Why IE9 Will Not Support Codecs Other Than H.264

jlp2097 writes "There is a new article up on Microsoft's IEBlog explaining why IE9 will support only the H.264 codec: 'First and most important, we think it is the best available video codec today for HTML5 for our customers. Relative to alternatives, H.264 maintains strong hardware support in PCs and mobile devices as well as a breadth of implementation in consumer electronics devices around the world, excellent video quality, scale of existing usage, availability of tools and content authoring systems, and overall industry momentum – each an important factor that contributes to our point of view. H.264 also provides the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights from the many companies that have patents in this area.'"

H.264

[sopssa]

This is actually the same thing that has been said in the older HTML5 discussions on slashdot too.

Ideologically Theora would be great. It's open and patent-free (supposedly). But it's not as good as H.264. We have already used H.264 with Flash and MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 from MPEG LA. It hasn't created any problems and its technically better. It would be better to have an open source and free codec, but people need to work to create it. Ideology doesn't go far in corporate world, and in my honest opinion, H.264 is better for end-user because it uses less bandwidth and provides better quality and is supported in a lot more devices already.

If MPEG LA would start asking website owners and end-users for fees it would basically mean this was their last iteration in video codecs. MPEG LA also uses patents owned by other companies, so they have a saying over it. I don't think they would be that stupid.

Re:360?

[jonesy16]

The Xbox 360 has supported H.264 for over a year now ...

http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx [xbox.com]

Some more information

[masterwit]

I for one am no expert in this subject, so here are some links I ended up reading:

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC [wikipedia.org]

a decent article that could provide one with some insight on the patent "wars to come": http://www.vcodex.com/videocodingpatents.html [vcodex.com]

a random google search to a blog post with a good bit of information, but also opinionated: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what-history-tells-us-and-why-were-standing-with-the-web/ [0xdeadbeef.com]

cnet on Microsoft's stance: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20003838-264.html [cnet.com]

Lastly, does anyone have a good article on Opera's stance? - I had heard they are against it, but not much more than that...

Is there a better, open, alternative?

[onionman]

From what I've seen of Theora, it's the performance limit, not the open source nature of it, which makes it a non-starter for many platforms. I've read some rumors about Google supposedly pushing their own open-source codec, but I haven't seen any actual products. Do they exist? Is there an open alternative that can compete with H.264 on a wide range of platforms?

Less anti-MS headline:

[MonsterTrimble]

Why IE9 Will Not NATIVELY Support Other Codecs Than H.264.

From the article:

Of course, IE9 will continue to support Flash and other plug-ins. Developers who want to use the same markup today across different browsers rely on plug-ins. Plug-ins are also important for delivering innovation and functionality ahead of the standards process; mainstream video on the web today works primarily because of plug-ins. We’re committed to plug-in support because developer choice and opportunity in authoring web pages are very important; ISVs on a platform are what make it great. We fully expect to support plug-ins (of all types, including video) along with HTML5. There were also some comments asking about our work with Adobe on Flash and this report offers a recent discussion.

I love linux and think MS is rapidly falling behind, but let's not go overboard here.

Ogg is inferior

[wazzzup]

The obvious reason Microsoft has standardized on h.264 is its support for DRM. However, Ogg Theora is inferior to h.264 by any standard of measurement except for licensing.

Ars has a good article [arst.ch] summarizing a comparison study between Theora and h.264 [streamingl...center.com]. Basically, Theora produces much lower quality videos with larger filesizes and higher CPU utilization when compared to h.264 videos with identical bitrates.

I've heard Theora advocates say "just jack up the bitrates until it looks good - we're in the age of Hulu so no big deal." I find that unacceptable. Theora will have to up its game if it wants to be a true competitor to h.264. All it has going right now is an open license.

Re:360?

[Goaway]

MKV has nothing in particular to do with h.264, except that pirates like putting h.264 video in MKV containers. It's pretty obvious why Microsoft or anyone else has little interest in supporting it.

Re:Ogg is inferior

[CoolGuySteve]

You can wrap nearly any codec's stream in DRM as long as the container supports it. So DRM has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Do not conflate H.264 with DRM.

Re:So, its for the DRM then...

[moongha]

There is nothing about a codec that makes it amenable to DRM. This is uninformed fear-mongering.

DRM is incorporated at the wrapper level. For example, the 'Fairplay' DRM used by Apple is proprietary to Apple and has nothing whatsoever to do with H264.

MPEG-LA is doing a happy dance

[ChipMonk]

Not that Microsoft cares, but Free Culture just took a big hit [osnews.com]. Money quote:

there is something very important, that the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don't know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes (go on, read your manuals). I was first made aware of such a restriction when someone mentioned that in a forum, about the Canon 7D dSLR. I thought it didn't apply to me, since I had bought the double-the-price, professional (or at least prosumer), Canon 5D Mark II. But looking at its license agreement [c-wss.com] last night (page 241), I found out that even my $3000 camera comes with such a basic license. So, I downloaded the manual for the Canon 1D Mark IV, which costs $5000, and where Canon consistently used the word "professional" and "video" on the same sentence on their press release [canon.com] for that camera. Nope! Same restriction: you can only use your professional video dSLR camera (professional, according to Canon's press release), for non-professional reasons. And going even further, I found that even their truly professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A that uses mpeg2, also comes with a similar restriction [c-wss.com]. You can only use your professional camera for non-commercial purposes. For any other purpose, you must get a license from MPEG-LA and pay them royalties for each copy sold. I personally find this utterly unacceptable.

And no, this is not just a Canon problem (which to me sounds like false advertising). Sony and Panasonic, and heck, even the Flip HD, have the exact same licensing restriction.

