Google to Open Source the VP8 Codec 501
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by
kdawson
from the floor-wax-and-dessert-topping dept.
Several readers noted Google's reported intention to open source the VP8 codec it acquired with On2 last February — as the FSF had urged. "HTML5 has the potential to capture the online video market from Flash by providing an open standard for web video — but only if everyone can agree on a codec. So far Adobe and Microsoft support H.264 because of the video quality, while Mozilla has been backing Ogg Theora because it's open source. Now it looks like Google might be able to end the squabble by making the VP8 codec it bought from On2 Technologies open source and giving everyone what they want: high-quality encoding that also happens to be open. Sure, Chrome and Firefox will support it. But can Google get Safari and IE on board?"
Hurrah! (Score:5, Insightful)
We're all very quick to hit Google when they do something wrong. This one pretty clearly is "do no evil". Thanks Google!
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The devil is in the details; open source is nice, but unencumbered is also extremely important. I'm cautiously optimistic that Google will take this and do something really positive, but we'll have to wait and see. If they are willing to provide royalty-free patent licensing for the technology, then that really would be fantastic.
Re:Hurrah! (Score:4, Funny)
We're all very quick to hit Google when they do something wrong.
We appear smarter when we find ways for good news to not be good news.
"Neat! The product I have in my hands right now has a cool new feature!" "Yeah, but that other product you didn't buy because you didn't know about it or it didn't suit your needs had that feature months ago. (Score:5, Insightful)"
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Actually, this could have some bad effects -- it has the potential to fragment the online video market even further.
There's now no way in hell that Mozilla will ever support h.264. Previously, h264 support for Firefox was basically inevitable because there was no way in hell that Theora was going to overtake h264 as the dominant format.
That said, it's nice that we've got an open codec that's (supposedly) actually decent.
Re:Hurrah! (Score:4, Informative)
It certainly wasn't inevitable.. Mozilla has said again and again, there is absolutely no legal way to include h264 support in Firefox.
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They are full of shit. They can just use various media frameworks like GStreamer and leave it up to the end user/distro/whatever to provide codecs for it. They have however stated they are unwilling to do this because H.264 is Evil and Proprietary and they want everyone to use Theora, because it gives you Freedom, even if you have to put up with a vastly outdated codec with a horrible implementation and no hardware support (of course, users can't be allowed to make any such choices on their own; you're gonn
Re:Hurrah! (Score:5, Informative)
No one is forcing you to provide video in Theora. The idea is that you provide Theora as a fallback, the last resort. It doesn't matter if it's out dated or if H.264 is better quality. It's suppose to be the last resort. The video tag gives you the ability to specify different videos in case the browser can't load the first one you provided.
H.264 is CPU intensive compared to Theora. Theora doesn't need hardware support because it's a simple codec which can be run in software even on mobile devices. Google is already sponsoring an effort [blogspot.com] to get the Theora codec running on ARM which makes this more practical. Theora even runs on IE via a java applet [flumotion.net] so it's widely supported compared to H.264.
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Sure there is.
Firefox is licensed under GPL2, not GPL3, among its various licenses. So, they could put H.264 in Firefox.
Those redistributing Firefox would need a license from MPEG LA, though, and that's why they don't want to do it.
GPL2 terms and patents (Score:5, Informative)
The GPL is not the only reason that Firefox would decline to place an encumbered technology in their browser. However, you are incorrect in stating that GPL2 would allow this. Under the terms of GPL2 section 7, the only allowable patent license would be one that licenses all GPL software used by anyone, because the patent license you take may not restrict any of the GPL terms - like modification, and of course you can modify any GPL program into another GPL program.
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not really. if they open source VP8, it'll be the default for everyone basically. That'd be cross platform, which is important.
There was no way in hell that h264 was ever going to go into firefox. They said flat out it wasn't going to happen. I don't know where you even come up with such an idea?
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Mozilla doesn't really have a choice about not supporting h.264(directly at least). The legalities just won't work out. However, substantial uptake of h.264 is largely inevitable, which makes indirect support of h.264 in FF largely a foregone conclusion. Somebody, whether Mozilla or third party, was just going to hack out a mechanism th
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While this is a good act, Do good != do no evil. The former is existential while the latter is universal.
