's a poor decision that doesn't help your users or the web in general.