I fully agree with the article. Google's move makes me very angry, for two reasons:
1) Google uses us as tools in its battles and wars, because it is us who will be inconvenienced for years to come if companies continue to fight over video codecs. Sure, the explanations are grandiose — "we fight for openness" and the like — but the fight is being done by our expense.
2) Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable. H.264, an ITU/ISO standard, documented, with reference implementations, with a free/oss encoder (x264) and hardware support in a bazillion devices is called "closed and proprietary". Meanwhile, Adobe Flash (which this whole fight will just strengthen) is just fine, thank you. Oh, MP3 and AAC are fine, too.
I'll skip over technical details in this post, suffice it to say that I know and understand why H.264 (especially Main and High profiles) is vastly superior to On2 VP8 (now renamed WebM).
Google's move is not about "open". The term "open" here is just used as a horse upon which the knight is riding. The long-term ulterior motive is to dominate video on the web.
The h264 removal in Chrome is probably an experiment more than anything else. It will make people remember the h264/WebM debate again, and it will show that Google takes a stance for WebM.
The long term goal is to fragment h264. First move is this. The next move is to play an alliance with Adobe: We can make your Flash survive for 5 more years if you include WebM playback in it. Then you play the piece where you force Apple to adopt WebM by virtue of Youtube: you let it hint that Youtube will in the future only play back WebM. At this point in time, all Android devices have WebM hardware decoding circuits (notice that mobile phones have an incredible short half-life time. You don't see a 3-4 year old mobile phone much these days).
At this point, all of the internet is WebM capable and h264 has been limited to every device which is non-internet. The MPEG-LA consortium will have been marginalized by this time and will have to bite the apple and add in WebM support as well.
First, Google is interested in boosting the web indirectly because it puts their technology (adwords) out there in the right place. If you watched most of your video over WebM over the net, it would indirectly benefit Google. They also know that a large part of their power stems from the fact that they do "nice" things for their users, while their customers pay Google to facilitate a link between googles users and googles customers through adwords. Using their market share for the "greater good" is highly valuable to them in the long term.
Second, if you own the WebM format, you could use it to bully the MPEG-LA members individually. MPEG-LA is an alliance with the sole purpose of keeping everyone else out of the alliance. The patent pool in MPEG-LA is a defensive measure - not an offensive one.
None of the things Google does seem to be short-term invested. It rather looks like they are shooting for 5-10 years ahead.
x264 may be free software to download, but you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA license fees under most circumstances if you actually use the videos you encode with it.
It depends on how you use them and what you use them for. But in general, yes.
So perhaps Google should start saying openly it's about the money, not about "openness" (which seems to be defined every week as something different by one company or another).
Once money/licensing is involved, it does become an issue of openness. Think of it as the letter of the spec versus the spirit of the spec.
If h.264 becomes the de facto standard for HTML5 video encoding, then a browser such as Firefox, or any free/open browser, will be financially unable to implement a completely standards compliant browser due to the cost of licensing.
Yes, one could supply other codecs to support the video tag since no codec is specified in the spec but if the majority of content out there is focused on h.264 then the effect is the same as not supporting the video tag at all.
> you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA license fees under most circumstances
As far as I am aware software patents only hold in the USA and a few other countries that the US has strong armed into accepting them. So I don't think you need to worry about the MPEGLA coming after you if you are somewhere on the other 90% of the planet.
Yes, specifically software patents may be considered a bit of an unconfirmed area, but I doubt it's something many people would want to risk going up against.
The licenses fees don't kick in until you ship something like 10,000 units, then it is something like $0.25 per unit for decoders. (numbers from memory, consult mpeg-la for accuracy).
So anyone is free to tinker with x264 as much as they like. The people who have trouble are the free OS distribution folks, e.g. Debian, who ship enough to trip the license… and google chrome.
Maybe they just got tired of paying a quarter for each download.
While you are right pointing out the notion of triggering a limit breach and thus having to pay out the dues, that is exactly what needs to be avoided. This is not a home-brew, I made a tinker-toy use case that Mozilla and Google are describing. They are defending a ubiquitous tool such as a browser, that is prevailing as the de facto standard of accessing information. That channel needs to be kept free.