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so what? They're doing something really good here. Simple as that. That's a whole lot more than we can say for a lot of companies right now. Many don't even care about "doing good". Why argue semantics?
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Re:I don't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
I would disagree. The competition locks themselves out by keeping the best quality codecs closed source. If Google can equal the quality of an expensive codec, and make if open source with no royalties paid by anyone to anyone, that's great. But, don't blame Google for locking anyone out! It's still a "free market". Anyone can make an even better codec, and sell it for less!
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Insightful)
"only someone else with equally deep pockets", or a group of someone's who has the time, expertise, and coordination to do it for free. Like, maybe, Open Source?
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Source has consistently failed to produce anything remotely like a decent video codec so far. The only serious attempt is Theora, and that was commercially developed and donated as open source once it was irrelevant, and then people just polished it up a bit.
Codec design is hard, lots of work, and boring. It's exactly the kind of thing open source developers are bad at.
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Interesting)
Compared to the original On2 codec? It has. Who says the same same can't be replicated with VP8?
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Informative)
On2 VP8 already is a runaway success. Video content producers with an older version of Flash have an On2 VP8 encoder already. This is the format that Flash used just before moving to H.264
Re:I don't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole discussion is moot in my opinion. Hear me out.
What do we need of online video?
Well, it should be ubiquitous. Everyone should have it available, or else web developers will be chasing their tales. FLV was a nice improvement over years gone by where a web developer couldn't predict with any accuracy what video playback facilities would be available to any particular user.
Sites like Youtube, break.com, theonion.com, are almost entirely based on online video and are only possible if most viewers can view the content with minimal fuss.
A codec doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be free as in beer, and everywhere. Flash did it, but it was proprietary and people didn't like it. Ogg Theora is free(in all the ways that matter, shut up Theo), but you'll never get native support for it from Microsoft.
To meet the needs of everyone, Google is giving us all VP8. It may not be the best, but if it's freely available to all browsers(native ideally, or by plugin), then it meets the needs of the web developer community to avoid recreating the wheel for every browser.
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Yup, now all you have to do is get people to use it.
Re:I don't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
ensured that only someone else with equally deep pockets has the time and money to engineer something so clearly better that they can recoup the time investment by surpassing VP8.
Not at all. The cheapest and easiest way to surpass VP8 is simply to take VP8 and improve it. Minor investment, not that much to recoup that it's a problem. If you have a problem that needs a better codec, it might even pay for itself.
It's the restrictions of patents and copyrights that make that difficult; they make it harder to engage in mass reuse, necessitating the massive investment of rewriting things from scratch. Copyleft ameliorates the problem, but nowhere near as effectively as outright abolishing intellectual monopoly rights would.
Re:I don't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, let's try to put it into a computer software context. If the only optimization level your compiler had was "-Op" which did perfect optimization by doing a brute-force search over all possible sequences of machine code of a certain size (let's assume that the input data distribution is known), but using this compiler option then required several years of computer time to finish the compilation, this wouldn't be "good" (i.e., useful) in most scenarios, and no one would do any optimization at all.
In other words, attaining (or even trying to attain) perfection in a specific goodness metric almost always causes other goodness metrics to give very non-optimal results. Another example of this is the "over-fitting" problem in machine learning [wikipedia.org].
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Insightful)
Also note that perfection is exceedingly rare and tends to be exorbitantly expensive when it is accomplished. Solutions that meet a need well enough for a reasonable cost are usually all that's necessary. A company could go broke or a person could die of old age looking for perfection because they refuse to release a "good enough" solution. Even when seeking perfection, releasing "good enough" early enough and improving from there tends to be much more useful than paralyzing yourself refusing to compromise anything from your perfect solution.
It can have to do with trying to displace a "good enough" solution that's already out. It doesn't have to. If that was the only reason or the saying, it would probably be worded "The enemy of the perfect is the good" instead. Too often, we never see a promising project because some minor drawback we could work around easily delays its launch.
