Ars Thinks Google Takes a Step Backwards For Openness 663
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Ars Technica, Peter (not so) Bright gives a long-winded four pages of FUD about how Chrome dropping support for H.264 is a slight against openness. 'The promise of HTML5's video tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora. ... The reason Google has given for this change is that WebM (which pairs VP8 video with Vorbis audio) and Theora are "open codecs" and H.264 apparently isn't. ... H.264 is unambiguously open.'"
Summary sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Peter (not so) Bright gives a long winded, read 4 pages of FUD
I come to slashdot for the articles but stay for one-sided submission summaries.
Not that I support Google's move but, come on, this is summary is a troll unto itself.
Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that the original editorial does have a point in one regard. The height of "openness" and freedom to me is the ability for me, as the user, to CHOOSE whatever format I want to watch or use for myself. Now, I'm sure that there will be some extension for Chrome that allows for H.264 support. But, having said that, I still never feel more "free" when someone REMOVES support for a format.
Rarrr!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
RARRR WTF, so much FUD blah blah blah... (continue raging in the way that the submitter is hoping for)
definitions (Score:3, Insightful)
The stupid ad hominem attacks by the anonymous submitter aside, Peter Bright isn't really that far off the mark. He is quite correct in the claims he makes, which essentially boild down to two points: One, H.264 is an open standard, where "open" needs to be read in the context of standards, and none of the other are (though they are "open" in other senses of the word). And two, the move is more about having a free-as-in-beer standard than a free-as-in-speech one.
I don't really think that Google is the least bit worried about a few million bucks, so I am doubtful of his 2nd argument as far as it regards Chrome. But there are a couple good points in his first argument, especially when it comes to the question of control.
Licensing fees (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't understand the bit of reasoning Peter Bright made about why Google dropping H.264 is a bad thing because they may incur licensing fees. Especially this last bit:
It's not as if Google can't afford the $6.5 million a year, and by paying that money the company would enable web users to view open, standards-compliant, H.264 video.
What, just because a company can afford the licensing fees means that it MUST pay the licensing fees, especially in the face of other open source alternatives that doesn't require them?
You Can Argue ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unambiguously patented (Score:5, Insightful)
no, i dont want to pay. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
If however, Google and Mozilla remove support for H.264 and only support open codecs, Microsoft will be forced to adopt open standards as well, rather than slamming Google for "imposing a language on the world," as they've tried to do many times in the past.
This is a step for openness on the server side. Although it looks like it's removing options, it is actually forcing options by forcing Microsoft to play nicely.
H.264 is unambiguously NOT open (Score:4, Insightful)
so there is nothing left to talk about. i am creeped out like any one else about google's increasing ability to know everything about our lives, but in this case, google did the right thing in the name of openness by denying H.264
good job google, thank you. ignore the paid prostitutes howling about not including H.264. we who have genuine opinions, not opinions derived from corporate pay, are on your side, and support your decision. thank you
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:3, Insightful)
You do realize that the amoritized cost of an H.264 license for any company the size of google is fractions of a cent per customer, right? The royalties, which they don't have to even pay for streaming Youtube videos, is maxed out at a few million dollars which is less than they spend on a month worth of cafeteria costs.
Re:Licensing fees (Score:5, Insightful)
And besides, if you want to start writing your own browser to compete with the big guys, do you want to pay $6.5 million? Or even $1,000? This would effectively cut out grassroots development of anything that could compete with the big boys, wouldn't it? That alone is worth not having the "feature".
Re:excuse me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:H.264 _is_ open; just not free (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm with others on this one... I don't think Google cares if it has to pay or not. Money is not exactly something Google has a shortage of.
They do, however, want to be able to freely make and distribute products to others that can, in turn, use them to make other products... without having to worry about their customers being sued into the ground, as is happening now.
Google wants Android to succeed, make no mistake. And "freely implementing" H.264 in Android does not allow their customers to freely USE Android without coughing up money for the rights. This is all about protecting Google's interests, not its bottom line.
Google thrives by providing free stuff to people that allows them to better understand them and thereby feeding them ads that meet their needs and wants. Having other companies sue the users of their products doesn't exactly help Google.
