10. Why do you appear to be opposed to promoting an open, royalty-free, non-patent-encumbered video codec? Is it because said codec is currently not promoted by Apple? If Apple were to switch to WebM and drop H.264 tomorrow, would you then herald it as a great move?

When will flash release a version with webM build in? Flash plays a critical role in mass adoption of this codec.

When will flash release a version with webM build in?

When will flash release a version with webM build in? Flash plays a critical role in mass adoption of this codec.
...
This move greatly helps flash because now flash will be able to play everything "out of the box" and most web designers wont have to change anything.

The people who argue H.264 is better aren’t those paying the licence fees. Not one.

I personally haven't seen Flash crash in... Well, ever since I started using Windows 7, I guess (release day).

It's hard to see this as a purely selfless "support open standards" move

Why does Google support H.264 through YouTube and Android?

The article's a little hyperbolic and has some inaccuracies.

1.) strictly speaking, h.264 and WebM are equivalent with respect to royalties and patents with the exception one of the holders of VP8-related patents (Google) has given public license to them; WebM will be cheaper, but not free. The royalty-free nature of h.264 is now set to expire in 2014, but so will many of the patents covering it.

2.) MPEG-LA wouldn't be a patent-troll per se. They were formed by the consortium of the technology developers and original patent holders and they've always been up front about their claims.

3.) Is correct, but it's not clear why it's important. It will take a few years before the technology is pervasive, at which time it probably won't be relevant.

4.) Some browser makers. However, web browsers make a minority of the video distribution and production space. Almost all modern video tech outside of the web is based off h.264.

6.) VP3 is improperly compared to h.264. It's much closer to ISO/IEC 14496-2 which came out a year prior to VP3. ISO/IEC 14496-2 (h.264) are most closely comparable; they are contemporaneous and use many of the same technical approaches.

7.) This overlooks the fact that perceived patent issues with VP8 and it's predecessors contributed to the sale of VP8 to Google.

9.) It's a loaded question. The browser should rely on the platform it runs to provide support for codecs. The only reason this conversation exists at all is because some want to move responsibility for implementing video codecs directly into the browser itself instead of the operating environment (the idea being that it might simplify implementation and consistency).

10.) I don't think Apple cares, honestly. They use h.264 because everyone else does. Their platforms offer video playback and transcoding through a common API and a codec plugin architecture (as does Microsoft). Adding support for WebM really only requires pushing out the codec in an OS update (or an OS X download). You don't find WebM anywhere yet, thought, so why add bloat?

The arguments are kind of silly. Google has good reasons to push for adopting a codec wholly controlled by them as the de facto standard. It gives them the ability to be the sole arbiter on matters of DRM, etc. For Apple and Microsoft, it's pretty much an annoyance. For the video production and distribution industry, it'll be an enormous pain in the butt.

To me, this raises a better question: Chrome isn't a serious browser, it's only raison d'etre is to make tracking everyone that much easier and making Google's job of marketing to you that much easier. The questions we should all be asking is how to escape Google's grips and not stupid crap about some proprietary video codec that you shouldn't want to use anyway.

If you're going to fight H.264 because of the patent mess, you have to make sure your arguements are based on things that are true. Don't argue technical superiority. Stick to your point...

I'm surprised by how many people use Firefox. I've had the most problems with in the past few years.

One one side, there's people who applaud the move, who are happy that Google is pushing an open, royalty-free and unencumbered video codec (irrespective of Google's motivation). On the other side, there are the H.264 supporters, who believe that H.264 is the one and only choice for HTML5 video.

You are a proponent of Apple using its influence to diminish the importance of Flash for the web. Yet, when Google makes similar moves to rid the web of a similarly closed and patented, albeit different type of technology, you do not support them. Why is Apple promoting an open web a good thing, but Google promoting an open web a bad thing?

What about this one - that's conveniently overlooked by the "we're not going to pay royalties" brigade. Currently commercial video is encoded using H.264 for a variety of media. What additional costs, that will be passed on to the consumer, will be involved in "retooling" then creating and maintaining new production workflows to spit out WebM encoded video purely for delivery by a Google dominated web video
market?

