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."
Pretty soon... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Consequently, it's not supported by Firefox natively nor in any other browser that cares about being sued and can't or won't pay.
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you just want to play the video back (as opposed to those who insist they have to use their own very specific player) , and you're relying on the Browser's native controls, a decent browser will have a full screen option.
if that isn't the case maybe you should blame your browser maker, or get a better browser.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>a decent browser will have a full screen option.
Way to completely-and-totally miss his point. Yes the browser has a FS option, but it requires users to take a two-step option (first blow video to fill the browser; then make the browser full screen). The Grandparent poster said that's a pain in the ass, and he would be correct. Especially since many of us users don't know how to do full screen in our browsers. The old way was better (a single click via javascript).
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: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.
You lost me (Score:5, Insightful)
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. Consequently, it's not supported by Firefox natively nor in any other browser that cares about being sued and can't or won't pay.
Google's motivation is obviously to try to establish an open source, free (as in speech) codec as the web standard for video. That way, we won't have the silly issues you mention above. So why are you not happy with this move?
Keep in mind that browsers like Firefox, Konquerer, Seamonkey, etc., because they are open source, cannot legally integrate H.264 into its browser. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping Microsoft, Apple, Opera, and Google, and anyone else who wants to from integrating WebM into their browsers. It simply boils down to an administrative decision to do so.
So if you want your web-based video to "Just Work," you absolutely must support WebM. Or more precisely, you absolutely must not support H.264 unless MPEG releases it to the public domain or under a free (as in speech) license, which I think there's exactly zero chance of happening.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Horse shit.
If the Mozilla foundation wanted to support H.264, they'd release a plug-in that ties into codecs installed on the system.
MS did exactly this.
The plug-in can be open or closed source, and the codec can be open or closed source. Whether or not the codec the end user has is open, closed, or legal doesn't matter, and has no bearing on the openness or legality of Firefox itself.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Add to that that they will continue to bundle the proprietary Flash support, and claims of an 'open' internet smell more like bullshit. Had they truly been motivated by an open and free internet, they would have removed flash support as well.
Re:You lost me (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course Microsoft did that. That's exactly what they want. 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. And all the websites with "Firefox" as a tick box on their compatibility checklist would happily tick it and be on their merry way. Meanwhile, bye-bye cross-platform web. Can't possibly think why Microsoft would like that and Mozilla wouldn't.
Re: (Score:3)
In short, if you don't put them side-by-side for an in-depth comparison, you won't even notice the difference.
Re:You lost me (Score:4, Informative)
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...
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: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: (Score:3)
The maximum bite for an encoder/decoder is 20 cents a unit
Which is 20 cents more than can legally be charged any encoder/decoder implementation built using GPL source code.
Re:H.264 is dirt cheap. H.264 is everywhere. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for proving the GP's point but, just so you know, "cheap" isn't "free" and it most certainly isn't "Free".
But hey, if you like paying through your nose for watching and uploading videos just so you can feel "popular" go right ahead, I'm sure MPEG LA will be happy to sell you a license. Or prosecute you for breaking the law.
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides which, even if you do live somewhere with software patents then the liklihood is you already have an H264 licence with your OS. It's certainly the case for Windows & OS X users. In fact they have an entire media framework ready and at the disposal of any browser to invoke for content it doesn't handle natively.
The whole situation is absurd. If Firefox / Opera / Chrome don't support H264 out of the box for legal / patent reasons then fine, don't ship it out of the box. Instead open up the video api so it's extensible. Better yet, invoke whatever media framework is on the OS and let that decide if the content is playable or not.
Not providing any convenient way to support other video formats is just stupid. It won't drive people to the open standards, instead it will drive them the other way, using Flash plugins and other hacks to workaround the issue.
Choose your country wisely (Score:3, Insightful)
how does x264 get around the patent scheme of H.264?
By recommending that users emigrate from the United States, South Korea, and other countries whose courts enforce software patents, I presume.