Re:So, h264 is (Score:3, Insightful)
The alternative is WebM, which is owned by Google. Google also owns YouTube, Google Video Search, and Chrome, and is leveraging the fact that YouTube, Video Search, and Chrome are popular to try to force everyone to adopt their owned product WebM, without providing any kind of financial assurances to people who do that there are, in fact, no encumbering patents. See a problem here?
Re:Summary sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, while I haven't been around quite as long as you, I have a pretty low UID and I can't remember a time when Slashdot didn't contain it's fair share of immature prattle, tremendously uncreative insults, or pedantry. Remember when half the people here insisted on always referring to Microsoft as M$, or every single post on a mainstream press articles containing the word "hacker" had at least one, probably several, 20-30 comment threads on the difference between "hackers" and "crackers"? Sadly, we've always been retards.
H.264 IS unambiguously open (Score:3, Insightful)
H.264 is an open, international standard. Indeed, there is nothing left to talk about.
Free != "open"
Open source != "open" (in this context)
This has nothing to do with "paid prostitutes". The reason H.264 costs money is that there is a shitload of patents that all have been dealt with as part of the patent pool. WebM may be encumbered, it may not — but we don't know. It's it's most certainly not an open standard in the same way the MPEG family of international standards are.
I do think people need to understand that (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me some OSS types get a little hypocritical in that they talk about OSS being all about openness as in source. They claim that the idea is that you can share improvements and so on. It isn't about money, it is about information.
Well, H.264 is open in that way. It is a standard open to anyone that wishes to implement it under fixed terms. The x264 project is a great example. If you want to see a working H.264 implementation, and try your hand at improving it, well then have at it. The code is there for the taking. Of course if you then wish to make use of it in certain contexts, like implementing it in video editing software, you'll need to pay licensing fees. It isn't free, however it is open.
However it seems that the OSS types then get mad that any money is being charged. All of a sudden openness isn't what it is about. It is no longer a matter of "free as in speech" it is "free as in I want to sleep on your couch for a year." Only things which cost nothing are acceptable, for some reason "open but not zero cost," isn't ok anymore.
In the case of browser H.264 support I think Google is wrong to force WebM. I'm not at all unhappy that there is the WebM standard, I think it is great that a completely free format is out there because face it, we can't all pay royalties. However H.264 is superior in terms of quality per bit and thus has a reason to be used. So the option should be offered.
If it is an issue of money, which I can accept since Chrome is free (though you are right it isn't a big deal to Google) then all they should do is use the system's H.264 codec, if it has one. Windows 7 and OS-X ship with an H.264 decoder, and you can get H.264 decoders for older versions of Windows and I presume for Linux. So just use them if present, and don't play it if not.
Really I think that's the right way for browsers to do HTML 5 video period. Simply pass the request on to the OS's media layer. That way any format the OS knows how to play, you play.
Dear anonymous, (Score:5, Insightful)
While others focus on the definition of "open", I want to focus on the definitions of bright, long-winded and FUD. In defining these terms, I think you are a bit confused. You seem to be using the "bright" to imply having a reasonable amount of information or insight. After reading Mr. Bright's article, I learned a handful of things that I didn't know before, so I guess I would have to consider him at least a little bright. I imagine the rolling of your eyes while reading his article made you a bit dizzy, preventing you from having a similar experience. Or maybe you just know a lot more than I do.
When you define FUD, perhaps you mean that he has a different opinion than you. No matter which side of this argument a person is on, I think that it is easy to agree that this is going to make implementation of the video tag by web developers more difficult and less likely to happen in the next couple of years.
When you define long-winded, perhaps you mean "taking the time to build his position". Clearly from your submission, you are a man of few words. I can admire someone like you that doesn't let information get in the way of expression. I can only wish that life was that easy for me. I keep getting bogged down in considering positions other than my own.
One thing I can say that Mr. Bright has on you though... he was willing to put his name on his position. For all the effort you put into adding your own brand of color to your submission, I just can't understand why you wouldn't want to take full credit.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
Although very crudely worded, "Anonymous Coward" is right. H.264 is created to make money.
Chrome was created to make money.
Don't forget that when evaluating Google's stance on this.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
If Microsoft only supports H.264 and Google/Mozilla/Opera only supports WebM, the winner is - beyond a shadow of a doubt - Adobe and flash. There's no need for Microsoft to play nice, the video tag is not established and they can in practice delay it indefinitely.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should I pay 10 cents for something to be included that I don't need because I have a free alternative?
