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:"Available in WebM" (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/html5
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:4, Interesting)
The question is do any go the other way?
My bet is the VP8 folks must have some from older versions that MPEG-LA infringes on.
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a lot of Buddhists who seem to have forgotten that, just like a lot of Christians seem to have missed thou shalt not kill (it doesn't say murder in my bible ta very much). But yes the GP should stick to playing the banjo and screwing his relatives.
Re:"Available in WebM" (Score:3, Interesting)
As opposed to shitty code on Windows. Flash is pretty processor intensive on anything.
But it's significantly worse on Mac, and always has been. For Linux it's even worse, there Flash is almost unusable.
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:3, Interesting)
For variable definitions of "works". Flash is not a great performer on low power hardware, especially on the battery.
While it doesn't change the existing speed/stability/security/battery-munching problems of most of the Flash content out there, the performance situation should be somewhat better for Flash content that uses h.264 on hardware with h.264 acceleration. (upgrade to current software, if possible, probably required)
The people that say Flash works fine and those that say it's awful can both be right. It's not consistent.
So that definition of "works" needs qualifiers for old versus h.264 Flash content, and whether certain playback platform features are present.
The way I see it, if one has to replace old Flash content with h.264 or another modern codec to get acceleration speed/power improvements, it might as well not be wrapped in a Flash container.
On VP8:
The question I have is can existing hardware that supports h.264 acceleration do the same for WebM VP8 video, and if not, can that functionality be added fairly easily to future devices?
Support for hardware acceleration is probably a bigger deal, at least on mobile devices, than whatever performance differences otherwise remain.
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:3, Interesting)
What about Linux? Flash on Linux sucks and this is entirely Adobe's fault.
Re:WebM versus H.264 (Score:3, Interesting)
flash with H.264 has not been working great.
Rubbish. Flash with H.264 is fucking fantastic. That's because H.264 is fantastic. Flash is just a set players (just like VLC or QuickTime), which can suck or not depending on the specific player, just like with any media player.
It is hell to work with, both as a user and as a developer
How so? The only way it seems to be "hell to work with" is if you let ideology get in the way.
and it don't work on mobile phones.
The Flash H.264 players don't work on most phones (and the ones it does work on, tends to not work very well), but that's why they come with their own players. H.264 on iOS is the most seamless, easy-to-use, high-quality combo of media format and player out there.
But your post begs one ENORMOUS question: what format is better than H.264? WebM? WebM is poorer quality and far less widely supported.
As a technical curiosity, WebM is interesting, but as a consumer media format it's rather pathetic. Geek tribalism and anti-patent sentiment may get you modded Insightful, but that doesn't change the reality that H.264 mops the floor with WebM (and Theora). Good luck trying to convince consumers that they should choose an inferior solution for theoretical, hypothetical, and ideological reasons. In fact, anyone who thinks WebM should supplant H.264 ought to ponder their motives. Geeks like to pretend they are above fanboyism and that they objectively choose the best tool for the job, entirely unswayed by emotion or marketing. Yeah, right...