Software development teams often use continuous integration, time boxing, iterative development, and many of those other agile buzzwords to prevent the exact problem this saying codifies. The whole point of "agile" development (as well as lean manufacturing and many other modern productivity boosting systems across industries) is that you pay attention to the quality of the pieces as you build them and put the pieces together rapidly into a quality whole that doesn't necessarily have more than the most essential features. Then you release, then refine both the pieces and the whole, then release again with more features and any bug fixes.
"Agile" methods are opposed to top-down methods like waterfall which involve specifying and developing whole fully-featured projects before release, often with little feedback from the target users between specification and release. A good development team can do good work under a strict release-once mentality, but it's much easier to miss your mark with one big go at it rather than a bunch of refinements.
Re:I don't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
.... google can also just implement the new codec on youtube... the whole world will follow.
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oh please. there are plenty of open kernels and open graphics systems available.
this VP8 thing prevents the internet from having to deal with yet another proprietary roadblock.
it was going to happen anyway with h264 in another 10 years. Now we have a technologically advanced codec and don't have to screw around with parasites wanting to milk the internet.
way to go google.
besides, If you really do want to keep the ecosystem going, then start contributing to dirac, and figure out some way to make it work fast
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Bingo. 100% dead on.
I humorously wonder if H264 will suddenly announce being 100% royalty free for lifetime now, or will fade into obscurity.
Given that MPEG-LA is involved, I'd bet on the latter.
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Considering that H.264 is used in Blu-rays, ATSC, DVB-T/DVB-S2, video streaming services like Netflix and of course, sites like YouTube, I don't think H.264 will go away anytime soon.
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Why would we want to "defeat" h.264? Most of us like it. Also, there are tons of pirated movies and tv shows out there that use h.264 in a Matroska container (why they insist on Matroska when a standard mpeg4 container would work just fine is beyond me) and that means it's got a lot of mindshare with the casual pirates (although a lot of them seem to think the codec is called x264 since that's what the releases tend to be tagged with).
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We, the casual pirates, disagree.
We want movies. We don't give half a shit regarding what format it is encoded, in, so long as it plays.
We don't even particularly care about image quality. If anyone cared about the difference between Theora and h.264, blu-ray would be flying off the shelves, instead of slowly trickling out despite major pushes. In terms of media, society has consistently favoured quantity and story quality over "image quality". basically: if you can get more of it, people like it.
We, the ca
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Insightful)
You are lying.
The word here is "wrong", not "lying".
You do not accomplish anything by accusing this this person of deliberate misinformation, aside perhaps from making yourself appear a dolt.
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I humorously wonder if H264 will suddenly announce being 100% royalty free for lifetime now, or will fade into obscurity.
While I do hope for the former, the latter is not likely. Even ignoring the media standards which use h.264, there is the matter of hardware acceleration. This is critical for mobile devices, and pretty damned important even for desktops.
In a way, I think this move may be done specifically to prod the MPEG-LA to commit to freely license h.264, but ultimately it's really just the only logical thing for Google to do. Sitting on VP8 does them no good, and they are not in any industry where owning a codec provi
Re:I don't like it (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is, video codecs *ARE* a case of interoperability.
Video codecs end up in *HARDWARE* on mobile devices. Once you put them there, you're kinda stuck with that, and need to buy a new device to change codecs. Picking a good codec at first is generally a good idea there.;)
Also, let's say people can freely install codecs as they choose. You'll get websites saying you need to download this codec to watch this video, and people will do it. With a standard codec, if a site does that, users can be educated that they shouldn't download ANY codecs.
Re:I don't like it (Score:5, Interesting)
One, codecs are, largely, infrastructure type software. They exist to do the unsexy-but-necessary job of getting content from point A to devices B, C, and D as effficiently and quietly as possible. Like networking protocols, interoperability and standardization are key, you want to be able to release a video and have it Just Work, no matter the end software or device, the same way that you can pretty much assume that any modestly sophisticated computer will speak TCP/IP correctly enough. Performance counts, since bandwidth and disk space, and battery life are all not free; but, as with operating systems, "compatible" generally beats "superior". Also of note, competition and growth do occur among infrastructure software, they just tend to be strongly shaped by the value of compatibility, and so growth and change tend to come about either through backwards-compatible evolutionary shifts, or through sudden, swift changes.
