80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM 163
An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has an update on the WebM project from a presentation given by Google's John Luther and Matt Frost at the Streaming Media West conference. OSNews writes, 'Earlier this year, Google finally did what many of us hoped it would do: release the VP8 codec as open source. It became part of the WebM project, which combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container. The product manager for the WebM project, John Luther, gave an update on the status of the project (PDF) — and it's doing great.'"
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:5, Insightful)
flash with H.264 has not been working great. It is hell to work with, both as a user and as a developer, and it don't work on mobile phones.
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:5, Insightful)
WebM is free.
It's also a good potential "unifying format" for web video codec-wise the same way Flash has been player-wise because we're still in the same codec hell as far as HTML5 video is concerned due to Mozilla foundation's refusal to use H.264.
H.264 licensing fees [zdnet.com] look reasonable though if products or services are sold at profit. Not sure how it goes though for free software or products that make marginal profits.
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:1, Insightful)
The standards are almost identical though. Realistically there's no way there are patents out there that cover h264 and not VP8.
Re:"Available in WebM" (Score:3, Insightful)
...and most of what you got two years ago was Flash, until Steve started his war on Flash.
Somebody's just trying to get the 'standard' fixed on a codec that you can write players for without paying through the nose for.
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:3, Insightful)
For variable definitions of "works". Flash is not a great performer on low power hardware, especially on the battery.
Re:"Available in WebM" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:2, Insightful)
H.264 is the codec, flash is just the wrapper of choice these days. H.264 encoded video should be playable on any machine that can decode it and read the wrapper/container format. What makes H.264 so great is that I can encode the video once and place into whatever container I want and have it read on almost any device these days. It doesn't have to be flash, it could be MOV, M4V, MP4, whatever container. Flash is the current favourite because you can put DRM into the wrapper and make it a bit harder to remove the video from the container. When I create a quicktime movie anymore, I get two files, an .m4v that is the actual video, and the .mov which is a wrapper with a pointer to the movie.
And most video players these days will read a straight m4v encoded file whether it be on mobile phones, windows, mac, linux (provided you have the codec), console, etc..
The problem WebM has right now is that it either has to offer videographers and producers a technical advantage over H.264 and be widely adopted. Currently it's still not AS good bit for bit as H.264 and it's not yet widely adopted. Until those two hurdles are overcome, it's not going to see wide spread adoption.
I'm mostly interested in quality (Score:2, Insightful)
Have they managed to improve the quality of the VP8 codec? Last time I saw a comparison, VP8 was way behind H.264 [multimedia.cx].
And don't even give me that crap about "it's free, it doesn't have to be as good" or "it's only a web codec so who cares". If there's a number of big companies supporting the project and they plan on making WebM some kind of industry standard, anything less than state of the art is unacceptable. We'll be using this for years to come, so doing it right is in everyone's best interest.
Re:"Available in WebM" (Score:5, Insightful)
Adobe started the war with Apple by writing shitty code for Flash on the Mac.
Secondly, there's no point in wrapping H.264 video inside a Flash player when the hardware can play H.264 by itself.
Putting H.264 video inside Flash is as stupid as putting a JPEG inside a Microsoft Word document.
TO: Timothy (Score:1, Insightful)
CC: an anonymous reader
Subject: 80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM
Body: WTF Does that mean? Is WebM a competing website? Is WebM a DVD Archive? From reading comments it appears to be something related to the way the videos play and may or may not have something to do with HTML5. The first thing that came to my mind was some competing web site that has made 80% of all YouTube videos available as an archive for use when copyright infringement is claimed.
Here is a good link that should have been included for geeks like me who don't know everything: http://www.webmproject.org/ [webmproject.org]
Additionally, how does one make a video available in WebM format? I upload videos occasionally and have never seen the check-box for "use HTML5 with WebM format". Does YouTube decide on it's own how and when to make them available that way?
Re:"Available in WebM" (Score:4, Insightful)
Adobe started the war with Apple by writing shitty code for Flash on the Mac.
As opposed to shitty code on Windows. Flash is pretty processor intensive on anything.
Secondly, there's no point in wrapping H.264 video inside a Flash player when the hardware can play H.264 by itself.
DRM. Flash is great for DRM. Don't forget that little 'feature'.
Putting H.264 video inside Flash is as stupid as putting a JPEG inside a Microsoft Word document.
Hasn't stopped anybody I work with yet...
Re:"Available in WebM" (Score:3, Insightful)
Safari supports H.264 and yet it's free.
But it isn't FREE!
And Mozilla isn't just about making a browser, its about making the web better.