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."
Chrome+Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is obviously betting that WebM in Chrome and Firefox can carry enough weight to compete against H.264 in MSIE, Opera, and Safari.
Google, obviously, has enough web-surfing based data to factor into this judgement call. Whether or not Google is right on this call, one thing is certain: Google wouldn't do this unless they were fairly confident in WebM's chances against the looming patent trolls.
This, I think, is the noteworthy aspect of this bit of news. A patent troll going after WebM will now have to expect to have to deal with Google's well-funded lawyers.
Will they drop Flash, too? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Market Share? (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Chrome. I haven't found many sites on the public Internet that don't work with Chrome; mainly a few niche sites that still require IE or ActiveX. Chrome benefits from the fact that it uses the same rendering engine as Apple's Safari.
A really nasty trick (Score:3, Interesting)
This serves two strategic purposes for Google. First, it advances a codec that's de facto controlled by Google at the expense of a codec that is a legitimate open standard controlled by a multi-vendor governance process managed by reputable international standards bodies. ("Open source" != "open standard".) And second, it will slow the transition to HTML5 and away from Flash by creating more confusion about which codec to use for HTML5 video, which benefits Google by hurting Apple (since Apple doesn't want to support Flash), but also sucks for users.
It is, in other words, a thoroughly nasty bit of work. It's not quite as bad as selling consumers down the river to Verizon on 'net neutrality, but it's close. And if Google is actually successful in making WebM, not H.264, the standard codec for web video, they're literally going to render hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tablets, smartphones, set-top boxes, etc. with H.264 hardware support obsolete.
"But wait!", the OSS fans are saying. "Isn't Google really standing up for freedom and justice, because H.264 requires evil patent licensing?"
No. Expert opinion [multimedia.cx] is that WebM infringes on numerous patents in the H.264 pool, and will need a licensing pool of its own to be set up, just like Microsoft's VC-1 did. So the patents are a wash. This is Google manipulating the market entirely for selfish advantage here, and it's all the worse because they're pretending otherwise. And it's going to be really frustrating watching people fall for it.
A classic-era Microsoft move (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, that is exactly the kind of thing that Microsoft would do before it finally got the idea that standards are good. Like the way Windows Movie Maker would only save in WMV format. Although MS used to ignore the standards, only to add them in later rather than blatently removing support in an existing product.
But I can understand why Google might do this. It is annoying that we have the situation (yet again) where you have to choose between one standard that is more commonly used with better device support, and a more open standard (without patents) that is not quite as good (mostly because it doesn't get accelerated). It is the MP3/OGG situation again. And Google's solution is the same that open source audio software did - they will rely on plug-ins like LAME to add support.
Also the similar thing happened when the GIF format patent became a problem. It got dropped from a lot of programs where they didn't want to have to pay for a licence.
I'm not sure why TFA said that it was controversial that Microsoft added H.264 support to Firefox. It seemed quite reasonable to allow Microsoft's patent licence to be used in software installed on their operating system.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:2, Interesting)
No. We will stay in the current era, where flash is preinstalled. All of your normal h264 sites will continue to work, in flash. This is a genius move on Google's part. All they are forcing to be in WebM are html5 sites. They won't really drop h264 (flash) until html(4?*) dies (or until h264 patent holders decide to start charging out the ass for it, and everybody starts to worship Google for WebM). By attaching h264 to html4/flash, they are ensuring that they both die at the same time.
Have a device that only supports h264 like an iPhone or older Android device? That's no problem! Almost all web sites are still compatible with your outdated device. If you have one that supports WebM though, you have one that fully supports html5!
Sew where this is going? Google can't hope to control video codecs as video codecs, but they can reasonably hope to control html5, and by extension video codecs which are a part of it.
* I think the web is idiotic in general, so I'm not sure if we call it html4 or xhtml or what. Maybe this codec issue is easier for me to understand because I don't give a shit about any of it.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Interesting)
So What? (Score:2, Interesting)
Really, nobody should be using Chrome anyway. Firefox has a much, much better spec on nearly every level, is open source, has the adblock extension available....
