Microsoft Slams Google Over HTML5 Video Decision 453
jbrodkin writes "Microsoft is accusing Google of some heavy-handed tactics in the battle over HTML5 video standards. In an attempt at humor, a clearly peeved Microsoft official wrote 'An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google,' which likens Google's adoption of WebM instead of H.264 to an attempt to force a new language on the entire world. Internet Explorer 9, of course, supports the H.264 codec, while Google and Mozilla are backing WebM. The hyperlinks in Microsoft's blog post lead readers to data indicating that two-thirds of Web videos are using H.264, with about another 25% using Flash VP6. However, the data, from Encoding.com, was released before the launch of WebM last May. One pundit predicts the battle will lead to yet another 'years-long standards format war.'"
Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle - you are both black.
Re: (Score:2)
FYI, this article makes it sound like MS is the only backer of H.264 and is out to lash at Google.
But H.264 is backed by MANY companies out there, including Apple, Sony, DivX amongst others.
Its a file format adopted by BlueRay, QuickTime, DiVX/XviD.
Now, if HTML5 would go ahead with H.264, think of the transcoding hours you would spare by being able to simply stream the same content a those popular sources of content.
Re:Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of big media and a whole bunch of tech companies with ties to big media backs H264, sure. But then they can afford to fork over the license fees involved as they get payed pr "unit" sold, and can recoup it from there.
Google, Mozilla and the rest give their browsers away. This means that any license fees will end up being a running expense. And with the download rates they get on their browsers, that is a whole lot of red ink.
H264 is the last in the line that started with Edison's phonograph, a mental world where there are a few big broadcasters and millions of passive "consumers". Not so with the net, as anyone that can hook a computer to the net is a potential broadcaster! And trying to get a "pr use" license out of those, especially if the pricing is in the "big broadcaster expensive" range, is just not going to happen. Until the MPEG-LA steps up and states that the H264 will be licensed for free (price and use) for as long as the patents apply, this will continue to be a issue.
This is the equivalent of the catholic church having a patent on latin, and attempting to leverage a use fee from anyone writing something in that language.
Re:Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the insanity here is that Google and Mozilla refuse to use the codecs installed in the operating system that you've already paid royalties for (if they require royalties to be paid) and that automatically take advantage of hardware acceleration and any other features the OS offers for media playback.
What Google (and Mozilla) _should_ do if they want to play nice and not just hurt their competitors is to bundle a DirectShow/Quicktime codec for WebM in their Windows/Mac version of their browser. This would also enable all other applications on the OS to play WebM so it's a win-win.
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It has traditionally been possible to both view the web and to contribute towards it by creating sites or operating a server, and all using free software. It is also possible for you to create your own software to interact with the web, either as a client or a server, and all the documentation needed for you to do so is freely available.
If H.264 starts becoming common, then that freedom is lost and it's a slippery slope...
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>>No, the insanity here is that Google and Mozilla refuse to use the codecs installed in the operating system that you've already paid royalties for (if they require royalties to be paid) and that automatically take advantage of hardware acceleration and any other features the OS offers for media playback.
Funny, I don't recall paying anyone for my GNU/Linux operating system...
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"That is bullshit, because right now THE standard for personal broadcasting is h.264.
And it's for the same reason it's so popular for playing videos - hardware support."
Circular logic, as hardware support basically had to come into existence once big media decided to make it its codec of choice.
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Circular logic, as hardware support basically had to come into existence once big media decided to make it its codec of choice.
Does it matter WHY it came into existence, when the FACT is that it's at the core of huge personal publishing platform now?
It's not circular, it's a chicken and egg issue. the FACT is that right now millions of people are eating metaphorically tasty chicken broadcast sandwiches without knowing or caring if the egg or chicken came first.
You simply cannot label h.264 as "for consumpt
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And if H.264 were released as a totally royalty free standard, just like HTML, Javascript, CSS and all the other web standards then it wouldn't be a problem.
Also most of those companies don't produce web browsers... Only Apple and MS produce browsers that support H.264, Mozilla, Google and Opera produce browsers which support WebM.