Two, there isn't much evidence supporting the thesis that FOSS destroys competition. It does tend to drive down prices(and, to be fair, it is quite possible that it destroys the role of the "proprietary-but-cheap 2nd or 3rd string player", either replacing it with free software, or with the services of "free as in freedom but not as in beer" software integrators and consultants); but, even in markets where the price is basically zero, you can usually find, at the very least, several FOSS projects duelling for users. Quite a few markets don't even go that far. If anything, by providing a solid baseline, they force proprietary vendors to compete harder.
In the specific case of video codecs, the proprietary market was already largely uncompetitive before Google showed up. Everything was either h.264(or very close variants, like VC-1), at the mercy of the giant-pool-o'-MPEG-LA-patents, or various more or less obscure legacy crap.
Re:I don't like it (Score:5, Insightful)
First, I doubt that it will lock out competing codecs. At best, it will create a common interchange format. There's no reason why software wouldn't continue to support whatever codecs were useful to people. The only thing it might do is make it hard for patent holders on other codecs to get people to pay for licensing fees, if there's a superior royalty-free format available.
I also disagree that video codecs aren't "infrastructure". In my opinion, all file formats are infrastructure and are required for interoperability and compatibility. People can freely dream up new applications while still standardizing the formats those applications output to.
But finally, I disagree with the implication that your "second type of Free Software" should be considered a threat to a competitive ecosystem. Firefox hasn't locked out competing browsers and OpenOffice hasn't locked out existing office suites. MySQL hasn't locked out all other databases. Other FOSS can compete, and they can even start by forking the existing project. If proprietary software is superior enough that people are still willing to pay for it, then people will buy it. FOSS isn't a threat. to anyone doing a good job. It's only a threat to companies who want to rest on their laurels and rely on vendor lock-in to make a profit.
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Isn't this an example of the market choosing a winner? Google could afford to make this free, and we still don't even know whether half of the browser vendors out there will bite. Even if they do, it could take a while for browsers supporting VP8 to penetrate the market.
Reasons to be happy (Score:5, Informative)
There's no bigger software patent problem than the video situation, and Google's track record is good. They stockpile software patents, but I haven't found any cases of them using their patents aggressively. 29 patent holders are claiming to have a total of over 900 patent on h.264! There's just no way to invalidate them all.
The only way we can win this is by abolishing software patents (I'm working on it, but it won't happen tomorrow:-), convince everyone to move to Theora, or convince everyone to move to some super new format.
Really good news (Score:4, Interesting)
Setting aside the fact that it's just rumors so far... if true, this is really great.
I was generally more supportive of H.264 in this debate for purely pragmatical purposes, but if we can have a codec that is both free, and technically capable, it's a win-win all the way.
Of course, there's still the battle to get it supported on hardware side. But then if Google truly backs it (rather than just dumping a tarball of source on the FOSS crowd), it might be dealt with much faster than how it goes for Theora now. Especially if, say, Google will push to make it supported on Android - the volume of devices is large enough that some established company can come up with a hardware decoding chip and make it profitable.
As a side note - in retrospect, sounds like it's a good thing they didn't prematurely standardize on Theora...
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They can back it by requiring hardware running Android and Chrome OS to support the codec in an adequate way that doesn't kill battery life.
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Since they just started sponsoring some mobile Theora work, I would think they will do at least as much for VP8
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H.264 has very heavy processing requirements - it barely works on netbooks and most handheld devices can't manage it.
As a "web standard" it isn't going to work.
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Oh how quickly perspectives change.
It's not a change of perspective. What I want from the codec is that:
1. It's good enough.
2. It's open.
The ordering is intentional. Theora didn't cut it, because their priorities were reversed. H.264 satisfied #1, which was more important to me than #2. But if Google can provide a codec which is the best of both worlds - why, of course I'm happy about it.
Does this help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Open-sourcing it alone means next to nothing: there are open-source h.264 codecs. The community still can't use it without a thorough patent examination, a universal royalty-free patent license, and an indemnity guarantee.