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: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: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: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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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: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.
With all respect (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used H.264 for quite a while. I was thrilled when it became available as a streaming format under Flash.The superiority of H.264 is debatable however, just like the debate between Ogg/Vorbis and MP3. End users can't tell the difference anyway. Google has a huge monetary cost associated with using an inefficient codec - YouTube. That cost would dwarf licensing costs by a long shot.
I think we're literally seeing intelligent people at Google advocating a technological change which ultimately is in the public interest. You can't support open source software while proprietary systems like H.264 are in use. It creates an artificial barrier into entry in the market to free software by causing unwitting users to entrust their personal information to a format they must pay to use. There's no positive for ordinary people with H.264, none. Google has just gained a lot of points in my book.
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: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: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.
Flash is the legacy way (Score:3)
Flash wrappers are the legacy way to put video on a web page. If you wrap the h.264 decode up in flash than the licenses for the decoding support are Adobe's problem. Flash works in pretty much any browser anywhere the user is willing to install the plug in. I don't see Google as having any issue with that. What is pretty clear is that the HTML 5 video tag WILL replace those flash objects for sites with simple needs at least, sites like Hulu, netflix, et al will continue to use other tech.
Open browsers
Re:Pretty soon... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
heya,
Oh please. Google Chrome is a *fantastic* browser. It's quick, snappy, secure and is constantly being improved. You compare that to the development pace of other browser's currently. Sure, IE9 may blow our socks of when it comes out, but the only reason Microsoft's finally picking up the slack on it's stagnating piece-of-junk browser tech is because of Chrome. Chrome's V8 JS engine alone would have been enough for me to convert.
Most people, once they've converted, don't go back. Even Firefox gets rings
Market Share? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Partner videos are still Flash (Score:3)
Google owns Youtube and is working to make every video available in VP8.
Except for the ones that need the Flash-only ad engine because they either are posted by Partners or make fair use of music.
Re:Market Share? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect that YouTube will fully support HTML5 and WebM before Chrome drops H.264. Google isn't going to make two of their big properties incompatible with each other.
Re:Market Share? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Chrome really have the market share required for this move to have any effect on the decisions of web designers?
Yes. Chrome is rapidly eating market share: in just about 2 years since launch, it's at 13.5%. This is twice the share of Opera and Safari combined. But the decision to drop H.264 doesn't put Chrome "versus the world", as they already had Firefox and Opera in their camp (which also lack H.264). Opera + Safari + Chrome make over 50% of the browsers used today, in market share.
This is substantially different than the previous situation, where Google, Microsoft and Apple all had a H.264 browser, and Firefox looked like the odd one out, while Opera was quietly awaiting the market to decide (they'd have no choice but support H.264, if Firefox did it).
However, the battle is still not over for H.264. The common wisdom is that Google is pushing their WebM standard and that's why they drop H.264. If they really think it's that simple, they have not done their math right.
The growth is with mobile devices. The leaders among them is Apple with iOS, and Google with Android, both of which come with hardware support for H.264, and no WebM hardware support (future support in... theory, but I can say, count Apple out). So what are web content owners left to do? Maybe encode all content twice: WebM and then H.264. Imagine the hassle of, ironically Google's very own, YouTube, having YET another version of every single video they have in their library: FLV, H.264 and now WebM.
No, actually web authors will opt for the simplest choice, that's least amount of work: the same H.264 video everywhere, making use of hardware support for H.264 in mobiles, exposed via HTML5, and ... Flash on the desktop, which also support exactly the same H.264 videos.
So, in attempt to push WebM, Google may end up accidentally (or not..?) cementing Flash's position on the desktop as the video player for the foreseeable future.
I used to think Flash will considerably fade away once IE9 becomes mainstream (which comes with GPU accelerated renderer and H264 support), but now things are suddenly interesting again for Adobe.
Re: (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.