The Internet has thrived because it's built on open standards, while proprietary networks attempting to compete with it have either died out or been relegated to just providing ac
Re:Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I don't know about that. I would rather just say Microsoft, "Pot, go f--- yourself."
I keep hearing about how "evil" Google is becoming, but supporting open standards to the detriment of patent-ridden corporate rubbish is not really remotely evil. No sir, "evil" would be buying all their competitors to cement their vendor lock-in, and boosting proprietary technology that furthers only their interests, which are attempts to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible. Google is furthering its own goals while benefiting consumers at the expense of bloated corporations and patent trolls who were salivating over squeezing more money out of everyone. As far as business models go, Google seems to have more of a symbiotic relationship with consumers, whereas Microsoft is just a crippling parasite.
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A kettle has a spout.
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A kettle usually has a handle as well.
Re:Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle (Score:4, Informative)
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Cook much?
A pot is generally a variant of an open cylinder, often as deep as it is wide, typically used for cooking soups, stews, and the like, with an optional lid. A kettle is typically the a dome with a wide base designed to catch a lot of heat from below relative to its volume in order to bring liquids inside (typically just water) to a boil as quickly as possible. It generally has a built-in "lid" with a small access area and a pouring spout.
Both were traditionally made from iron, hence the reference
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Actually the reference to colour is from the days when they were used on open fire. So regardless of the material in use they all became black over time from soot. So it implies not just black colour, but dirt as well.
The days when most of them were made from black cast iron as well as the days of clean heat from gas and electricity came later.
Re:Kettle, meet pot, pot, meet kettle (Score:5, Funny)
It's not illegal (Score:5, Funny)
My irony metre exploded. (Score:2)
Is someone at MS taking the piss?
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The difference is that when Microsoft does it, they get condemned for doing so - and quite rightly. So it seems reasonable that Google should also get similar condemnation. It is not a valid defense to just point the finger back at Microsoft just because they have done similar things in the past.
However, the royalties problem does make it difficult for open source browsers. The best solution would be for all browsers to implement WebM as a base. It wouldn't cost much to do without any royalties to be paid.
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The fact it originated at MS was not the problem...
It was bloated and incomplete... There was already an existing fully open standard they could have contributed towards instead of making their own (OASIS invited them to join the ODF board on more than one occasion). They forced their format through ISO using plenty of well documented questionable tactics.
Google have done nothing of the sort, their format is effectively a newer version of the codec ogg theora was based on, the documentation is clearly compl
66% + 25% (Score:5, Informative)
The hyperlinks in Microsoft's blog post lead readers to data indicating that two-thirds of Web videos are using H.264, with about another 25% using Flash VP6
yes, but once Google updates Youtube to only use WebM, I guess that'll show 91% of all online video to be in WebM format.
I wonder what Microsoft will say then?
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They'll celebrate the fact that Youtube suicided, or won't be impacted at all.
The former will happen if they did that move without Adobe supporting it in flash. It may well still happen because all the iPhones and similar in the world suddenly couldn't play youtube content because they depended on efficient ASICs that can't be adapted to WebM and there isn't enough generic processing power to do it without such an ASIC.
The latter will happen if they figure a way around it on mobile devices, and have a flas
Re:66% + 25% (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:66% + 25% (Score:5, Informative)
You are both wrong. The most resource-intensive parts of a video codecs are handled by DSP's that are very specific to the codecs they support. While some parts of WebM will translate to current hardware just fine, some parts of the standard have been found not to translate to it at all. Just read this to educate yourself on the subject before assuming hardware WebM support will be a matter of a simple firmware update:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 [multimedia.cx]
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That ignores the fact that more and more web access, *particularly* for youtube-type content is coming from embedded style devices (phones, TVS, etc), which generally are not so straightforward and may even be incapable of dealing with a different format even with a hypothetical firmware upgrade.
The short of it is, Google is in no way going to try to stupidly use youtube as a 'weapon' like that because they aren't complete morons. Just like MS using that statistic borders on the pointless as those video si
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
A Men In Black reference? (Score:2)
A Men In Black reference? Well done good Sir, well done indeed!