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True, but I doubt Google would do something as pointless as releasing the code, but not making it completely Free.
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They also own the company that created it, and i presume that includes the patents they held, if any. If there are patents that Google now owns on VP8, it's possible those patents could be used defensively against other companies, but trolls are always a wild card.
Re:Does this help? (Score:5, Informative)
Well it's bad word choice in the article (and summary) to talk about "open source" when, you're right, the real issue is patents. However, every indication is that Google intends to release the codec under a royalty-free patent. From the Google press release [google.com] regarding the acquisition of On2:
"Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform," said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google. "We are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2's team and technology will help us further that goal."
Now that's certainly not definitive, but this happened right after browsers started implementing the video tag, with everyone arguing about H264 vs. Theora. I think the subtext was pretty clear: Google intended to resolve the situation.
What's more, the article says:
...with that release, Mozilla — maker of the Firefox browser — and Google Chrome are expected to also announce support for HTML5 video playback using the new open codec.
Now Mozilla was the holdout with H264, so I can't imagine that they're on board if there will still be patent problems. I expect that when this is made official, you'll find that the patents have been licensed in a way that is irrevocably royalty-free. After all, Google doesn't need codec license money. The whole project might be worth it to them if it just makes it cheaper to run YouTube.
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The community still can't use it without a thorough patent examination, a universal royalty-free patent license, and an indemnity guarantee.
I suspect this is why Google has been so slow to announce their intentions: they have probably had lawyers combing through the IP, making sure that they didn't overlook anything.
I don't know if they can do an indemnity guarantee. You don't even get an indemnity guarantee when you license H.264!
But Google has deep pockets and would be the first target of any lawsuits ov
Re:Does this help? (Score:4, Interesting)
Google most likely wouldn't be the first target of lawsuits over this because they have deep pockets. Notice Apple is suing HTC over alleged patent violations in Android, and not Google? Patent attacks are launched at the weakest target to establish a precedent; anyone wanting to fight over VP8 would go for the implementer with the least/cheapest lawyers.
That's why it was a big deal that IBM offered you patent indemnity for AIX and Sun offered the same for Solaris - it's like saying, "If SCO sues you, our lawyers will defend you." I see nothing similar for video codecs, not with h.264, not with Theora and not with VP8.
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What happened to Microsoft's VC-1 will happen to Google too. I'm sure of this.
Few years ago, Microsoft does the exact some thing with VC-1, telling the world and the dog that they will release VC-1 as a royalty-free video codec. Then the likes of Sony et. al. 'helpfully' tells Microsoft that VC-1 violates many of their patents. Knowing that they will lose heavily in court if sued, Microsoft back-tracks and now have to participate in MPEG-LA patent pool.
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H.264 is not open-source. Those decoding/encoding utilities are legal only in countries which do not support software patents. So no, there are no open-source H.264 codecs. You are mixing the concept of a codec and encoding/decoding facilities of it.
It's possible for a piece of software to be open source yet still patent-encumbered if a third party owns a patent on something used in it (like h.264 may be). Since open source licenses are applicable worldwide while patents have limited jurisdiction, use of such software in some countries without a patent license may be illegal, thus negating the applicability of the open source license there. However it has no effect on the entities that released software under an open source license, or users unless jur
Not an immediate cure (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox has already committed to supported theora natively. Are they going to dump that now that VP8 is open? Or are they going to support two codecs now? That would just recreate the problem an open source VP8 was meant to solve.
More problematically, patents. I doubt most people owning h264 patents want an open source competitor, and the media companies are probably more comfortable with an IP protected media format. Google has a lot of money, but patent battles could carry on for years and put the ubiquit
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A given browser supporting more than one codec isn't "fragmentation" in any serious way(gosh, FF supports at least four image formats, and that doesn't seem to have killed anybody). The danger is when different browsers support only disjoint sets of codecs. VP8 seems likely neither to be of much danger nor of much help on that sco
Codecs (Score:4, Interesting)
So now instead of two incompatible codecs for HTML5 video, we will have three? Great!
The only way this will really take off is if Google starts serving up youtube in VP8 to clients that request it. I am not saying that options are bad, and its nice the Google has released this code, but HTML5 video is already hampered by competing standards and this doesn't help.