Re:Market Share? (Score:4, Insightful)
You say "Even PayPal" as though it were surprising that PayPal sucks in yet another way.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
What the hell are you talking about?
All I use is Chrome, and it works great for Slash Dot, and every other site I use. Pasting isn't a problem.
Workaround: Open comment in new tab (Score:3)
Open standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Double standards or what?
Re:Open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open standards (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Google would almost certainly like to stop doing this, but they are practical enough to know that this isn't feasible quite yet. However, if WebM became the de-facto standard for web video then Google would be much closer to being able to realistically ditch Flash. In short, this is clearly a step in the right direction. Unless, of course, you happen to believe that we'd all be better off using H.264 to stream video.
Re:Open standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Adobe claims it is a DMCA violation [wikipedia.org] to make software that is interoperable with Flash video. There might be some parts of Flash that are open, but playing video sure isn't one of them.
And as for the other parts, haven't you ever wondered why there is still only one full implementation of this supposedly open "standard"? Either the Gnash guys are incompetent (they aren't), Adobe's implementation is fucking awesome in everyone's opinion and all users are delighted with how great it works and the wide variety of platforms it has been ported to (they aren't), or the claim that it's open is bullshit.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
They might be throwing down the gauntlet so to speak in the attempt to get the patent cartels to stop the FUD and either sue them or shut up. With all the talk 6 month ago it's very likely that patent cartels decided the risks of suing Google over WebM far outweighed any potential benefit. Afterall if they do litigate it and it's decided it doesn't violate the H264 cartel then the cartel is out of business.
Re:Chrome+Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Chrome+Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Opera doesn't support H.264, and was the first browser to ship a stable release with WebM support (and, heck, the original browser to ship an experimental video element, with Ogg/Theora/Vorbis).
Re:Chrome+Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
against H.264 in MSIE, Opera
Opera never supported h.264, they are against software patents, shame as I likecd h.264 more than webMsomething :(
Will they drop Flash, too? (Score:4, Interesting)
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: (Score:3)
You mean John Gruber the Mac fanboy who's too much of a zealot for other fanboys [whydoeseve...ngsuck.com] has an issue with a Google product.
Colour me unsurprised (and unconvinced).
Re: (Score:3)
You know nothing about John Gruber.
You know a great deal about John C. Dvorak.
More accurate title? (Score:3)
Google To Cede Web Video Market To Adobe
Doing it now (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe it's better to weed out all the half-free proprietary stuff now before they have a chance to go all Unisys on you.
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.
Re:A really nasty trick (Score:5, Insightful)
Will people please stop citing an x264 developer's rant as an "expert opinion" on the video quality or patent risks of WebM? Next thing we'll indulge the musings of a Coca-Cola Company executive on health issues related to PepsiCo products.
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.
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Yeah, x264 is an open-source project. And we all know open-source projects never attract egomaniacs, and major contributors wouldn't derive significant value from their importance, which would be lost if their project was replaced by a competitor, right?
Oh, wait.
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WebM can use many of the same acceleration blocks as H.264, it is a matter of writing the codecs that use the hardware.
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WebM can use many of the same acceleration blocks as H.264, it is a matter of writing the codecs that use the hardware.
Hence why it also is likely to run afoul of some H.264 patents. It's a pretty unoriginal ripoff of H.264.
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Or, you know, you can't reinvent the wheel thirty times without eventually falling back on the same basic concepts and H.264 and WebM share unpatented portions? You can't seriously believe every single thing H.264 does is patented, can you?
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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.
"Isn't Google really standing up for freedom and justice, because H.264 requires evil patent licensing?"
You say "patent licensing" as if it was just signing a legal agreement. Their license requires significant royalties to be paid and which we must all pay. We all pay a MPEG LA tax when we buy any of the devices or software that has to decode H.264.
While those that despise Adobe Flash are desperate to see it replaced all I know is I've never had to pay a penny to use the Flash plugin.