Next up, I'd like a Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure reference.
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Hey Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft,
Nobody but people who spend to much time with the business world or tech world really give a damn if you're in a tiff with google. Just do whats best for the consumer: support both.
Frankly, you're in no position to talk badly about a company forcing new things on the rest of the world.
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That advice would be better directed at Google, since they are the ones dropping support for H.264.
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That advice would be better directed at Google, since they are the ones dropping support for H.264.
We'll see about that..
Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually it doesn't. Encoding free video is free (as in beer) in perpetuity. Nice FUD, though.
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Not all video Google encodes is for non-commercial use. Nice FUD though.
Well of course.. (Score:2)
MS considers their position to be perfectly opposite to google. No matter what choice google makes, MS will try to find a way to spin it as wrong and completely distinct from their own stance.
Here, MS has by many measurements, less than 50% share, and Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all reject H264, meaning it actually has a shot.
That shot is small, as practically speaking, all this HTML5 video stuff is mostly moot with 100% of those video sites using flash players, which gives not a rat's ass about any of thi
Re:Well of course.. (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all reject H264
Chrome and Firefox reject H.264. Safari only supports H.264. IE9 supports whatever you have codecs installed for, which is H.264 by default but can be WebM / Theora / whatever.
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Here, MS has by many measurements, less than 50% share, and Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all reject H264, meaning it actually has a shot.
Er, Safari prefers H.264. Apple are right behind H.264.
Actually pretty funny (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, I disagree with Microsoft's stance, but I will concede that they made a very humorous point.
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First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, ...
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If Google want to pull a Microsoft (Score:3)
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Netflix ain't going anywhere near WebM until WebM has DRM technology built into it. Until that happens, the studios won't let them.
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Netflix only servers 300 million users max. (U.S. residents only). The Internet is actually much larger (global), so it would not make that much difference.
Google on the other hand does global business, so they can and probably will make a dent if they want to. And it seems they want.
FF/Chrome/Opera vs IE/Safari (Score:4, Insightful)
We have Firefox, Chrome and Opera which decide that it's a good idea to avoid a format which is so patent encumbered that you've to pay licences to program a player, to program an encoder, to stream a video and to create a commercial video using that format (try to guess what it'd be like if authors had to pay Microsoft a licence to use the.doc format when they write their novel).
And on the other side, Apple (Safari) which own part of the licences and Microsoft who decided to pay... But neither are streaming anything (unlike Google via Youtube) and both have plenty of money available.
I don't see the problem with Google removing H.264 support from his browser... It's not like if he was the only one who don't support that format nor like if he had a major market choice...
What could have been wrong would be if Google suddently moved Youtube to WebM-only without Flash or H264 fallback AND was the only one to support that format... But the format is open and free...
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If suddenly they did that, everyone would be bitching at google because suddenly they broke YouTube. Especially the mobile market because of the millions of mobile devices out there that currently support H.264 hardware decoding. WebM won't be on those devices anytime soon and even if it was, it would be software decoding...aka kiss your battery life good bye.
I worked in video production for several years and H.264 is a freaking god-send. Finally we had a good codec choice that was pretty much universall
Just a bad arguments.... (Score:5, Insightful)
English doesn't have license fees, making it unusable for everybody that doesn't want to pay. If it had, I guess Esperanto or Klingon would suddenly seem like a better choice.
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Time is money.
Q.E.D. (you had to pay).
This isn't evil. (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is pushing a free and open standard that they released at an initial loss!? What bastards! We can't let them get away with this travesty and have their name associated with everything good about to come from the internet!
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Well, kind of. The specs for WebM are frozen, so it doesn't really matter who controls them. They are free to use, free to implement, and there are at least two independent implementations that I know of.
Google's control over the WebM brand doesn't really mean much. Using MPEG-1 didn't mean that you were locked in to then using MPEG-2 and then MPEG-4. If the next version of WebM is rubbish then there's nothing stopping you from just using something else when you come to replace WebM 1.
Funny (Score:2)
Funny, I don't remember having to pay a licence fee to use English.