As far as HTML5 video goes, it doesn't matter so much if the technically "best" codec gets used, so long as a single format is standardised to a large degree. There are better ways of storing photos than JPG, but that's what browsers use and nobody complains. There are better ways of storing video than Theora and everybody bitches about it. I hope it gets sorted out soon one way or another - HTML5 audio is in the same boat.
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One interesting thing about html5 video is you can have fall backs, ie the video in ogg, the video in mp4 and the video in another codec in the same tag.
So if you want to do it right you re-encode in all formats and everyone gets to use the codec they want.
The disadvantage is you need more disk space, but really how expensive is that?
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Yes, you can re-encode the files you want to serve multiple times (I do this for the audio files on my site) but this is a real pain in the neck. It's bad enough doing it twice - are we going to have to re-encode everything three times now? Even worse is if you do not have access to the original raw file - if you only have an h264 encoded file, re-encoding it to theora or VP8 is going to look terrible.
Put it this way: back in the day before Flash video became popular some sites used Quicktime for video, som
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"Put it this way: back in the day before Flash video became popular some sites used Quicktime for video, some used Real, and some used WMV. "
Now, all those players are simply using mpeg4 standard one way or another. Even Real switched to H264/AAC+, they just did some tweaks. Oh WMV uses VC1 and I bet H264 is there very soon as MS made clear with Silverlight.
People just don't get how a great thing H264 served and how much it is liked by industry themselves. The container may change but H264 is there to stay,
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So now instead of two incompatible codecs for HTML5 video, we will have three? Great!
The only way this will really take off is if Google starts serving up youtube in VP8 to clients that request it. I am not saying that options are bad, and its nice the Google has released this code, but HTML5 video is already hampered by competing standards and this doesn't help.
Well since Google does own Youtube.com which was the most used online video site that I'm aware of, and if they make all videos re-coded on site or equivalent to VP8, then this could get real interesting. A lot of weight there to throw around in the online video field.
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Do you also remember what a pain it was when some browsers (IE) didn't support PNG while others (Firefox, etc) had good support. That made no-one happy.
Now imagine if IE only supported GIF and Firefox only support PNG, with no universal fallback that they both could view. That is the situation with audio and video in HTML5.
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There are better ways of storing photos than JPG, but that's what browsers use and nobody complains.
Er... we have multiple incompatible graphic formats on web pages, and nobody says much about it anymore. Once upon the time, people were concerned about GIF vs. JPEG vs. PNG, and now it's apparently such a non-issue that you don't even realize that web pages aren't all using JPEG.
HTML5 doesn't necessarily need to standardize on a single format. You're confusing the issue. It's not about forcing everyone to use the same format, it's about having some selection of high-quality formats (or at least 1) that
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For a start, GIF and PNG are used quite differently to JPEG - there are good reasons why multiple image formats exist. All videos are pretty much the same, unless someone comes up with a codec for low-colour animation or something.
Wow... (Score:2)
More like a battle between IE and Firefox (Score:2)
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...mater because accessing the web on mobile devices has become increasingly common.
But trends are showing that more cellphone providers are putting limits on cellphone data plans [cnet.com] and the more limits pop up, the less likely people are going to be wanting to stream videos. This runs risks that mobiles will be less of a deciding factor for things like streaming video. Time will tell though.
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How do you figure? Even if cellphone data rates were zero, handheld is always going to be gimmicky. It has it's use, sure, but it won't be replacing PCs any time soon.
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There are other details that matter, as well. If the browser in question allows 3rd party extensions, or simply supports video by falling back on the OS-provided set of codecs, then the codecs it supports are user-changeable. If the browser only functions with the codecs built in, or relies on a non-user-modifiable set of OS-provided codecs(the iPhone version of Safari al
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ENCODERS IDOTS ! (Score:4, Insightful)
its all about the encoders !
google can quite easily make reference but until there is High quality encoders then its pretty pointless
making decoder plugins for IE and mac is actually pretty easy in comparison
hardware reference designes need to be seeded also to the likes of TI and STMicroelectronics before it will even start to be useful after all where do all the camera's now do mp4 come from...
its all about the encoders !
regards
John Jones
Not a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The amount of money that Google paid for On2 was pocket change by Google standards. And the amount of money that On2 made every year was in the noise level by Google standards. So it never seemed likely to me that Google bought On2 with the intention of selling codecs for money.