How will those costs compare to the current fees associated with using H.264? I personally believe this will be a double-edged sword, but as there are currently no royalties being charged for H.264 for private web use anyway, I thnk the ultimate situation will be an increase in cost of commercial video delivered via WebM.

Of course private video will remain free, just as it currently is, but of course "we can't trust them". We can however trust Google, so they tell me...

Can't somebody object to removal of support for one codec, without being opposed to the support of another?

Well, you first have to understand that it's only recently that IE became an acceptable browser again from a user's point of view, with IE8. IE 7 and IE 6 were really terrible (IE 7 especially).

For most people, Firefox just works. It's not #1 cracker target, so it's a better choice than IE for a cautious sysadmin.

Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM? If not, how will Chrome users watch this content other than by resorting to Flash Player’s support for H.264 playback?

By that I gather you mean the group who support H.264 because it is an internationally recognised INDUSTRY STANDARD, that is used in every other major form of digital content delivery, AND has consistently delivered a superior end product?

So how much does Apple profit from reducing the web's dependency on Flash? How much does Google profit by forcing a WebM standard on everyone? The answer to the latter is very very obvious, and multi-pronged. The former not so much. Then there's the proven performance and battery life issues with Flash, that have only been partially addressed after Apple took the stance. And comparing Apple's influence on the web to Google's? Please - you're kidding right?

What about this one - that's conveniently overlooked by the "we're not going to pay royalties" brigade. Currently commercial video is encoded using H.264 for a variety of media. What additional costs, that will be passed on to the consumer, will be involved in "retooling" then creating and maintaining new production workflows to spit out WebM encoded video purely for delivery by a Google dominated web video market? How will those costs compare to the current fees associated with using H.264? I personally believe this will be a double-edged sword, but as there are currently no royalties being charged for H.264 for private web use anyway, I thnk the ultimate situation will be an increase in cost of commercial video delivered via WebM.

Of course private video will remain free, just as it currently is, but of course "we can't trust them". We can however trust Google, so they tell me...

Not to derail the thread Sagum, but what OS and version of flash are you using? I use flash constantly on Fedora 14 (the 32 bit version) and it very rarely crashes. When it does, it only crashes flash, not the OS, not even the browser. At most I have to reload the page. And it only ever crashes on videos.(usually when I have multiple videos going)

Firefox supports h.264 courtesy of an installed Flash plug-in.

Now, I know some people are going to try to argue that WebM isn't inferior to H.264. But it's quite well known that H.264 has superior motion compensation, among other things. There's a lot of subjectivity, but H.264 seems to compress at least slightly better or have slightly better image quality. Just accept it.

It has also been shown that H264 is superior.

And it is a fact that it is very widely spread.

We're facing the problem that we'll have to use twice the storage, and a LOT of energy (think YouTube) to transcode the existing H264 content to WebM/Theora.

And considering most browsers in use ARE open source, isn't it really Apple and Microsoft who are being a bit inconsiderate?

WebM may be open source, but that doesn't mean Google doesn't control it.

If Google are really serious about this openness thing, they should set up an organization so many different companies can work together on WebM, or maybe donate it to W3C or another standards body. Right now, despite being OSS, Google de-facto controls WebM. And although it is certainly bad that h264 is patented and all that, it is at least controlled by more than one company.

That being said, I definitely consider WebM to be the lesser of two evils.

IE6 was really terrible? Thanks for the tip, this is my first day reading tech news.

Anyways IE6 was far worse than 7.

Call it free standard if you wish. In the context of Open Web, open standard includes royalty free licensing.

By that I gather you mean the group who support H.264 because it is an internationally recognised INDUSTRY STANDARD, that is used in every other major form of digital content delivery, AND has consistently delivered a superior end product?

Yet funny enough the tag has no specified file format and people were quite happy to use GIF even with all the patenty goodness that came with the territory. Let the marketplace dictate what format rises to the top.

Wow... Congratulations for destroying your point all by yourself !

It's precisely because of the Unisys incident (which happened due to widespread use of GIF) that so much people *don't* want of a format encumbered by patents, obfuscated licensing terms and royalties on the web. And I'm ready to bet that it's also because of it that the W3C now specifies that any web standard must be royalty-free.