Rich (Score:2)
Standards: Simple Questions (Score:3)
There are some simple questions that can make it easy to choose between competing standards.
1. Are they sufficiently similar quantitatively in doing the job?
2. Are they sufficiently similar qualitatively in doing the job?
3. Is anyone allowed to use them without inhibition?
It's not hard. If one of the potential standards satisfies all three of those requirements and the other does not, that is the better standard. Why? Because we strive to be a free market economy. We do that because it is a better answer -- mathematically speaking -- than being a biased-market economy. Free market means satisfying the customers needs (item 1), their wants (item 2), and their freedom to choose (item 3). Competition is one of the pillars of free market efficiency. Encumbered standards create inhibition to competition.
Economically speaking, this is Dick & Jane stuff. The only people who could fail to get it are the ignorant and charlatans.
People should listen to Microsoft (Score:2)
"...which likens Google's adoption of WebM instead of H.264 to an attempt to force a new language on the entire world. Internet Explorer 9, of course, supports the H.264 codec,...
People should listen to Microsoft! What better expert is there with regards to forcing things on the entire world?
No. (Score:3)
'years long standards/format war' ? really ? with what ? internet explorer lost a lot of share to become head to head with firefox. chrome is eroding ie even more. google has much more reach on the web than anything microsoft, because google had come up embracing the web, even to the point of setting up adsense/adwords to enable small websites and advertisers that everyone on the internet was ignoring and snubbing, including microsoft. from webmaster tools to google analytics, and many more. what microsoft has to show against all these ? internet explorer
there isnt going to be any format war. microsoft has nothing to wage a war with.
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"....it dosn't seem to work in IE ...." is like scratching nails down a blackboard ....
Forcing new languages ? (Score:5, Insightful)
an attempt to force a new language on the entire world.
You mean, like,
multi-browser (Score:2)
I predict many years of having multiple browsers installed...
wait - I have multiple browsers installed...
So, I predict many years of, effectively, no difference to end users like me.
Yeah, but (Score:2)
Yeah, but this time, we the people will have someone on our side for a change. Unlike PNG in the mid 1990s and Vorbis around the turn of the century, the implementations we have will be big'n'mainstream. It's nice to not be a marginalized weirdo hermit for a change.
Codecs (Score:2)
What format war? End users will happily play all. (Score:4, Informative)
I don't see the "format war" potential here.
Format wars were VHS vs Video2000 vs Betamax. BluRay vs HD-DVD. And the losers were primarily the manufacturers that bet on the wrong tech, and the other manufacturers that could barely sell anything before the format was settled on. After all users had to shell out real money in serious amounts to buy one, and even more if they wanted to be compatible with the others. The space taken by an unsightly pile of equipment notwithstanding.
Now H.264 is effectively free for end users. I know there are license fees and whatnot but no end user has ever seen a bill for an H.264 player as far as I am aware. In other words: if it's not already included in your OS, you will be able to download it somewhere, and such an installation is usually very very easy. And has to be done only once. Problem solved.
WebM same story. But without the license fees.
And before anyone starts to complain about "installing so many plug-ins", I'd say many FF users chooses FF for the many plug-ins available. It's just that they're called "add-ons" in newspeak.
So it may be a format war, but for most of the end users there is no difference. Video on the web will just play. Be it in Flash, H.264, WebM, or whatever comes next.
Ideology vs Practicality (Score:3)
This is what bugs me the most about Google abandoning H.264.
They're a bunch of ideological zealots saying "Screw your phone, screw your iPod, screw your video card, screw your laptop, screw your PS3, screw all your expensive hardware that supports H.264. We're switching to WebM. It offers no real-world benefits over H.264, but it's OPEN!"
At the risk of sounding like a bitter old man, that's a load of fucking hippie bullshit.
Google can feel good about themselves for being "open", and save a few cents in the process, but all my hardware, which did its job perfectly, now won't. (That, and we won't see hardware supporting WebM until somewhere in 2012.)
Re:And in other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Alanis Morissette claims prior art
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+1 Hilarious!