If VP8 really is as good as On2 claimed, Google could save some pretty good money by serving up YouTube videos in VP8 format instead of H264. And even better, Google would not have to worry about the H.264 patent owners changing the rates or changing the rules. So it really would be in Google's best interest if all of the YouTube users were able to view content in VP8. But given the head start of H.264 in the market, the only possible way for Google to get everyone to use VP8 would be to release it for free.
I'm happy about this. This is just a win/win for everyone. If VP8 is decently competitive with H.264, and it is completely free, then as shutdown -p now commented [slashdot.org], there is no longer any need to choose between good compression and free software. Everyone can have both!
steveha
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If VP8 really is as good as On2 claimed, Google could save some pretty good money by serving up YouTube videos in VP8 format instead of H264. And even better, Google would not have to worry about the H.264 patent owners changing the rates or changing the rules.
I don't think Google really wants to re-encode their entire YouTube catalog in yet another codec, but V8 serves a very particular role in this picture.
Google is basically keeping ISO/IEC MPEG in check by basically stating "if you do something stupid, we'll do everything possible to use V8 to make your life harder". So we may see some PR work and posturing, and V8 will likely end up in Google Chrome as well.
Whether everyone will jump to using V8 is still questionable at this point. But having it around will
What I would ask Google is.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Was this decision taken after the urge of FSF or they had it in their plans? I think the lobbying and urging by FSF to a corporate like Google seems somewhat undignified, at least to me. This act seems of higher quality and nature, be whatever its motivations are.
But yeah, I would be curious to know from the Google Insiders as how much of FSF urging help?
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>I think the lobbying and urging by FSF to a corporate like Google seems somewhat undignified, at least to me.
Why? If corporations get to lobby government, which is supposed to be of and by the *people*, and
non-profits can do so as well, why can't a non-profit lobby a corporation? Compare a (call to) boycott.
They might be On2 something here... (Score:5, Funny)
Safari and IE? (Score:4, Interesting)
But can Google get Safari and IE on board?
What?
Just make it the default format for Youtube, and everyone will include it, just to get rid of Flash. Apple hates Adobe, and Microsoft merely dislikes it, so no tears are going to be shed.
Just need flash (Score:3, Interesting)
> Sure, Chrome and Firefox will support it. But can Google get Safari and IE on board?"
They don't have to- they just need to convince Adobe to get on board and they are set. Web Developers will be able to have a Flash fallback without needing to re-encode their videos
More than just browsers (Score:4, Insightful)
H.264 is in *everything*, even Flash. It's in all the hardware, from smartphones to PC GPU's. Camcorders make it. It's on Blu-Ray and iTunes and YouTube.
This move with VP8 is likely to keep MPEG licensing free from 2016 through the expiration of the patents. It's not going to displace H.264, though. Even if everyone in the world agreed to replace H.264, it would take a decade or more. Even if you don't know it, most of the post-DVD video you've watched was H.264.
Apple and Microsoft don't need to support it (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple delivers video through the Quicktime architecture and Microsoft delivers video either through DirectShow or MediaFoundation. These frameworks are pluggable and CODECs can be easily installed on these platforms.
What is missing is a method of delivering the CODECs to the users. Google can make the CODEC part of Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Earth, etc... there are countless ways in which Google can proliferate the CODEC to the consumer. The real issue comes in mobile devices. Delivering to the Microsoft and Apple phones. On the desktop, the CODEC issue is already taken care of.
As for supporting the VP8 CODEC on iPhone, I don't recall seeing anything that specifically bans third party CODECs on the phone itself. In fact, given that the hardware encoder in slingbox appears to be either WMV9 or VC-1 (I haven't verified it, but I read it somewhere), SlingPlayer for iPhone almost certainly is delivering a 3rd party CODEC to the device. It might simply be an issue of making a new player that triggers on VP8 media.
