Google To Push WebM With IE9, Safari Plugins 413
surveyork writes with this "new chapter in the browser wars: 'Google in a defense of its decision to pull H.264 from Chrome's HTML5 revealed that it will put out WebM plugins for Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. Expecting no official support from Apple or Microsoft, Google plans to develop extensions that would load its self-owned video codec. No timetable was given.' So Google gets started with their plan for world-wide WebM domination. They'll provide WebM plugins for the browsers of the H.264-only league, so in practice, all major browsers will have WebM support — one way or the other. Machiavellian move?"
Yes, Machiavellien, quite (Score:5, Insightful)
How sinister of them, trying to compete with a proprietary codec by releasing free plugins for other vendors' browsers to play their unencumbered format.
Look out Lex Luthor, Eric Schmidt is stealing your schtick.
"Machiavellian move?" (Score:5, Insightful)
So lets recap:
* Mozilla and Google push for a video tag in HTML that is unencumbered by patents. Apple and Microsoft will not go along.
* Google acquires On2, and promotes it as an open standard, including promises to defend it in court.
* Google promises to release plugins that allow IE9 and Safari to decode their codec in the two browsers which won't support it natively. No one is forced to use their open standard, but it is now an option across all browsers that implement the video tag.
If buying a codec so you can open it, make it freely available to everyone, and defend it from patent attack is Machiavellian, than how would you describe Apple and Microsoft's work to make sure the only way to play a video is the use of a proprietary format?
Re:Then has anyone decided to fork the H.264 build (Score:5, Insightful)
IIRC it also costs oodles for licensing for those making browsers, which in turn raises the costs of making a browser, which in turns hurts competition.
Re:Then has anyone decided to fork the H.264 build (Score:5, Insightful)
And there is the crux of the issue: Assuming a strong distinction between consumer and producer, there's no problem. But anyone astride the cusp between the two is vulnerable to fees that could stop them from distributing a popular video made with H.264. People have already testified here that once the license regime kicks in (for distribution above a certain number) they suddenly gain the interest of the licensing body and have no choice but to pay or to stop distributing the video.
The idea that video content is made solely for profit is the worm in the middle of this particular apple. And it's likely why Google, with their huge investment in Youtube, want to give their users an alternative.
A brilliant move! (Score:5, Insightful)
We learned an important and valuable lesson with MSIE and HTML. We learned that Microsoft's implementation of HTML/CSS is very, very broken. However, because at one time, the majority of users used MSIE, web developers needed to design their content primarily for MSIE. And since the majority of content was for MSIE, users mostly used MSIE. And because most users used MSIE, content was designed for MSIE... and so on and so on in that looping fashion.
So, with HTML5, we have a chance to start anew. We should ALL be adhering to the same standards so that everyone gets a fair shake. But already, there is positioning, posturing, claim staking and all manner of politics threatening the HTML5 fresh start.
Google wants a good cleam fresh start. Why? Because they are primarily content providers, that's why. Their stake is more closely aligned with the users of the internet as we share a common interest -- good, usable content, without irregularities or problems. Good for us; good for Google.
So Google, with this move, is trying to break the looping cycle I described above. If the most commonly supported format out there is WebM, the content creators will design for the most commonly supported format! It will not matter if browsers also support a second format, only that WebM is supported.
Now will Microsoft and even Apple play the "only MSIE/Safari is supported" game with their content? Most definitely. There is still room for the other players to spoil it for everyone else. But this is a pretty good strategy to get content creators to help break the cycle before it starts.
Re:Even more IE plugins from Google? (Score:5, Insightful)
Safari on Mac will fight the fight for H264 on the desktop all by itself. Ouch.
Flash supporting H264 is irrelevant. Or rather, it's a good thing, because Flash can be used as a fallback while WebM takes over the market. Future versions of Flash will support WebM anyway.
WebM will be natively supported on all future Android devices. That's a huge market, and will probably be the dominant mobile OS.
You are clearly biased against Google and WebM. You refuse to look at the reality of the situation. Apple fanboy, perhaps?
Not Machiavellian at all - brute force approach (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary makes it out to be some kind of subtle plot on the part of Google. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact what Google is doing is plain as day. They are trying to convert the whole of the web over to WebM and VP8, formats they control. This gives them an advantage, I don't even really blame them for trying. In fact had they done this a few years later I'd be in support of it from the standpoint of trying to establish a more open video format/codec.