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Now, the only way I can appreciate Irony is ironically.
Re:Microsoft: A warning from history (Score:4, Informative)
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>Firefox
Kids these days.
Mozilla != Firefox
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Wait, you're going to tout the "standards compliance" of *Netscape*? Ummm... Netscape was just as bad as IE at standards compliance...
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
This is exactly what google's move reminds me of. How many years did us web devs spend banging on about Acid2 before IE finally passed it?
Re:Microsoft: A warning from history (Score:5, Insightful)
H.264 High Profile is undoubtedly more efficient them WebM. WebM quality should have an upper bound of about the same as H.264 Main Profile.
I think in that Mozilla, Google, and Opera are right on this one. This is about openness and innovation. H.264 stifles innovation, while non-patented codecs allow greater innovation.
Today, H.264 seems to make sense, but limits the freedom of people to build software, hardware, and services based around web video.
The lesson of the internet is that libre and gratis standards combined with connectivity help foster growth and innovation like nothing else we've ever created.
I support dropping H.264, at least until all browsers support a freely available codec. Free standards should be mandatory, and costly ones optional.
Unfortunately, the only way to help move some players to free standards is to refuse to support the paid ones.
I'd rather have the option of using both, but value the innovation of having free standards everywhere over that option as a short term tactical move.. That's exactly what Google, Firefox, and Opera are doing.
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I don't see how H.264 is actively restricting aspiring young producers.
Cameras can record in it. Inexpensive software, even software that comes bundled with a computer, can author in it. Various websites like YouTube and Vimeo can serve video in it for free. Yes, that's really onerous. The average person is not going to spend one extra cent on H.264.
By the time that you reach a level where you may possibly have to pay a license fee for it, you're going to have much bigger costs in the realm of bandwidth, pr
Re:Microsoft: A warning from history (Score:4, Insightful)
A 400MHz G4... Let's see... That's something like my G4 Cube, which was release in 2000.
Yeah. Apple's restrictions are all that's keeping you from running a modern browser and OS on a ten year old machine. I seriously suggest you try running Chrome 9, Firefox 4 or IE9 under Win7 or Ubuntu 10.04 a P2-400 with 256 to 512MB RAM. While you're at it, try to play back an HTML5 video streamed from the web.. Let us know how it goes.
Apple is just codifying what is, for intents and purposes, a functional limitation. If I were them, I wouldn't waste resources trying to support ten-year old hardware, either. It's nice that, eg, you can run an XFCE-based desktop under Linux on that kind of hardware and perform basic tasks, but you're still up against the "Try and run a modern browser and play back H.264 or WebM video" restriction.
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I seriously suggest you try running Chrome 9, Firefox 4 or IE9 under Win7 or Ubuntu 10.04 a P2-400 with 256 to 512MB RAM.
It works very well [thinkwiki.org], thank you.
I haven't tried streaming video yet though, but given how much of a resource hog h.264 is, I doubt it'll work very well. Still, I'm sure it'll do just fine with all other HTML5 features, far better than IE5 does for you Mac users thanks to Apple's planned obsolescence.
Sure, it's kind of off-topic on this discussion, but do keep in mind HTML5 is far more than a video codec or two.
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and Apple with safari?
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IE isn't pushing any specific format. IE9 will support h.264 out of the box but will also play other formats if codecs are installed. IE9 will support WebM just fine. It's not like a browser has to pick a format and that's it; Chrome can perfectly well include support for WebM out of the box as well as h.264, as is the situation today. Or they could remove built-in h.264 and support installed codecs. The problem is that you have entities that are deciding to snub platform-provided methods for playing m
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If they wanted to be bizarre, they could even support their internal codecs for things they provide, and fall back to platform codecs for everything else. The only reason for Chrome to refuse to play H.264 video is a political one.
So much for net neutrality, eh?
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"Competition, motherfucker, have you heard of it?"
So what is the problem? This clearly is an interesting experiment in competition, which will have more support? Google pushing WebM with Youtube and Google Video and Chrome and other browsers, or MS with H.264 and IE?
