Multimedia, AV Archive

While Adobe previously said it would support Google's WebM video format within their Flash Player software, it doesn't look like this support will be arriving soon. Adobe's MAX 2011 conference took place last week in Los Angeles. During a Q&A session, WebM support in Flash was talked about. After Adobe was questioned about the WebM support, the response was, "Yes, on the priority list it's not very high because we don't have a lot of customers or real customers who want to do production with WebM. The problem on the production side is that encoding WebM is simply too slow, it's not real time. And it's not JDI too (just do it). Yes, it's a lot of work for us."

ABC.net.au has published an article titled "The Case for Piracy". The writer shows how copyright has been hijacked by corporations and that publishers are their own worst enemies. "One of the main reasons we all have anti-piracy slogans embedded in our brains is because the music industry chose to try and protect its existing market and revenue streams at all costs and marginalise and vilify those who didn't want to conform to the harsh new rules being set."

In a blog post, John Luther, the Project Manager of Google's WebM Project, has announced that Skype now supports the VP8 codec. The VP8 support is already available for Windows users who are using Skype 5.5. VP8 will be used to encode and decode the Skype video call if both the caller and receiver have clients that support the codec.

Ah yes, the MPEG-LA, the company that patent-trolled before it was cool (now every schmuck like Apple and Microsoft do it too). Remember how they once called for companies to step if they had any patents Google's VP8 might be infringing upon? After almost a decade of empty threats against Theora, the MPEG-LA finally started actually doing something. Now they claim (in an interview with streamingmedia.com) twelve companies have stepped up - but, in true MPEG-LA fashion, which patents VP8 supposedly infringes upon remains shrouded in mystery.

A few days ago Sony released the 11th version of their consumer "Movie Studio HD Platinum" version of their popular PC video editing platform, Vegas. A variety of new features can be found in it, most importantly 3D stereoscopic editing support, and a faster h.264 decoder for AVCHD/digicam/dSLR footage.

"Apple have been processing refunds for Final Cut Pro X as complaints flood in from grumpy pros - and it seems they are taking a lenient approach. Although the iTunes/App Store terms and conditions state that 'all sales are final' , when an application does not meet the expectations of a user, like in the case of a 59p iPhone game, Apple have been known to refund the purchase. Now it seems they are doing so with Final Cut Pro X to the tune of $299."

"Music service Spotify has decided to target iTunes users by introducing iPod syncing capabilities to its own software. That's not all, though: Spotify is introducing its own MP3 download store, and can now wirelessly sync MP3s to iPhones and Android devices." Well, if they manage to build client software that's better than iTunes, then more power to 'm. Ah what am I saying, it would be a bigger achievement to write client software that's worse than iTunes.

And the fight continues. Only a few months after the desperate move by the MPEG-LA to get anyone - anyone - to submit patents to a possible WebM patent pool, Google and the WebM community have struck back. A whole slew of major companies have formed the WebM Community Cross-License initiative, basically a sort-of Open Invention Network for WebM.

The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo TV working group ,the goal of which is to "help drive the evolution of MeeGo within the television ecosystem and provide an open framework for industry creativity and innovation".

"Addressing a major weakness its plan to build its WebM video technology into the Web, Google yesterday released a version of its VP8 video encoder and decoder designed to be baked into hardware. The hardware implementation of VP8 is called H1 and now Anthill, said Aki Kuusela, engineering manager of the WebM Project, in a blog post. It comes in the form of RTL, or Register Transfer Language, a very low-level description close to how processors actually perform their instructions, and it's available royalty free."

Well, well, well. The MPEG-LA is showing its true colours. After a decade of threatening to patent troll the living heck out of Theora, the company led by a patent troll has now finally put its money where its mouth is. Well, sort of. They don't actually have any patents yet, they're asking people to submit patents they believe are essential to the VP8 specification. Update: MPEG (so not the MPEG-LA) has announced its intent to develop a new video compression standard for the web which will be royalty-free. "The new standard is intended to achieve substantially better compression performance than that offered by MPEG-2 and possibly comparable to that offered by the AVC Baseline Profile. MPEG will issue a call for proposals on video compression technology at the end of its upcoming meeting in March 2011 that is expected to lead to a standard falling under ISO/IEC 'Type-1 licensing', i.e. intended to be 'royalty free'."

Piracy hurts the content industry. This has been the common line of thought in the piracy and copyright debate for years now, and even though study after study highlight that this is simply not the case - or at least, not as clear-cut a case - the content industry and its avid fans continue to spread this party line. Well, yet another study, this time from the Japanese government, has concluded that piracy actually increases anime DVD sales.

"Previously, I demonstrated creating an animatic using Kino. That was an interesting exercise, but Kino is not really up to that kind of job. Blender, on the other hand, has a very nice "video sequence editor" built into it, and it turns out to be very well adapted for this kind of task."

"Even if you don't believe all the hype about HTML5, sooner or later, you'll need to start encoding some video to WebM format. Maybe for internal experimentation, for a pay-per-view or subscription project (where H.264 may incur royalties), because you've decided to jump into HTML5 video with both feet, or because Google announced yesterday that it's going to stop supporting H.264 in Chrome. Whatever the reason, you'll be sitting at your desk or poolside one day, and you'll be thinking 'I've got to encode some video to WebM format'. If and when that day comes, set a bookmark in your memory banks for this article, because it's all about encoding to WebM. I'll start by looking at how WebM compares to H.264 in terms of quality, just to set expectations, and then briefly review the quality and performance of several free and for-fee encoding tools."