At the moment though, the industry is trying to get people behind HTML5 including the video tag. Googles premature move to try to get everyone behind VP8 means that no sane content provider or web site would support the video tag, since it's such a mess as to what browsers will support BY DEFAULT. You can build all the plugins you like, but you can't force people to install them and you certainly cannot deploy them to iOS devices.
So with this early move, Google has screwed over two groups. Those who wanted to see HTML5 video tag advanced, and those who wanted to push for a truly open codec. Yes, this move harms VP8 by insuring that most sites across the web will use Flash players, and following logically from that will only encode in h.264. After all, if you only need to encode once why would you bother with another format?
If they had waited to get the video tag established, for Chrome to gain even more marketshare (it has a really good momentum), to get solid hardware support lined up for VP8 playback/encoding (because people encode movies on devices too), and for Android to get a huge mass of devices in peoples hands. THEN at that point, Google could do what they are now, say that Android is not supporting h.264 and neither is Chrome - and basically force dual encoding on content providers, and eventually other browser and device makers (like Apple) might well convert to WebM.
See, the term "Machiavellian" implies a crafty and ruthless plan involving many prongs. I have outlined one such above. But what Google is doing now, is not Machiavellian in the slightest. It is the tantrum of a three-year old demanding that everyone use Googles codec NOW, users and HTML5 and content provider storage/encoding costs be damned.
I have backed Google many times in the past, said that basically they were a good company at heart. I still think they are but for the setback they have caused in forcing us all into a new dark age of flash players for video across the web - for that, I have dropped Chrome, and switched all my default search engines to Bing *shudder*. I think Google has somehow totally lost focus on what is good for the industry or the consumer, and are going totally now for what is good for Google and no-one else.
Re:Start your betting (Score:5, Insightful)
Do people think before posting idiotic comments like this?
My Mac already has many codecs installed that Apple doesn't officially support. Nothing Apple can do about it. What's one more?
What incentive would MS or Apple have in blocking it?
Re:The Platform Battle (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what you drugs you might be on but I want some. Since when have Microsoft and Apple been Google's friends? Microsoft and Google started a little cold war around the time Google first became a verb, and it became a hot war with the release of Bing. They have been slugging it out ever sense and this is just another round. Apple and Google have not exactly been at each others throats they way Google and Microsoft has but the have very different interests, Google wants the browser to be the Application, Apple wants to essentially go back to the way things were in the early days and push a bunch of tiny network aware Apps. Only this time Apple wants to sell you those Apps, and wants you to search for them in their App store. That does not leave much room for Google, who wants you doing as much as possible on the Web.
I don't think Google has a bad relationship with the Mozilla foundation, I guess Chrome is competition but I doubt there is much anger over it. Google has done a lot to boost Mozilla.org products over the years and if anything I am sure Mozilla sees this push for WebM as a big plus. They can't ship a built in H.264 decoder but they can ship WebM so as a user I am pretty happy about this and I would guess the developers are too.
I don't care to speculate about MPEG LA, I don't know about and history Google has with them. What I am saying is that I don't see this impacting the landscape much with regard to who Google's friends and foes are or even who is ambivalent. It might raise they stakes with some but only where they were already high.
Re:Then has anyone decided to fork the H.264 build (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have any ads on your page, even if you are using using just ad words and you show that video it might be argued you are using it commercially.
No. The license only demands fees if you actually charge for individual works (such as how iTunes sells TV shows). Ads are perfectly fine.
You just being an apologist because you bought a bunch of h.264 toys.
No. I support it because it's superior. And it's not being an apologist if the thing you are supporting is superior in the manner in which you are supporting it.
You, on the other hand, are an apologist for the inferior WebM codec, simply because it's ideologically compatible with you. There is absolutely no way whatsoever in which WebM is superior to H.264 except in terms of licensing. You probably supported Theora with the same fervor and for the same reasons.
You know we are right that h.264 could be dangerous.
I never said otherwise. But "could be dangerous" is a shitty way to live life. It's *not* dangerous, and MPEG-LA has made statements to allay any fears of it becoming dangerous in the future, and the members of MPEG-LA have a strongly vested interest in H.264 not becoming dangerous.
WebM can be just as dangerous as H.264, and you and your fellow apologists (notice the context which makes this term proper) gloss over this. MPEG-LA has already claimed that WebM most likely infringes upon their patents. If you adopt it, you risk a danger that is actually likely and in MPEG-LA's interest, as opposed to an imaginary danger which makes no sense other than to provide a paranoia-induced boogie man for which to scare people into supporting inferior codecs, since telling them that "it's Open Source!" is insufficient to do so.