I have no problem with the standard being controlled by Google since they are making it available gratis. Apple / Microsoft a
Re:A really nasty trick (Score:5, Insightful)
You say "patent licensing" as if it was just signing a legal agreement. Their license requires significant royalties to be paid and which we must all pay.
And more importantly, if a patented piece of software requires payment of any royalties whatsoever, it instantly violates the "no further encumbrances" section of the GPL. If that software derives from or includes any GPL components, poof, it instantly loses the right to be distributed.
So if you want video on a Free Software system at the moment you must choose one of the following four options:
1. Abandon the GPL and any dreams of having a fully free desktop system. Just bow, accept that The Market Has Spoken And Freedom Is Dead.
2. Abandon the USA as a market for a regime which doesn't recognise software patents, and hope international treaties don't impose US-like silliness on the world.
3. Abandon the law. Resign yourself to breaking the law and either living like a fugitive, accepting the penalties or trying to make a test case out of your lawsuit.
4. Abandon the known patent-tainted H.264 for a (hopefully) non-patented alternative like WebM, or one for which the patent imposes non GPL-violating encumbrances.
(or, as a temporary solution, sequester the video-rendering component in third-party "dirty" code, like a Flash plugin, written using no GPL libraries, while you initiate a proper project to replace it).
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It's not an expert option because he's not a lawyer.
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WebM is a multi-vendor standard: multiple independent implementations exist, and people outside Google have contributed to both the libvpx implementation and the evolution of the codec. Work is ongoing to publish a spec through an official standards organization.
Dark Shikari's inferences about patents are FUD. Notice that despite being an expert, he could not identify any specific patents VP8 is alleged to infringe. No-one else has either.
Re:A really nasty trick (Score:4, Insightful)
Pure FUD. The per-decoder license fee for H.264 is $0.20, capped at (IIRC) $4M/year. Firefox could simply pay out of the pool of cash it collects from search engine referrals, or, even more sensibly, avoid the entire problem by using operating system libraries to decode H.264.
And, once again, why are you arguing as if WebM is actually unencumbered? This is extremely unlikely to be the case.
Incidentally, by damaging the prospects of HTML5/H.264, Google is effectively promoting Flash/H.264. All the same patents, except with a proprietary closed source browser plugin thrown into the mix as well. Not exactly a victory for freedom.
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.
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Since it isn't clear MS got that idea yet, I must conclude you're a time traveler from the distant future.
Or someone who has used their latest products. Off the top of my head, Windows 7 has built in support for MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 part 2 (DivX), MPEG4 part 10 (H.264), MJPEG, MP3 and AAC. A far cry from the old days of just AVI, WMV, WMA and WAV.
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Don't forget Google owns a lot of patents on video compression since they bought On2, and they have no intention of licensing them out for H.264. If MPEG LA wants to start a patent war with Google, they might find themselves counter-sued with the potential of their H.264 format getting recalled off the market.
Re:A classic-era Microsoft move (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a real open standard. Does it require patent licensing? Yes.
And therefore, by doing so, instantly it violates the GPL. Because of the GPL's "no further encumbrances" clause, it becomes illegal to distribute any software which both implements H.264 and derives from GPL code. The "ease" of patent licencing doesn't matter. It is flatly illegal at that point.
It takes a very strange cast of mind to translate "illegal to be distributed as free software" as "open".
Of course, if you don't care about freedom of software or even, pragmatically, about using any GPL code - then sure, "open but nonfree/illegal" is close enough, if you squint a bit and don't look closely and also happen to be in the proprietary software or device manufacturing game - anyone but a hobbyist with a Linux box.
However, some of us want to be both Free and Legal, and H.264 has simply taken itself completely out of the running in that game.
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.
Good news for Adobe (Score:3)
Bottom line: This gives Flash (Player, at least) a shot in the arm.
Up to date versions of Flash player can handle h.264/mp4 video just fine - no Flash wrapper necessary. So you encode an mp4/m4v file, then add a softlink that ends in ".flv". Just one encode and your bases are covered - no Flash encode, no WebM either.