I tell all of my clients to use Firefox exclusively. That way you KNOW the code is truly open, secure, and up to date. There is no way to know this with a closed source browser, and I can't for security purposes ever recommend using one.
Even if it's better than Internet Explorer.
Firefox for the win! Boycott closed source software!
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Interesting)
Back? Have you ever tried using HTML5 video? It's completely fucking useless.
No, really, it is. 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.
Then there's the part where the HTML5 spec forbids allowing JavaScript to fullscreen the video. 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.
Both suck. Users are used to being able to fullscreen the video, and they do NOT want to jump through the two-step hoop just to get fullscreen video.
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." 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.)
So instead, you just use H.264 and a Flash-based player. Now you hit every major browser including IE, you don't have to encode your video three fucking times, and you don't have to have continuously explain the hoops required to fullscreen the video.
But what all this also means is that by ditching H.264, Google really doesn't lose anything anyway: if you were trying to support more than just Chrome and Safari with HTML5, you were already encoding to at least Theora anyway. 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. Or maybe, if they're lucky, they'll get the WebM video, which while worse than H.264 at the same bitrates, is still better than Theora.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Interesting)
What makes this decision even more annoying is that Google are part of the H264 patent pool. They have more to lose by removing support for it.
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
h.264 free until 2014... (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Source != (Open) Standard
Whether a tool is open source or not doesn't make it a standard, open or otherwise. What makes something a standard is when a group of people, companies, etc... (IEEE, ISO, ITU,etc...) get together propose and ratify a standard. In the case of h.264 the MPEG-LA and its members contributed their technologies and processes to the pool to build many of the wonderful products we like today. The only way that all of these different products by different manufacturers work is if they all support the standard. All of these companies built these technologies to make money.
What Google did with WebM was buy a company and provide one of their newly purchased products as open-source. This product may, or may not, come under scrutiny for various IP issues. Many have stated in the past that a number of WebM's algorithms are very similar to those of h.264 and its "freeness" may come in to question.
Googles actions today are not for you or for me. They are for the positive gain of Google as well as the negative impact on all of Google's competitors. This would not be a bad thing if this did not take into account the fact that millions, if not billions, of people already own products that make use of h.264 and therefore negatively affects consumers if they are forced to buy new products.
In the long run, will it matter? Won't there be something new by 2014 anyways? I doubt the MPEG-LA members are resting on their laurels and not working on h.265 or MPEG-5 or whatever is next anyways.
I wish people would wake up and stop believing the "don't be evil" mantra when Google is as bad as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and/or Oracle.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, they don't. Can you imagine how much better life would have been had PNG been established early as the de facto image standard on the Internet instead of GIF, and later, JPG? Aside from the superior feature set, there never would have been any of the silly threats of massive lawsuits, no need to pay someone royalties to implement an editor, etc.
Except H.264 is superior to WebM.
Google isn't just smart, it is freakin' brilliant with this move. If they can help to establish WebM as the de facto standard for Internet video, they don't have to be part of the H.264 patent pool. Also, people can write video editors and other utilities galore for Chrome with no viable threat of being sued.
Or, people can just use the hardware and software they already paid for which supports H.264. There are plenty of programs which use QuickTime to encode and decode H.264 with absolutely no fear of being sued by MPEG-LA. And they get the benefit of using a superior codec, all at no additional cost.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source, but WebM objectively inferior to H.264. Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price? As it seems to me, to do so would be entirely irrational.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Interesting)
And if something comes out as good as Handbrake after Chrome drops h264, I will gladly use it and compliment Google on their foresight.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Interesting)
APNG is a recent extension to the PNG format, which was not accepted by libpng, and is not widely supported.
One day PNG may be a replacement for animated GIF too, but that day is not today.