Hooking to system APIs is fine for a browser aimed for that platform but it just simply doesn't suit a browser that is aimed at being consistent on multiple platforms. Like for example if Firefox hooked to system APIs one couldn't anymore say "works on Firefox", they'd have to say "works on Firefox if [condition]"

Secondly, it would indeed create lots of extra work. At the moment if there is a problem with one or another feature and they get a bug report then it's quite easy to find, but if they hooked to native APIs and there was a bug somewhere there Mozilla would get lots of bug reports that actually have nothing to do with Firefox. Ie. it would mean lots of bogus bug messages and more work to sift through all of them. Not to mention the work needed to support all the different APIs. It does all add up to quite a lot.

So Google already have "set up an organization so many different companies can work together on WebM". exactly has been happening now for over six months.

I can't see how WebM could possibly be any more inclusive

Probably because they never announced support for WebM.
Just support for the VP8 codec.

‘@johndrinkwater: Hey @adobe @jdowdell when is that Flash update with #VP8 coming? 8 months a long time with no news… supporting #WebM container too ?’

‘@jdowdell: @johndrinkwater @adobe Sorry, tweeted yesterday that I hadn't seen timing guidance yet on Adobe WebM integration. 'Spect that'll change. ;-)’

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...

At worse WebM causes a minor dent in MPEG-LA's protection racket, it isn't going to have any affect on the broadcast world or most hardware devices, Apple will likely never adopt it so it will be relegated to Android for mobile, it will always be a red headed stepchild when it comes to Windows, etc. etc.

Google claim to believe that VP8 does not infringe on any third-party patents, but they don't offer indemnity to companies planning to use VP8, so apparently the belief is not held with much conviction.

Hooking to system APIs is fine for a browser aimed for that platform but it just simply doesn't suit a browser that is aimed at being consistent on multiple platforms.

I'm not so sure. When you have a format like this that a major video site uses, a format that everyone uploading to there will use and a format that anyone has the freedom to implement these things have a habbit of encroaching like sand filling in a lot of crevices.

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.

In the traditional sense, H.264 is an open standard.

At the time of its development, VP8 was a commercial product, licensed by On2. Keeping the specifics of its codec secret was a deliberate goal of the company. Though it has since been published and to some extent documented, the major design work and decision-making was done behind closed doors, making it at its heart quite proprietary.

(Google) hasn't taken any steps to submit WebM to ISO, ITU, or SMPTE for formal open standardization.

What H.264 isn't, however, is royalty-free.
...
The result is that anyone wanting to distribute an implementation of H.264 must obtain licenses for all of the different patented techniques that they use, and these licenses typically come at some cost.

the threat with both of those codecs [Theora and VP8] is that they may, in fact, infringe on one or more patents, in spite of efforts to the contrary. If this turns out to be the case, one or both of the codecs might end up in a very similar position to H.264, as far as royalties are concerned.

Is freedom all it's cracked up to be?

Then we somewhat agree. H.264 is certainly not suitable for widespread use on the web, but there are several other present and future video codecs which could do the job, and the W3C shouldn't cramp the spec by saying now "hey, you're going to use THAT ONE !".

My problem is that your example is terrible. If you want to advocate the solution used by the img tag, just say something like "At the time the specification for it was written, PNG did not exist. It is now proven to the best format for high-quality images on the web, with JPEG as a good second."

Advocating the img solution while talking about GIF is like saying "Oh, the US legal system is perfect, and the lawsuit which that lady won against McDonalds perfectly proves my point".

How about "Just install a decent browser"?

Finally, I have to say that the MPEG-LA is actually doing everyone a favour by starting a patent pool for VP8. Dealing with a single company to obtain a license is vastly preferable to identifying each company and separately negotiating licenses.

Ah but this a key point - a world without royalty payments is a world where neither VP8 nor H.264 would exist. VP8, as you know, was created by On2 technologies. In a world without royalty payments, On2 technologies would never have made that investment in the first place and VP8 would not exist.

As for your second point, the patents exist regardless of whether a patent pool is formed or not. Any rights holders who wish to kill VP8 would never join the pool. That is independent of the MPEG-LA.

Don't you know? ISO et al. are evil when they ratify a Microsoft standard, but holy sacred good when they ratify anything else using the exact same process.

Because Firefox is shit on Mac OS X and Opera a walking joke reminiscent of 2000.

