Google To Drop Support For H.264 In Chrome 765
Steve writes "Google just made a bold move in the HTML5 video tag battle: even though H.264 is widely used and WebM is not, the search giant has announced it will drop support for the former in Chrome. The company has not done so yet, but it has promised it will in the next couple of months. Google wants to give content publishers and developers using the HTML5 video tag an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their websites."
Re:Market Share? (Score:1, Informative)
Not being able to paste into a text field with a quote tag in it on Slashdot of all places is a pretty good sign that, no. /.s fault, but if /. of all places doesn't care, why would anyone else?
I'm not blaming the browser, maybe it's
Re:Open standards (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Market Share? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, note that firefox doen't ship H.264 either. In Europe, Firefox + Chrome share is 52.69%, IE 37.52%.
Also, Google owns Youtube and is working to make every video available in VP8.
Missing the open part (Score:5, Informative)
WebM is opensource (and grants use of its patents for free), so there's a bit of difference here. They're not pushing proprietary technology.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chrome+Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Exaggerated Marketing From A Marketing Company (Score:5, Informative)
Browser market share [wikipedia.org]
Chrome has 13.5%, which is more than Safari, Opera and all mobile browsers combined.
The big 3 browsers are IE, FF, and Chrome, so yes, this is significant.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but Google doesn't have any patents in h.264. [wikipedia.org] They had been a solid backer of it, but never had any patents involved in it.
For those curious, the companies that do have patents involved in h.264 are: * Apple Inc. * DAEWOO * Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation * Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute * France Télécom, société anonyme * Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. * Fujitsu Limited * Hitachi, Ltd. * Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. * LG Electronics Inc. * Microsoft Corporation * Mitsubishi Electric Corporation * NTT docomo * Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation * Panasonic Corporation * Robert Bosch GmbH * Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. * Scientific-Atlanta Vancouver Company * Sedna Patent Services, LLC * Sharp Corporation * Siemens AG * Sony Corporation * Ericsson * The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York * Toshiba Corporation * Victor Company of Japan, Limited
Re:A really nasty trick (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? You seem to be under the impression that "x264" is some for-profit organization that owns the rights to H.264 or something. That's now how these standards work; H.264 was developed by standards committee, not by some particular organization.
x264 is an open source GPL-licensed H.264 encoder. I'm posting the opinion of an open source developer familiar with the technical and legal issues surrounding video codecs.
Re:Will they drop Flash, too? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason Chrome has Flash integrated is because a significant number of security exploits today are of Adobe products, specifically Flash Player and Adobe Reader. By integrating Flash, Google has managed to integrate it with their silent update system and the Chrome sandbox (sandboxed Flash is in the beta channel [computerworld.com]). As for PDF viewing, Google wrote their own simple, sandboxed PDF viewer with none of Adobe's issues and shipped it in Chrome 8 [makeuseof.com].
Honestly, this is a lot better than users getting both of these manually and having vulnerable versions lying around.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Informative)
Because they only distribute source code. MPEG-LA has allowed source code exception for implementing their patent pool for ages.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:3, Informative)
H.264 is dirt cheap. H.264 is everywhere. (Score:5, Informative)
H.264 is not a free codec and consequently, you have to pay if you wish to encode content in it or decode content encoded with it. They just are gracious enough not to charge you for streaming it.
For...branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one
encoder = "unit"), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty
The maximum bite for an encoder/decoder is 20 cents a unit.
MPEG LA is geared for licensing production and distribution of H.264 video on a commercial scale. They don't give a damn about your wedding videos until you become a national franchise.
They don't give a damn about the geek's freely distributed Star Trek fan-flick.
For..where an End User pays directly for video services on a Title-by-Title basis (e.g., where viewer determines Titles to be viewed or number of viewable Titles is otherwise limited), royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a Title 12 minutes or less) are...the lower of 2% of the price paid to the Licensee (on first Arms Length Sale of the video) or $0.02 per Title (categories of Licensees include Legal Entities that are (i) replicators of physical media,
and (ii) service/content providers (e.g., cable, satellite, video DSL, Internet and mobile) of VOD, PPV and electronic downloads to End Users).
Where an End User pays directly for video services on a Subscription-basis (not ordered or limited Title-by-Title), the applicable royalties per Legal Entity payable by the service or content provider are 100,000 or fewer Subscribers during the year = no royalty
For...where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of Free Television(television broadcasting which is sent by an over-the-air, satellite and/or cable Transmission, and which is not paid for by an End User), the Licensee (broadcaster...) pays...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder..or...annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households
The Enterprise Cap for H.264 in 2011 is $6.5 million a year. H.264 is deeply entrenched in theatrical production. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Industrial and military applications. Home video.
There are over 900 H.264 licensees and collectively they dwarf Google.SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS [mpegla.com]
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Informative)
PNG is a replacement for non-animated GIF only.
Really?
http://www.bradfordsherrill.com/images/animated.png [bradfordsherrill.com]
Might depend on your browser.
Re:You lost me (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Missing the open part (Score:4, Informative)
There is a different license that gives you access to all Google patents necessary for implementing WebM, whether you use their implementation or not. It's here:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/ [webmproject.org]
Re:Great! Less choice! (Score:5, Informative)
>H.264 already is a success, a resounding one. It has been for nearly a decade.
Technically good, and completely useless legally and morally to an open and free web
>WebM is shit. Theora is shit.
Technically, Theora is fairly bad (but still usable in a pinch), and VP8 is alright. Both are excellent for the health of the free and open web.
That is all that matters.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Informative)
Furthermore if a certain other company tried this stunt (cough;Microsoft) with their favorite codec (drop all support except WMV) everybody would be up in arms, saying they are trying to gain a monopolistic advantage over competition.