Competition in standards isn't such a great thing. If you're going to release a new standard it should be for a very good reason, because everyone will have to support all standards (unless they totally fail, in which case they're just a waste of time).
I know H.264 has some sort of proprietary ties, but they're pretty weak, and introducing something completely new (instead of, say, enhancing and throwing their weight behind Ogg/Vorbis, which in itself would be somewhat irresponsible if less so) seems rea
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Standards are no good when there are barriers that prevent some folks from implementing them. Standards should be open if they are not then I am fine with competition in standards even when that means things don't just work.
Re:competition (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this bad analogy pretty clearly illustrates what the unwitting proprietary stooges don't understand. Refusal by software makers to pay licensing fees or agree to other terms in order to get permission to implement something, is equivalent to you saying, "Since people have to pay the $60 fee to do business with a single source, requiring the people to watch SyFy in order to get tax instructions isn't appropriate."
The problem isn't that you're barred from SyFy. The problem is that neutral entities shouldn't be making you do business with SyFy instead of letting you choose who to do business with, from all the choices that arise in a free market. A "standard" with licensing dependencies is like a government endorsing -- no wait, requiring -- a particular company.
You are allowed to implement WebM. You're allowed to implement Theora. You have to get on your knees and beg permission (and pay) to implement H.264. That (not just the money itself) is what makes H.264 inappropriate.
Think about all the non-proprietary stuff that browsers do, and what it would have been like if people hadn't been allowed to do all that stuff back in the 1990s. Now you want this one little part of the browser, to have a stranglehold? What's so special about video that we put up new barriers that we're used to not having, pretty much everywhere else?
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And they're so confident that WebM is now patent-unencumberd that they're willing to stake their own money on it.
Oh, wait - no, they're not, are they? They won't contribute to any sort of a defense fund for those folks who want to use WebM in case they're sued in the future. Not so confident after all. And considering how much like flipping a switch it was for the encoder/decoder guys to add WebM support to H.264 products, the odds of it not actually violating H.264 patents are very small indeed.
Re:competition (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's not enough for you that one codec is definitely encumbered with patents and that the owner of these patents is highly litigious, while the owner of the other codec has placed all patents they hold relevant to the codec explicitly in the public domain. You demand that the latter group also provide legal protection for you?
Do you get legal protection against patents for all the software you use?
It's incorrect to say that WebM is equally dangerous to use from a patent litigation point of view. Is it 100% risk free? No. But what non-trivial piece of software is, when a static image file format has resulted in royalties being collected under threat of litigation?
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I know H.264 has some sort of proprietary ties, but they're pretty weak, and introducing something completely new (instead of, say, enhancing and throwing their weight behind Ogg/Vorbis, which in itself would be somewhat irresponsible if less so) seems really crazy.
My understanding is that its patents that sink H.264 on the "open" front. Specifically the lack of open licensing terms.
Of course, my understanding is that Theora and VP8 infringe on a subset of the H.264 patents anyway, although no one is entirely sure which ones and no one really wants to go looking.
Incidentally, WebM uses Vorbis for its audio, so in a way, Google is backing Vorbis. Just not Ogg, instead they've invented a new container format that I think is either Matryoshka directly or a modified versi
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>I know H.264 has some sort of proprietary ties, but they're pretty weak
Weak is not the word I would use to describe the MPEG-LA [mpegla.com].
1135 patents from 26 companies in 44 countries [zdnet.com] does not sound very weak either.
Re:competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Good for you! Can you please pay the Licensing fees then for everyone?
I am certian that if you give Google a few Million they will see it your way.
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MPEG4/H264 will soon be an open standard too. ,/quote>
Are you a sock puppet for commodore64_love? The H.264 patents expire during 2023. That is not soon, that is in over 12 years. 12 years ago, we were all thinking RealVideo or MPEG-1 were the state of the art for web video. If we're still using H.264 online in 12 years, I shall be quite disappointed.
Re:competition (Score:5, Informative)
BESIDES the licensing fees will disappear very soon. MPEG1/2/JPEG are already public domain if I recall correctly, and MPEG4/H264 will soon be an open standard too
MPEG1? Check.