Imagine a scenario where an ink/printer producer patents blending of the colors and every newspaper in the world has to pay $0.25 for every paper they print after 10,000 units.
What I hope that people understand, and I'm aiming high by including the well connected writers and media personnel, that tools that serve as backbones for information flow need to stay free. There are software engineers working on that tirelessly. To undo their effort or trip them up, is to hurt the very rights to freedom to information.
Imagine a scenario where an ink/printer producer patents blending of the colors and every newspaper in the world has to pay $0.25 for every paper they print after 10,000 units.
It's far worse than that! My city's newspaper is printed with patented ink[1]. They pay for every drop they use, even for papers they don't sell, even for ink they wash down the drain.
And your numbers are way off. Imagine if I had to pay a one time $0.25 fee to read my $22/month newspaper would be more like it.
I look forward to a time when I can code and not worry about patents[2], but hobbling people to make a strategic move is not the path to that end.
Cost Thing
################ Computer hardware: $400/year
####### Computer software: $200/year
## Power for computer: $50/year
############################ Internet connection: $720/year
. H.264 license: $0.25
(Note: The graph is probably off. I have 26 pixels in a #
so the '.' would need to be a single pixel, but is four.
So, mentally expand the '#' lines by 4 to get the
perspective right. Oh, and that is not annual, so
maybe another three times.
And while we're at it, notice that video is probably your
biggest bandwidth need and that by using a more efficient
encoding you can use the next tier down at your ISP or
pay for fewer bits and save 100 times the cost of the
H.264 license.)
[1] Probably. They announced switching to the new eco friendly ink with great fanfare. I suspect if they went back to a traditional ink I would not hear.
[2] I've personally cancelled a lucrative product after development was completed over patent fears (needlessly it turns out, the patent owner in question never elected to go hunting and we probably didn't infringe but were unwilling to endure the legal distraction), and just this week was discussing picking the bones of a local company that briefly stepped on a ridiculous software patent and had their plug pulled by the parent company instead of fighting the lawsuit.
> Or do you really believe that Apple is actively preventing Flash just because they really care about the consumer?
Microsoft (Exchange), Cisco (VPN), Yahoo (Mail and Weather), and Google (Mail and Maps) all have code and/or data provided by the OS in iOS. In all of these cases, these third parties improve the iOS experience without any significant trade off.
Flash on the other hand has a huge trade off in application responsiveness and battery life. These are features Apple touts as being important to how their device is the best device for their customers. Flash would undermine those features, and Adobe has had a poor track record of delivering on promises regarding Flash (significant performance improvements are always one release away, for example), especially for non-Microsoft OSes.
Also, of those companies, most have contributed specifications (Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo), and one contributed code (Google, with the initial version of Maps). All of that code is now under Apple's control, and if Apple needs to fix it or update it or debug it they can do so.
Flash, on the other hand, is closed-source. Adobe could, at best, provide Apple with a binary plugin to drop in. Apple would not be able to fix any bugs or track down any problems, and judging from their performance on OS X, it would be the source of a lot of crashes Apple couldn't do anything about. Apple might announce iOS 5.0 in June, a few days before or after Flash 11 comes out. Now what does Apple do? Rush to incorporate a major version change into a minor version release? Hold off on releasing until Adobe can get them a stable version? What if it's buggy? Now users who bought a new iPhone with iOS5, or users who updated to iOS5, think that Apple's released a buggy release, when in reality they've released a (probably good) release with a crappy version of Flash. This is exactly what happened with Snow Leopard already, and Apple caught flak for distributing buggy software because Adobe had released security fixes after SL went gold.
It's not about control, but determination. Adobe for years hasn't been able to show off a stable, reliable, and performant release, and so in exchange for Apple accepting Adobe's crappy code into the OS, Apple would also lose the ability to speak for the quality of the OS and experience as a whole. It's lose-lose for Apple, so where's the incentive? They got screwed with Snow Leopard, they'd get screwed with iOS, and in the end the ones who suffer are the end users, who can either wonder why their browser is so slow/crashy/laggy/jittery when scrolling, or who can wonder why they don't have Flash, but then shrug it off because most sites don't need it.