First, to gain a monopolistic advantage, you actually need a monopoly, and Chrome - unlike Windows or IE - is far from it.
Secondly, is kind of hard to gain a monopolistic advantage by distributing an OSS library that you can embed in proprietary software. What advantage?
Monopoly is what the MPEG-LA has over the H.264, using software patents and preventing competing implementations from being distributed without paying them.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Informative)
No, parent is saying that browsers will have an option to "fullscreen the video" specifically, not the whole page. Firefox already has it [mozillalinks.org], just right-click the video and click fullscreen. No need to fill the browser.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:3, Informative)
Have you ever tried using HTML5 video? It's completely fucking useless.
Impressive fucking hyperbole.
OK, first off, we have the codec issue. If you want to support all browsers, you need to encode to the following formats: H.264+AAC, VP8+Vorbis, and Theora+Vorbis. You're stuck with all three if you want to hit all browsers.
Bullshit. Chrome has always supported Theora, as far as I can tell, and Firefox is about to support WebM. In fact, IE is going to support WebM soon, which means by this time next year, Safari will be the only HTML5-compliant browser without H.264.
How did you get to +5 with that blatant of a factual error? Did you bother to Google it?
Then there's the part where the HTML5 spec forbids allowing JavaScript to fullscreen the video.
Hey, guess what? Flash forbids allowing ActionScript to fullscreen, either. Of course, it'd be nice if there could be a fullscreen control somewhere...
Which means that you're stuck with either using the lousy solution YouTube uses (blow up the video to screen size, and assume the user can figure out how to fullscreen their browser on their own), or just dropping the feature all together.
Or right-click + fullscreen.
Of course, most browsers allow the user to fullscreen the video on the context menu. But that's still really a two-step process: right click on the video, and then click on "Full screen."
So, um, how many steps would you count the other one as? I realize it's click+F11 for you and me, but it's likely to be many clicks for an ordinary user, and at least three once they figure it out.
Really, it's a one-step process.
And to add insult to injury, most HTML5 video toolkits manage to block this option anyway by the way they generate their UI. (Including YouTube, in fact.)
Which is their fault, not the spec's. I'm used to being able to download videos and play them when I want, in an external player if I want. Speaking of H.264, I've got an H.264 decoder in hardware, in my fucking video card. Where is that feature in Flash?
To be fair, most browsers don't use hardware H.264 decoders, but the fact that it's an open standard means we can fix this. In Flash, we can't.
So all this does is mean that Chrome will now be stuck with the same crappy, blurry Theora video you already had to encode to anyway to support Firefox.
So what you're saying is you suck at encoding?
Re:You lost me (Score:4, Informative)
Are you trolling, or are you actually this ignorant of the topic at hand?
WebM is inferior shit compared to MPEG4 video. WebM is almost as ugly as MPEG2 video.
Really? [streamingmedia.com]
Furthermore it's not necessary to adopt WebM since MPEG4 is only a few years from being public domain/open source itself.
How many years?
I don't have a website but if I did, I would no longer support Chrome..... at least not for video. Everything would be encoded as either Flash or H264/MPEG4, and Chrome would just have to display a broken link.
Despite Chrome supporting Flash? And despite you using Flash? Do you just enjoy antagonizing your users?
I mean, I'd provide a similar link for IE users, or at least users of older versions of IE, but I wouldn't deliberately break the site, I'd just gently remind them that stuff might be broken.
Users would need to go get themselves a REAL browser (such as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla/Seamonkey, or Opera) that doesn't ignore the MPEG4 standard virtually everyone else in the world uses.
Not a single browser you mentioned currently supports H.264 in HTML5 video. They only support it in Flash, just as Chrome does.
Is there a single true thing you said here? Maybe H.264 will actually expire in a few years...
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Informative)
This got modded up? This is just completely wrong on all levels.
Bullshit. Chrome has always supported Theora, as far as I can tell, and Firefox is about to support WebM. In fact, IE is going to support WebM soon, which means by this time next year, Safari will be the only HTML5-compliant browser without H.264.
You obviously mean without WebM, and that's all nice, but like you say yourself, that's next year. My post is about right now, and right now, if you want to use HTML5 video, you need to do three encodes. Two if you're willing to put up with Theora, but Theora looks like ass.
Flash forbids allowing ActionScript to fullscreen, either.
But it doesn't forbid fullscreen entirely. Since there are half a million Flash apps that do fullscreen right now and telling people to just fullscreen their browser when they're used to just clicking the little button below the video is a nonstarter. And F11 doesn't work for all browsers on all OSes.
Speaking of H.264, I've got an H.264 decoder in hardware, in my fucking video card. Where is that feature in Flash?
Standard as of Flash 10 for Windows, and Flash 10.1 for Mac OS X. Since hardware decoding in Linux is a complete mess, who knows when it'll be available under Linux. Wait, didn't you just claim I didn't bother looking up simple facts? This isn't exactly unknown.
So what you're saying is you suck at encoding?
Unless there's a hidden "--suck=no" option in ffmpeg2theora, creating a Theora file at equivalent bitrate from the same source to either WebM or H.264 looks horrid. And, yes, ffmpeg2theora is just a frontend to libtheora, so it's not just a random crappy Theora implementation, it uses the official implementation. As far as I can tell, there are no quality options to trade off encoding time for a better encode. Note that the "video quality" flag in ffmpeg2theora is actually a shortcut to predefined bitrates, as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure, because as I've also mentioned somewhere, the Theora tools are completely horrible, and Xiph apparently has no interest in improving the situation.
So if there's some magic way to make Theora not look like crap, I'm all ears. As far as I can tell, WebM is miles ahead in terms of both tools to create them and in quality.