Theora in Chrome

[tepples]

RIght now, there's hardly any money in any of the companies doing Theora, and suing just gets you no money at all. Mozilla? Xiph? Relatively poor, and probably good lawyers to get patents overturned. Not a good result. But get a Google, Microsoft or Apple supporting Theora, and these guys have cash.

Google Chrome plays both Theora and H.264, and Google has both cash and "probably good lawyers".

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

People keep making claims like yours and the Theora developers keep SPECIFICALLY addressing those claims, and yet you APPHOLES keep making those claims.

REFERENCE [xiph.org]

What provides protection for Theora is: (in no particular order)
(1) Active avoidance of the well known and/or aggressively enforced codec IPR.
(2) The preference for older techniques and with a strong prior
art-history needed for (1) also provides some protection against
unknown patents.
(3) Theora and or VP3 have been shipped by a multitude of
deep-pocketed entities (IBM; RedHat; Google; Apple[1]; Mozilla; etc)
who would make much better litigation targets than you likely would.
At least some of these have done their own reviews and decided to go
forward.
(4) The dynamics of patent enforcement discourage long-shot
prosecution for patents that royalties are being collected on from
other uses due to the risk of claim invalidation.

Re:In other words....

[Bogtha]

We may find many reasons to "hate microsoft" but I seriously doubt Microsoft will actually assert charges of patent infringement against anyone... ever. Microsoft's involvement in the software patent arms race was quite reluctant and I suspect that is still the case.

Microsoft has filed an action today in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and in the International Trade Commission (ITC), against TomTom NV and TomTom Inc. for infringement of Microsoft patents. [microsoft.com]

Re:Someone explain this to me.

[shutdown -p now]

FTFA:

Several comments speculated about Microsoft’s financial interest in the codec. (Microsoft participates in MPEG-LA with many other companies.) Microsoft pays into MPEG-LA about twice as much as it receives back for rights to H.264. Much of what Microsoft pays in royalties is so that people who buy Windows (on a new PC from an OEM or as a packaged product) can just play H.264 video or DVD movies. Microsoft receives back from MPEG-LA less than half the amount for the patent rights that it contributes because there are many other companies that provide the licensed functionality in content and products that sell in high volume. Microsoft pledged its patent rights to this neutral organization in order to make its rights broadly available under clear terms, not because it thought this might be a good revenue stream. We do not foresee this patent pool ever producing a material revenue stream, and revenue plays no part in our decision here.

Re:So, MS does not even support its own codecs?

[jo_ham]

No, no conversion needed - you'll just install a plugin.

The article is phrased in a very anti-MS way - IE9 will support any another codec via plugin, including the older WMV and other MS formats.

Re:HTML5 will be a screw job.

[Paul Jakma]

Read the blog - Microsoft have *not* ruled out IE9 supporting other codecs via plugins and what not. Indeed there's a suggestion (though unclear) that IE9 may support whatever codecs are installed with WMP:

We’ve read some follow up discussion about support for more than the H.264 codec in IE9’s HTML5 video tag. To be clear, users can install other codecs for use in Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center.

Further, IE9 is not the only browser. Chromium supports a wealth of formats by dint of FFMpeg; WebKitGTK+ browsers support a wealth of formats thanks to GStreamer support (or will do soon); Firefox only supports Ogg/Theora at the moment - hopefully though it will gain access to system media APIs in time (gstreamer, etc).

I am baffled at how anyone can think that finally having an open delivery system, that can work with a range of formats, is *worse* than a proprietary system that only supports encumbered codecs (H.263+/VP3, VP6, H.264, MPEG-4p2), at least OOB and accelerated.

Again, I'm curious if you're using that proprietary video delivery plugin on your system?

Re:HTML5 will be a screw job.

[Paul Jakma]

HTML5 specifies a model for applying controls and transformations on the video.

Re:In other words....

[CannonballHead]

I thought TomTom started that patent infringement thing, and Microsoft responded to them by counter-filing?

Re:HTML5 will be a screw job.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oy vey.

Encode twice. Stick an extra tag in your document.

http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#markup

Works in all browsers. Stop worrying.

Re:HTML5 will be a screw job.

[TheRaven64]

it's my understanding that the canvas is the primary drawing surface for the page

That depends entirely on the page. Canvas just defines a region that you can draw on. It might be the entire page, but then a Flash applet might be the entire page. Any web page not designed by a complete idiot (at least 1% of total web pages) will continue to use non-canvas elements except where drawing is needed.

The real problem with the canvas tag is that JavaScript does not have a sane concept of encapsulation. You can block all scripts for a page, which will stop drawing on canvas, but will break other interactive elements (e.g. posting comments on Slashdot). You can turn off the canvas, so the context object is null, but that will break the scripts that try to draw to it. The nice thing about Flash is that you can disable it without affecting anything else on the page.

Re:The patent lawyers succeeded

[BZ]

We're talking about H.264 here, right? You may want to read http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html [mozillazine.org]

Re:HTML5 will be a screw job.

[hkmwbz]

What's the difference between an HTML5 video tag and a simple hyperlink to a video file, which has worked for as long as video files have been around?

The fact that it's played within the page, and is part of the DOM, which means that you can do all sorts of stuff with the video which you can't with plugins. You can manipulate the video in all sorts of crazy ways [craftymind.com].

The HTML5 video tag requires your browser to be a video player too, instead of just handing off the video to your systems video player. This increases bloat.

Oh no! "The IMG tag requires your browser to be an image viewer too, instead of just handing off the video to your systems image viewer! This increases bloat!"