Hell, let's just replace all the tens of thousands of free packages in our Linux repos with patented apps that each have a _completely_ insignifigant ten cent fee?
Or we could stop the bullshit right now and not support software patents that lead to a system closed from competition.
Open Source philosophy != Free Software philosophy (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that H.264's license structure is based around traditional producer-consumer relationships, which is not compatible with the concept behind free software. Royalty payments are inherently incompatible with the free software model, because it prevents people from liberally copying and sharing software. Note that royalties are the problem; other payment models are perfectly fine (I can, for example, charge you money for copies of Debian -- prior to widely available broadband connections, this sort of thing was not so uncommon).
The problem is that there are multiple axes (Score:4, Insightful)
And most of the rhetoric only mentions one, and open means too many things.
There is standard versus nonstandard (.doc vs appleworks).
There is open versus proprietary (C++ versus Java).
There is open source versus closed source (x264 versus apple's H.264 coder)
There is unencumbered versus encumbered by patents and license fees.
We have formats across all forms that are varying degrees of all of these. The thing that the h.264 people are saying is look - h.264 is the better half in almost all of those cases! It is a standard that was agreed upon by a standards board, not by a single company. The spec is out there and available for everyone to implement, not controlled by a single company. It is free to license for most uses! And it is supported by everyone and everything.
From all business perspectives outside of the open source mindset, it is a *great* standard. You don't have to worry about Apple, Microsoft, or Adobe changing it, or wait on them to make their decoder not suck. It is attached to so many different businesses that there is a huge incentive to keep licensing fees from becoming ridiculous. And it works everywhere.
Do people remember .mov and .wmv files? Do you remember real media's proprietary standards? From a *use* standpoint and a consumer standpoint, h.264 is a great and "open" standard.
The problem is when you run up against the open source concerns about infrastructure. It *is* controlled by somebody. It does have patents, so if you don't have money you can't make a business out of it. It is not "free" - either as beer or speech.
I think the argument the article makes is that perfect is the enemy of good. H.264 is *vastly* more open, consumer, and business friendly than that which it replaces - proprietary, nonstandard, closed video players from Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Real. Going to it as a web standard would be a huge boon for consumers and businesses, and it already has real momentum to do that.
WebM would be better, from a "free" perspective... but, argues the author, it's much less likely to succeed, as it isn't a standard, and it isn't ubiquitous. And so we should go with something that is already a huge improvement over the status quo instead of hoping for some "perfect" free solution. Getting to an open standard is already a major victory for nearly everyone involved. Or is installing a plugin to add h.264 support so much more odious than already installing one for flash? At least you can have your choice of which h.264 implementation you want to use.
Re:Summary sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is only one side.
Bright says the move is against openness because h264 was developed in the open.
I posit that that's irrelevant if the source is open if patents prevent you to doing anything to it.
Developing patent encumbered projects in the open is a great idea because: 1. more eyes means more testing. 2. more eyes means that it's easier to sue competitors who might or might not have looked up the source because the source is freely available.
So software patents, which were born for the main reason of letting big corps use for software market the same tactics they employ in real markets , have the added bonus to make open source more evil than closed source.
The only questions that matter are: is that software free or encumbered? - If it's encumbered is it worth the hassle? :"The [street-smart] people at MPEG-LA have made sure that from the moment we use a camera or camcorder to shoot an mpeg2 (e.g. HDV cams) or h.264 video (e.g. digicams, HD dSLRs, AVCHD cams), we owe them royalties, even if the final video distributed was not encoded using their codecs!" source [osnews.com]
In the case of h264 you have:
- big market share
- current market share being irrelevant in two years' turnaround time
- minor advantage in efficiency
- minor disadvantage in decoding efficiency against theora when dedicated hardware is not present
- being tied for the rest of your material's life to MPEG LA decisions
The last point kills it for me, and after SCO trial I think that being paranoid on these issues is not a bad idea. YMMV.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is simply trading one set of restrictions for another.
The tradeoff is that supporting Software Freedom will lead to more freedom for you eventually, while supporting closed solutions leads to more lack of freedom in the future. You have to create the world you want to live in.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
$100,000 is more than some small companies make in a year.