My original point was that no evidence has been provided that VP8 does not read upon any non-Google patents. Until such evidence is produced, stating that VP8 is royalty free is premature.

Hey I am all for open standards but you H.264 is a standard in the video world and to remove it from the browser is just plain dumb

To make content makers encode the same video with multiple codecs is also dumb. Think about all the waste of storage, time and bandwidth. That's what Google proposes though.

Sorry but it does not seem reasonable to the content providers just because Google has a bug up its butt.

The point is that H264 is widely adopted already, and now one browser decided to drop support for it, even though it was already there.

My original point was that no evidence has been provided that VP8 does not read upon any non-Google patents. Until such evidence is produced, stating that VP8 is royalty free is premature.

Regarding your point about software patents, yes plenty of low-quality patents are granted, but is that an argument to declare one area of subject matter unpatentable? To me, it is an argument for improving the examination process.

H264 is a closed standard. That makes it incompatible with the web.

They already are! They are offering videos in several bitrates and resolutions. They might as well do it in an open format.

And you are forgetting that Google is one of the biggest video content owners, through YouTube.

What utter nonsense. Google is a content provider too!

By that I gather you mean the group who support H.264 because it is an internationally recognised INDUSTRY STANDARD, that is used in every other major form of digital content delivery, AND has consistently delivered a superior end product?

How much does Google profit by forcing a WebM standard on everyone?

What about this one - that's conveniently overlooked by the "we're not going to pay royalties" brigade.

Of course private video will remain free, just as it currently is, but of course "we can't trust them". We can however trust Google, so they tell me...

Gruber's questions still remain valid.

Why does Google support H.264 through YouTube and Android?

Why is Flash allowed?

His final question is a good one, too.

ZNU said it best:

First, it advances a codec that’s de facto controlled by Google

a codec that is a legitimate open standard

“Open source” != “open standard”.

it will slow the transition to HTML5

Yet funny enough the tag has no specified file format and people were quite happy to use GIF even with all the patenty goodness that came with the territory. Let the marketplace dictate what format rises to the top.

Just because a standard is closed does not mean it is incompatible with the web, THAT is nonsense.

No, you seem to have trouble reading. The article said encoding (codecs) not bitrates and resolutions.

And you are forgetting that Google is one of the biggest privacy offenders too and has their hand in everything related to the web. They have too much power, IMHO.

not to mention the MAJORITY of consumers who do not give a crap if a standard is open or closed

The two sides of the argument are (a) those who value open technologies over closed ones, and (b) those who value technically superior solutions regardless of openness.

Now, I know some people are going to try to argue that WebM isn't inferior to H.264. But it's quite well known that H.264 has superior motion compensation, among other things.

It may be time consuming, but it is not impossible. Technology companies regularly conduct 'clearance checks' on products to find any patents they may have to license to sell their product. All I'm asking is that this result of such activity be made public to give other users of VP8 some assurance.

Firstly, a clearance check is performed on a product or process, not on a patent pool. Learn your terminology.

The MPEG-LA do not state that H.264 is a royalty free codec, so they do not have a burden of proof to support this statement.

What they do state is that patents in their pool are essential for implementation of H.264. This statement is supported by the following document:

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/avcCrossRefChart....

If they were to state that these are the only essential patents for H.264, for this statement to be credible they would need to provide a additional analysis to show which patents, although close to H.264, were in fact different and therefore non-essential.

Good thing webm is a separate project that's only sponsored by Google, then. Also, you didn't even address the fact that Google is a major content provider when it comes to video.

How on earth is that relevant? The requirement for an open web doesn't disappear just because most people don't know or care.

...I am done with this.

"...I am done with this.

Erm...Chrome?

Camino?

"Actually, that is exactly what it means. Look up the patent policy at w3.org.

Ok WebM as a container is sponsored by Google, but WebM uses the VP8 codec, that was developed by On2 which Google purchased the company.

Oh, I see. Again most people don't know the web is supposed to be OPEN. It is not completely open as long as there are closed parts of it. And that was my point, who cares as long is the consumer gets a good experience.

Advocating the img solution while talking about GIF is like saying "Oh, the US legal system is perfect, and the lawsuit which that lady won against McDonalds perfectly proves my point".