> ISO and ITU do not require the members working on their various standards and specifications to give up any specific patent claims that may cover the technology that they define.
Quite the contrary -- the ITU specifically had language that every contributor agreed to provide their contributions royalty-free. Unfortunately the politics got complexated when it became a joint ITU/ISO thing. Some of the biggest players made noises that they would agree to a "royalty-free baseline profile" (ie without some of the more patent-rich features, such as interlace and B-frames).
At the last minute, like Lucy from Peanuts, they took their ball and went home, leaving all the smaller players who had an interest in a truly free standard high and dry. This event IMSHO left a vacuum that resulted in pent-up demand for a truly free codec, which created room for Theora and WebM.
Do you remember how Microsoft snuck a Trojan into their IPR statement for the integer transform? Something along the lines of, "We agree to the standard royalty-free terms, as long as everyone else does".. It didn't take long for everyone to adopt the "Microsoft amendment" to their IPR statements, and for one token member to object to royalty-free terms, and the whole thing came tumbling down.
sounds familiar. I was involved around '03, when Polycom and about 25 companies were up against the 4 or 5 biggies over the patent issue. It was like watching a bunch of school kids get beat up by teenage bullies. Very ugly.
MPEG-LA are really just a bunch of thugs. They remind me of Tony Soprano: "Satisfaction guaranteed -- or double your garbage back!"
I don't think Google has affected anything with this move. By any counts out there, Firefox has double the market share of Chrome. It might reduce the use of HTML5 video versus Flash video in Chrome itself, but for the whole web, it doesn't make a difference when Firefox already took this position with twice the market share.
I would argue that none of the desktop browsers are having an effect in this area. The only thing that is really driving the adoption of html5 <video> is mobile devices and their poor or nonexistent support for flash.
Many sites that serve mobile devices html5 video still serve flash to html5 capable desktop browsers.
Mobile devices will support WebM; simply because desktops/laptops still rule and there's tremendous pressure to support desktop technologies for content-delivery that are popular.
And I would argue that the majority of traffic for websites like YouTube comes from desktops / laptops.
This move might signify changes to be made on YouTube later, which will be significant for a large segment of Internet users.
Also, Chrome is heavily used by early adopters and tech crowds, so it will influence their perception of things and this might trickle down to more average users over time.
I for one, though do not use Chrome (I use Safari) myself, have put Chrome on every PC I help set up, until yesterday. Sorry, Google. I just like the fact that I can put up videos I shot with my camera on my website without transcoding and my friends would view them just fine from their browsers and phones. I don't know which side is more open - and therefore more right - in this controversy, but in addition to openness, I support industrial collaboration. And more importantly, video codecs are used beyond just web. How about looking further and see the frustration that the non-web video people would have because of this action.
On page two, "Consistency Counts", the argument isn't right. "Openness" is sadly very ambiguous, but as noted earlier in the article, there's a difference between being developed openly and having patent encumbered royalties. Flash is actually an open specification, and anyone is free to develop tools that create flash content (distributed as source or binary) without paying royalties to Adobe in any part of the world. Anyone can create a flash player too without paying royalties.
VP8 and Flash are not open standards, but they are royalty free. AVC was openly developed and is an ISO standard but is not royalty free.
Flash isn't an open standard anymore. As of Flash 9 when they started shipping the DRM subsystem, free software cannot be fully compatible without rev eng.
Which is only a capability relevant when interacting with Adobe's flash media server. There are several alternatives media servers available, most of which are open source.
The problem of FMS parity is a wholly different ball of wax, aside from (although perhaps relevant to) the behavior of the Flash VM itself.
There are two different kinds of royalties associated with H.264. One is the fee on each encoder or decoder, and the other is a per stream royalty. Although most of us are concerned with royalties on the codec, Google is more concerned about the royalties on the streams.