I don't have freedom if I have to like the pockets of some cartel Shylock.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is simply false. (Lifted from a post I just made about this in the Ars forums) MPEG-LA licenses the H.264 standards under RAND (reasonable and non-discriminitory) terms -- they're not playing favorites to give some companies strategic advantage over others. Moreover, if you think about the fact that there are 1000 patents in the H.264 license pool, and no individual company owns more than a few, you quickly realize that nobody who actually implements H.264 is making more money from it than they pay for it. The idea that anyone is supporting H.264 because they want to get rich off of license fees is ludicrous.
H.264 is a real standard, developed and governed by a multi-party process, recognized by international standards organizations, and extensively documented. WebM is some C code that Google bought and dumped on the public. Other stakeholders had no input into the "specification". There is no formal multi-party governance process; the format is de facto controlled by Google, because they employ the developers. In practice, WebM is defined by Google's code, not by standards documents.
Oh, and WebM is also technically inferior.
And as if that weren't enough, it's extremely unclear, given what happened to Microsoft with VC-1, that WebM has actually managed to avoid patent liability. Keep in mind, Google hasn't indemnified anyone, and their strategic interests are served here even if a patent licensing pool does eventually need to be set up for WebM. So they have essentially nothing to lose by pretending its unencumbered, even if it's not.
It comes down to this (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what the outcome will be - arguments for removing support for H.264 fall flat since Google knows this is what will eventually happen (especially now that Chrome has become much more popular). The end result will be that fewer web sites will be iOS-compatible thereby strengthening Android, since it does support Flash. This is Google playing corporate BS games using "openness" as a guise, plain and simple... Guess they took some lessons from Apple.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
Although very crudely worded, "Anonymous Coward" is right. H.264 is created to make money.
As if no one has to pay the bill for ongoing R&D at this level.
But let us begin with a bit of history:
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.
The intent of the H.264/AVC project was to create a standard capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous standards (e.g. half or less the bit rate of MPEG-2, H.263, or MPEG-4 Part 2), without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be impractical or excessively expensive to implement. An additional goal was to provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide variety of applications on a wide variety of networks and systems, including low and high bit rates, low and high resolution video, broadcast, DVD storage, RTP/IP packet networks, and ITU-T multimedia telephony systems. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC [wikipedia.org]
H.264 has never been exclusively a web video codec.
For a small global sampling of video services and applications based on H.264:
List of video services using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC [wikipedia.org]
A search of Google for "H.264 medical applications" returns about 276,000 hits. A search of Gooogle Images for "H.264," 33 million hits, "WebM," 173,000. A product search of Google Shopping for "H.264," 69,000 hits.
Consumer products, industrial and commercial security and so on.
If your employer can't play his internal videos in the browser, he won't be installing Chrome - he won't be transcoding to WebM - and he has one less reason to choose Linux or Android over the iOS, OSX or Windows 7 platforms.
20% of peak hour network traffic in the states is a Netflix video stream.
Think of it as five hours each evening without a single penny going to AdSense.
Licenced, paid for, and content protected video. No one can simply walk away from a market that size and survive.
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:4, Insightful)
H.264 business model incompatible with FOSS, web (Score:4, Insightful)
H.264 is a real standard, developed and governed by a multi-party process, recognized by international standards organizations, and extensively documented.
That is all well and good, but, the fact stands that it is impossible to legally create an open source H.264 enabled browser (in countries where patents are valid). Because of that, H.264 is simply not suitable as a standard for the open web - if only closed-source browsers can view the web, it is no longer open.
To clarify that point: Even if Google or Mozilla paid MPEG-LA royalties for their own browsers, the browsers would not be freely redistributable, which violates a fundamental principle of free and open source software. MPEG-LA's current business model is simply not compatible with open source software and the open web.
The interesting question would be, what would happen if MPEG-LA made an exception for open source implementations of H.264. Total guess, but I suspect Google approached MPEG-LA with that or something similar, got rebuffed, and went through on their bluff to remove H.264 from Chrome. MPEG-LA's next move will be interesting (remember that they already made H.264's licensing more lenient several times, in response to Google's previous moves of buying On2 and announcing WebM).
Re:Putting the snideness of the summary aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
H.264's licensing terms are anything but "reasonable", given its context. HTTP is free, HTML is free, FTP is free, every single protocol and format standardized for its use on online communication has been free since the inception of the Internet, demanding now the use of a codec that requires monetary payment to create, distribute and display content using it is outrageous, particularly when valid, Free alternatives exist and have already begun to be put in place.