MPEG2? *bzzzzzzzzt* 2023.
JPEG? Yep, was never patented to begin with.
H.264 soon? Well, if 2027 is soon.
And you didn't mention MP3, but that is 2012/2017 depending if you think the submarine patents are valid or not.
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If your "iGadgets" can't be updated with software to support new codecs or variations in existing codecs, then I fear you have already wasted your money on crappy technology.
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Re:competition (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't get it. Video decoding hardware is very specific in what parts of what codecs it supports, and it can't be upgraded through software. The x264 devs already determined that WebM contains algorithms that don't translate well to efficient hardware, and that it will be a huge resource hog compared to current h264 solutions, until dedicated WebM hardware is released to the market.
As for the whole licensing discussion: I think everyone should pull their head out of their asses and stop spreading the H264 licensing and royalty FUD. The H264 patent pool serves only a single purpose, which is licensing H264 for use in commercial products and services. The terms are very clear, only if you make more than x amount of money (somewhere in the neighbourhood of a few hundred thousand dollars) you have to pay a very reasonable royalty fee as a compensation for using the work done by the MPEG group and ITU. I don't see what's wrong with that.
The only arguments against H264 that people can come up with are irrational, and hypothetical, and none of them make any sense at all. What if MPEG-LA reverses their decision and asks everyone to pay up for watchin youtube? What if MPEG-LA challenges open-source codecs in court to crush them? What if the lock the specifications and extort everyone hosting an H264 to pay up? None of these make sense unless you think MPEG-LA are codec fascists who are only out to screw everyone, instead of just trying to make money off a very advanced piece of technology that is widely regarded as the best you can get for video coding.
Does the fact that x264 negotiated a licensin scheme with MPEG-LA for 100% legal distribution of x264 for commerical purposes make any sens if they want to extort non-profit use? MPEG-LA is effectively taking x264 licensees now, or in other words: they make money off the commercial use of an open-source codec that's freely available for non-profit use.
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You don't get it. Video decoding hardware is very specific in what parts of what codecs it supports, and it can't be upgraded through software. The x264 devs already determined that WebM contains algorithms that don't translate well to efficient hardware, and that it will be a huge resource hog compared to current h264 solutions, until dedicated WebM hardware is released to the market.
Oh, I get it. This is a very similar situation to the earlier days of video cards that supported "Windows acceleration" instead of more generic graphical acceleration. Software is fluid and has been since the dawn of computers. Device makers have lots of options to allow them to accelerate H.264 content without some artificial lockout of other technology, especially when that technology has been around for MANY years.
WebM is based on technology that predates H.264 by years (VP3.2 was the first open versi
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Netflix will also be a big player in how this all plays out.
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Congratulations. You just admitted to being a proud member, in good standing, of "sheeple." Your thinking on the matter lacks depth of understanding beyond your own immediate interests and fail to appreciate how the larger ecosystem can have tremendous benefits to you and your entertainment media cravings.
But let me help explain this in simple terms for you:
When technologies are legally encumbered, the only parties who can play in that arena are "the big players" whose interests do not lie in giving you t
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I dunno about Google, but the issue for Mozilla Foundation is that by supporting the closed format, you're enabling a two tier web with aspects that users in developing countries etc. won't be able to access. As long as Safari and IE do not support a free codec, kids in Sudan (*) might not be able to encode video for the web. As long as Chrome supports H.264, there's weak incentives for rich people (*) who just want it to work, to move to something else.
(*1) "Kids in Sudan" is a placeholder for whatever poo
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Ok, so if Chrome is no longer going to support H.264 then it won't be able to support YouTube except via Flash.
Have you been living under the rock for the last year? YouTube HTML5 beta has been streaming WebM for a while now, and Google says that 90% of all videos are already transcoded. If they say that they'll remove H.264 in Chrome "in a few months", it's probably when HTML5 support goes out of beta on YouTube.
If they require all YouTube streaming to be done in WebM, I certainly won't be going there.
They will still be serving it in Flash for a long time. That said, Adobe said they're going to support WebM in Flash...