Although the Ars article mentions that MPEG-LA won't charge per-stream royalties for free youtube videos (for 5 more years, anyway), H.264 content from the Youtube Store are already subject to per-stream fees, starting at the beginning of this year. Also, Google TV streams may not fall under MPEG-LA's definition of royality-free "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". Furthermore, MPEG-LA hasn't yet made it clear exactly how much these fees will be!
WebM (vp8), along with lower-quality FLV (vp6), is a hedge against both current and upcoming per-stream h.264 royalties.
All of the articles, particularly this one, seem to be missing the point. They attribute Google's actions to abstract ideas of openness or competition between codecs.
But there is a concrete issue involved: under MPEG-LA's licensing terms, Google should be paying $6.5 million a year to distribute a H.264 decoder. Under that license, the end users only get the rights to use the software "for personal and consumer purposes": they couldn't fork Chrome, redistribute it, etc. The Ars article mentions this, but immediately moves on.
It's possible Google expects MPEG-LA to try to enforce the patents, and that's why they're dropping H.264 support. After all, Google is the only browser vendor not in MPEG-LA worth trying to get money from. The yearly licensing amount just went up by $1.5 million, which might have influenced the timing of the announcement.
Comparisons with Flash are irrelevant: it may be less open than H.264, but not in the way that matters to Google.
when firefox 4 is released (and is rapidly adopted+), if you are a major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video, you will need to serve webm or theora or you will miss out on a quarter of the world web audience and the majority of the european web audience.
if you weren't planning on doing so, you were either going to have to serve video via flash or not at all anyway. google's decision only tips the scales a little more.
+edit: note that I'm not prognosticating a new firefox monopoly or anything, just that firefox 4 will rapidly replace most of the current firefox 3.*s out there, which currently make up the referenced marketshare.
major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video
Here's the sticking point -- as the article says, no one's going to go through the pain of dealing with VP8 transcoding and storage. Flash will be for everyone except iOS, where HTML5 H264 acts as a backdrop.
that's your guess, but I'll freely admit that you may be right.
however, there are increasing benefits to being first-class content in a browser, and there will be at least a few major providers (youtube, maybe (someday) people encoding to theora today) willing to transcode and distribute for you.
I believe (and I recognize that this is just my opinion) that web video should first be in an encoding that is free to use in any way. The only way this is going to happen is if Mozilla (and to a lesser extent, Google) make a stand now instead of waiting for one of the many long years between now and 2028 when the last h264 patent expires.
Article states that Microsoft already has a h264 plugin for Firefox. I imagine MS will probably do the same for
Chrome. They have big vested interest in ensuring that their DRM video will be ubiquitous. I imagine their licensing fees to companies like Netflix makes it a good business decision.
And Google can laugh all the way to the bank while they build and promote their own competing format.
if you cared to look at said plugin, you would realize its worth nothing, it just replaces <video> with a windows media player active x object. it does not provide the same javascript api, it does not support scaling, pausing, transparency, overplay and so on, to make it short, its a joke. sadly it seams to be good enough for people like you to suggest it would actually work.
I make no qualitative judgement. I only state that the article says there is a plugin available and posit that it is an interesting development that Microsoft is putting resources into a competing browser.
The details of the implementation are interesting and concerning; however, your judgement of "people like me" is not germane, nor is it based upon any information in this context.
well, I'm not sure if I completely understand your line of reasoning, but note also, as clark-kent notes below, that Microsoft will also allow VP8 to be installed as a codec at the OS level and then work through IE9. The same will be true with Quicktime and Safari, but my understanding is that that is still hypothetical.
To be certain, lots of conjecture on my part. I just found it very interesting that Microsoft is essentially taking on the h264 licensing fees for Firefox by releasing a h264 plugin for the browser. (I'm assuming that MS will be footing the licensing fees -- or maybe they're just covered by a blanket $6.5 million fee, so it's just the cost of building the plugin that they really have to eat)
My extrapolation is a reach, but supporting h264 on Firefox doesn't make sense except if MS is seeing cash from h264 ubiquity.
Microsoft's Firefox add-on simply replaces the browser's <video> player with a Windows Media Player object, so the fees have already been paid for as part of their licence to include an H.264 decoder with all copies of Windows.