As for the Microsoft phone, it's both easier and harder. I have implemented low complexity CODECs in
My greatest dreams at the moment is Microsoft implementing vectorization extensions in
All said and done, VP8 can be proliferated pretty easily. At least for a company like Google who has both the means to implement it as well as the means to deploy it.
PSNR Graphs (Score:5, Interesting)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_Frame [wikipedia.org]
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Chrome Frame FTW!
Seriously, we "frame" all our intranet IE users. The site works in IE, but CF gives us a way to do CSS3/JS features that gracefully fail on IE. If the user wants the good experience they run FF, Safari, Chrome, or Opera... or simply follow the prompt to install ChromeFrame.
Google makes our lives easier.
coffin? (Score:2)
You see what it took to kill IE6. MS hasn't supported it for what, 2 years and it's finally now about to die?
Not supporting this video codec is unlikely to kill IE.
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Yeah, I suppose it might be a bit of a stretch. But things have changed quite a bit from IE5/6's total domination to how things are now, and not supporting... say youtube, would knock IE down another peg.
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You seem to be conveniently forgetting the reasons behind IE6's - uhhh - "extended" life. Those silly programming tricks that enabled crazily hacked "applications" to run only in that version of IE. Without all that nonsense, IE would have died long ago.
IE7, 8, and the upcoming version 9 don't have that legacy baggage.
Failure to support something as potentially popular as this new codec *could* spell IE's demise. I'm not predicting anything, but the possibility is there.
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By its end it was long in the tooth, and lacked key features of the likes of Firefox, but back then it opened up a lot of new possibilities for a web develope
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to some things i read the other day, the hardware support for h.264 is really just a programmable DSP in most cases, so they could program support for VP8 if it were being seriously considered, and that appears to be the direction of things.
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I expect there are some programable components, but adding whole a new codec to existing hardware decoders may be asking a bit much.
However, On2 already offered VP6 video decoder hardware designs like this one: http://www.on2.com/index.php?549 [on2.com]
And, as I understand it, one of the big factors in the VP8 codec design was correcting issues with VP7 that made it hard to implement efficiently in hardware (or parallel software for that matter). So, I would expect them to be working on VP8 hardware decoders.
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According to some things i read the other day, the hardware support for h.264 is really just a programmable DSP in most cases, so they could program support for VP8 if it were being seriously considered, and that appears to be the direction of things.
This was the case several years ago, when it was the wild west of MPEG4. Things were changing too rapidly to make concrete hardware. Today, everyone in the hardware world has pretty much settled on h.264 and the target profiles are well known. Hardware can be made to decode it at much lower power consumption than a DSP (and at much smaller die sizes, making for cheaper chips). People that need a wide variety of codecs or those that have a vested interest in DSPs (such as Texas Instruments) still use the
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If we were talking about adding a new standard to a Blu-Ray player, dedicated codec silicon would be an issue, but we're talking about web browsers....
Dedicated DSP chips are common, but they are common in things like camcorders, Blu-Ray players, DirecTV receivers, cable set-top boxes, TiVos, TV tuner cards, etc. Such devices generally don't provide general-purpose web browsers.
Most devices capable of web browsing have a full scale GPU. Even portable devices like the iPhone family or netbooks have GPUs t
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I read a comment to the same effect, but I'm left wondering how true it is. Are all the devices (phones, computers, set-top boxes) using reprogrammable DSPs, or just some? If just some, then what percentage?
Also, does it matter that these DSPs weren't designed with VP8 in mind, or are these DSPs just completely reprogrammable, or...? Or to ask it another way, would one of these DSPs that was intended to decode H264 be designed exactly the same if it were intended to decode VP8?
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LoB
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Unless Google starts using VP8 exclusively for Youtube. How long would it take for VP8 to gain hardware decoding? Hint: Not long.
Re:"Do No Evil" (Score:5, Insightful)
To make it a scientific opinion, you have to give an example of an action that Google will take that will convince you they were not evil. Sometime ago, slashdotters were saying that if Google open sources VP8, that would be proof enough. Apparently you want more. So tell us. What do you want?