Prepare for web fragmentation (Score:3)
In between IE specific sites and Apple boycotting flash it's already hard to access information on the web with a device one happens to have at hand. Now with this, Android users will be locked out of content owned by anyone who managed to kick dependence on both Adobe and Microsoft. All that remains if for Apple and Microsoft to block Google search and Internet will go to good old walled garden days of CompuServe and AOL.
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Re:Great! Less choice! (Score:4, Funny)
What? That page says "Click here to download plugin".
Re:Great! Less choice! (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing is, if Google doesn't do this, and allows both formats, they are contributing to the success of H.264, and detracting from the possibilities of success of their WebM.
You, the consumer are caught in yet another standards-war. Which side will you be on?
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I'll be on the side of "screw your video, gimmie the transcript"
'course, I'd be on that side regardless of what format the video is encoded in.
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Re:Great! Less choice! (Score:5, Insightful)
Except H.264 is the best codec. Google didn't choose WebM because it's better, they chose it because they own it and (purportedly) because it's open. They did not choose it for being a high-quality codec, they chose it for entirely meta and political/ideological reasons.
Yes. The chief of those meta issues being that distributing any Free Software implementation of H.264 in the United States of America is illegal due to software patent law.
I don't know about you, but where I come from, not getting arrested is a pretty good driver of technology choices, and yes, does tend to trump 'quality' issues. A slightly higher-quality video codec, distribution of which breaks the law, is not even a starter. It simply cannot compete with WebM in the GPL-derived software market at all.
It's certainly very sad that the makers of H.264 have deliierately put their product outside the realm of rational economic choice by using the big patent gun to make its distribution in GPL-compliant form flatly illegal, but, well. Destroying a whole class of potential users of their own product was their choice, even if it wasn't a sane one.
Google, however, have only one economically rational law-abiding choice left open to them if they want to distribute a GPL-derived media player, and that's to use anything but H.264.
I admit I find it rather strange that you consider legality to be a mere 'meta' issue. Do you regularly break the law in your daily business life, and expect others to?
Re:Great! Less choice! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's short term vs. long term thinking. We can have a slightly better codec thats got a thousand patents on it or we can have one that isn't patented. We are talking about a very slight difference in quality here.
Yes the patented codec may be slightly better now, but if an open codec becomes the standard then in the long term we're better off as it will be easier for people to make improvements to it.
With a patented codec we have to pay. Sure it may be cheap now, but further improvements to it will also be patented which means it will never be free. And over time the price will rise and it will become less likely anyone will be able to come up with a codec to compete with it, not because no one else has the skill to do so, but simply because it will be illegal because of the patents.
We have an opportunity to get free of all of this. Yes we have to sacrifice a small amount of quality today. And it is a very small difference in quality we're talking about. But if WebM becomes the standard then you'll have a lot of companies working to improve it. if H.264 becomes the standard a lot of companies will work to improve it. The difference is that one will be patented and the other won't.
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Re:Great! Less choice! (Score:5, Insightful)
H.264 already is a success, a resounding one.
And still an illegal one if you live in the USA and want to distribute an encoder/decoder built using GPL source code.
Any media playing solution which requires getting arrested is not really a 'success'.
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:Great! Less choice! (Score:5, Insightful)
or the reality of "We've decided to stop supporting formats for things that aren't free", would be a more simple answer.
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But then they'd be liars since they're still supporting Flash.
They support flash plug-ins that come from Adobe. I don't remember getting an install for h.264
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Chrome ships with Flash, you know.
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: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: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.
You = Fail (Score:3)
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You can fairly easily do a side-by-side comparison and notice that overall there is nothing but branding and data mining that's missing, really. I personally use Firefox but Chrome would be the only alternative I'd seriously consider, thanks to Chromium. If you want to go in some mad conspiracy theory whereby Google is hiding optimizations and features in a separate Chrome build, have fun.