Re:Then has anyone decided to fork the H.264 build (Score:5, Insightful)
Try buying a video camera that doesn't use either x264 or mpeg2 video codecs. Every major video camera maker, and just about every minor one uses these codecs.
That's the whole point of creating a standard high quality codec. Would you rather Sony, Olympus, etc., all have their own incompatible formats? What's worse, is these formats would be limited in quality by lack of licensing of patents.
By pooling their patents, a codec which is legal, high quality, and universally supported is possible.
So when you buy them, you have to pay the royalty fees. That would be what I would consider maximizing profits.
How is the free choices of other, non-MPEG-LA members an example of MPEG-LA maximizing their profits?
Sony pays more to license H.264 than they receive in royalties from their licensing fees, by definition. So how is this Sony maximizing their profits? Wouldn't it be better to use their own, proprietary codec?
It would be more profitable, but it would not be better. They tried that with ATRAC and UMD and it didn't work. What *does* work is having an open format which is high quality and universally supported.
As I mentioned, it strangled out competition so that MPEG-LA, and ONLY MPEG-LA is profiting from this. It kills any form of competition which is never a good thing. It has been shown numerous times in numerous business fields. And what good does a free to use codec do? It allows people to use their videos and try to make money from their hard work without having to pay even more money on top of their investment of the tools they already paid for or worry about it being denied. If I made a for-profit movie that shows the downfalls of relying upon the MPEG-LA's licensed technologies and promote free to use ones, I'm likely to have the MPEG-LA want to figure out a legal way to refuse it which would cause me to lose time and money, a risk I shouldn't have to worry about. And there is always other problems. Without competition, a company won't bother to improve their products to the extent that it can be because that costs money.
There are other codecs that would work just as great and are flexible and free to use (like Googles own WebM as an example) but the owners of the other codecs don't have the muscle of MPEG-LA, so they get strangled out so the MPEG-LA, and only MPEG-LA, is profiting from digital video codec sales.
Google can join MPEG-LA. And to assert that WebM would work "just as great" is absolute bullshit at this point in time. A standard that is widely supported is far superior to even a better format that is poorly supported. Doubly so when it comes to battery life of handheld devices. But WebM isn't even technologically better in any way. H.264 is superior. The *only* thing WebM has on H.264 is its licensing arrangement (and even that's dubious given the likelihood of it infringing upon MPEG-LA's patents).
To start with, there is no real reason that Google should have to agree to MPEG-LA's rules if they don't want to. Nor is h.264 superior, as tests have shown that they are neck to neck [streamingmedia.com] (with WebM's code not being optimized). The only times h.264 was done better was went it was assisted by the GPU which isn't in most mobile devices. Now as WebM becomes more mature and optimized, it might very well be a more superior.
It also gives the MPEG-LA power over how people use the videos they make. According to the licensing of x264, you will also need an additional license to use your digital video commercially, and since any video made with a digital video recording (becoming quite the norm with most people) that means that MPEG-LA yet again has their fingers in the pie for more money.
Big deal. If you are using your video commerc
Re:Other way around (Score:2, Insightful)
The video tag was starting to see adoption, because all video has unified behind h.264, so it made the use of the video tag actually work across all browsers
Except Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera of course.
Re:Start your betting (Score:5, Insightful)
Something tells me that MS and Apple (and especially, Apple) will do all they can to break the plugin's functionality.
Did you miss the part [windowsteamblog.com] where MS had already announced that IE9 will handle WebM just fine provided the codec is installed, a few months ago?
In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.
It's about as clear as it gets. It also dodges any patent issues nicely as far as MS is concerned (if MPEG LA wants to sue Google, they are given a clear line of fire since Google is the one making and distributing the codec).
Re:Yes, Machiavellien, quite (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but most, if not all, of the major patent holders are part of MPEG-LA.
Try reading the news. It's been, what, two months since someone who wasn't an MPEG-LA member was suing H.264 distributors for patent infringement?
So far we have VP8, with no license fee, which no one has been sued for distributing. Theora, with no license fee, which no one has been sued for distributing. Dirac, with no license fee, which no one has been sued for distributing. H.264, with a license fee, which several people with paid-up licenses have been sued for distributing.
Both Google (using VP8) and the BBC[1] (using Dirac) have deep pockets and would be a good target for patent lawsuits by people with valid patents in their CODECs, but so far H.264 is the only one that has been a target.
[1] The BBC uses Dirac for world-service and BBC America things as well, so has offices in jurisdictions where a software patent suit could be filed.