Re:H.264 is dirt cheap. H.264 is everywhere. (Score:5, Interesting)
And with a maximal of 6 billion units, that works out to around 1.2 billion (ignoring things like having multiple units (one on the computer, one on the smart phone, one on the game system, etc)). Care to pay that for everyone?
Ie, if I put my wedding video on youtube in H.264 and it becomes popular and gets 2 million page views, I'll risk having to pay $40,000? Golly, I wonder why anyone would have a problem with that.
Unless the website hosting it has ads of any sort; then it's commercial.
Which begs the question, why isn't licensing such that Google, Firefox, etc don't have to pay? It's certainly not like MPEG LA is getting insufficient money. The simple point is, MPEG LA wants the chance to spread into the online world to make even more money. I can appreciate this. But, when you start counting the possibly millions or even billions of units to be sold in the future, that "dirt cheap" is no longer dirt cheap--why else would the per unit rate be so low, anyways?
The simple truth is, allowing H.264 to effectively tax all internet-video devices is one of those anti-free market things that will only slow down innovation and growth. It's no different than any other pervasive fee in a system.
Re:You lost me (Score:2, Interesting)
If Firefox did that too, then you'd end up with the situation where Firefox users running on Windows would be able to view H.264 and Firefox users on a Free operating system would not.
If by "Free" you mean "Absolutely pure and also legal", sure.
I have at least one copy of x264 on my system, as well as a hardware decoder in my video card. While x264 may not be legal in the US, the hardware decoder certainly is, and the native Linux nVidia drivers support it.
In fact, I don't know of a modern OS on which I'd want a modern web browser for which I don't pretty much get a legal H.264 decoder for free, and illegal-but-Free ones if I want them.
And all the websites with "Firefox" as a tick box on their compatibility checklist would happily tick it and be on their merry way.
They already do this with Flash, and worse, Silverlight. I currently have to boot Windows because Moonlight won't run a presentation I am required to watch for a class, three times a week.
I don't like this any more than you do, but I would very much rather have to install an x264 decoder and be able to watch this presentation on Linux, than have to fuck with Moonlight for over an hour before giving up and booting Windows just to watch a fifteen minute webcam + powerpoint.
The h.264 patents will eventually die, and we'll eventually have a select few codecs which are supported everywhere, and the video tag will thus become like the img tag, and all of these debates will become as irrelevant as the "Don't use GIFs" debates back when the FSF was using JPEGs for everything (since PNG hadn't been invented).
But if we miss this opportunity, if people continue to back away from HTML5 video because they have the (correct or not) impression that you need to encode things three times just to make sure they play in every browser -- you realize we're already at a disadvantage even if h.264 was Free tomorrow, right? -- then we're stuck with what we've got now, which is Flash for everything but iOS, and H.264 for iOS, with browser detection to choose which.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Interesting)
Except H.264 is superior to WebM.
No, it's not. I've seen both in action, and they're perceptually identical. I see this argument a lot, and the people who make it are simply pulling it out of their ass.
I get the reason behind liking something for being open source. <bogus claim snipped!> Please tell my why I should use it when I have a superior option available at a reasonable price?
What if you want to upgrade that software? And then upgrade it again? And again? That all cost $$$, and as someone who uses both FOSS and commercial software, I can tell you that the difference isn't so "reasonable." What if you are a design studio and you need 100 copies of the software? That price isn't so "reasonable" either.
It strikes me that a lot of people made the same stupid arguments you just did about Linux--especially Microsoft, which stands to have the most to lose if people switch to Linux. "You have this expensive infrastructure that you can't get rid of!" And a lot of stupid companies buy into it, too. To save the $500 thousand it would cost to switch over and maintain the environment after doing so, they spend millions over the course of three to five years.
There's a better way. I know it. Google knows it. Most laypeople don't, and Apple, as the company who sells a lot of legacy H.264 hardware software and who earns royalties from other people who make such things, has a high financial stake in doing their damned best to make sure people don't act in their own long-term financial interest or freedom.