Supporting H.264 makes sense for Microsoft as a licensor of the patent pool.
As long as there's a codec installed for QuickTime to use, Safari will support it in the <video> tag. The same is true of Theora - no built-in support, but if you install the codec it starts working.
If it's going remove features for poorly-articulated ideological reasons, it would surely make sense to apply that ideology consistently
No, that doesn't particularly make sense. Choose your battles. They are endless in number. Nobody has time to fight them all. Fight the ones that matter most.
All else aside, there is nothing hypocritical per se about taking a stand on one issue and not another.
Maybe I'm just a moron, but couldn't a lot of this problem be solved by making the decoder free to use in all circumstances? They already allow free Internet broadcast at no royalty, and have other free parts of their licensing now, so they're clearly open to the concept at least.
If I understand things correctly, for people shipping decoders the royalty amount is capped at $6.5 million a year. So they're making $6.5 million from Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. All in all, probably a few hundred million over everyone?
Would it not be more advantageous to leave that money on the table, completely entrench your format EVERYWHERE, and then pick it up on the professional/encoder side of things?
CNN, CNET, Fox, whoever, probably wouldn't mind paying a little more and getting a single universal format for everything everywhere and home users/hobbyists can play for free since they'll never hit the thresholds. Startups can get going by working in the free zones (< 100k paid subs, free un-paid use).
Of course this can only happen if said project is based in a country which actually upholds software patents. In countries were software patents are void MPEG-LA's claims are also void in which case I'd like to see them try to sue the developers/projects operating there...
I'm continually amazed at the erosion of the term "Open Standard". There's a whole segment here that reads like someone arguing "It's not about Free Software, after all Internet Explorer is free", or "It is Open Source because you can just look at the python code they provide".
If someone comes up with a catchy slogan for their concept whether it's "Free Market" or "Fair Trade" it's simple politeness to engage with that and make a substantive point rather than making up your own definitions to suit and play semantic games.
That is a rather anachronistic complaint. The term “open standard” was a term of art for standards such as H.264 long before the term “open source” was coined.
Any limited use of "open standard" before that point was as meaningful as someone referring to "free software" or "open source" before those terms were defined.
Sorry, but that's wildly anachronistic too. The term "open standard" was in widespread use long before "open source" was coined in 1998, and certainly before the ITU-T definition in 2005: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&...
A term does not need to have a formal definition in order to have a meaning.
Can we all please collectively stop abusing 'Openness'? Google is the guiltiest of them all- shoe-horning open source, open standards, royalty-free, patent-unencumbered and god knows what else into the same overly-generic term complicates the debate. In fact, its clearly harmful- look at the way Gruber has hijacked the debate and refocused everything on Google's 'hypocrisy' for bundling Flash with Chrome.
That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format.
Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.
Yeah, Google really screwed themselves with that blogpost. To quote from a ZDNet article "Out of 250 words, open was mentioned 8 times." I don't know why they feel the necessity to paint everything that they do as open. This move itself could have been explained in one line like so: "We believe that the de facto codec for HTML5 video should be royalty-free, and to that end cannot continue supporting H.264 in our browser any longer." That much would have sufficed, and avoided a lot of the pointless bickering.
Google dropping a highly patented codec from Chrome is a step backwards for openness
Even the title doesn't make sense. They could say "step backwards for easy of use" or "step backwards for MPEG LA", but saying "step backwards for openness" is ridiculous.
If it's encumbered with patents, it's not open, no matter how many free software implementations it has. Open means, open to anyone, not only open to those who pay for it.
It is apparent you did not read the article. Please go read it, or at least this quote:
> This explanation is lacking, to say the least. It appears to be a conflation of several issues: openness, royalty-freedom, and source code availability, among others. In the traditional sense, H.264 is an open standard. That is to say, it was a standard designed by a range of domain experts from across the industry, working to the remit of a standards organization. In fact, two standards organizations were involved: ISO and ITU. The specification was devised collaboratively, with its final ratification dependent on the agreement of the individuals, corporations, and national standards bodies that variously make up ISO and ITU. This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs. H.264 is unambiguously open.
> In contrast, neither WebM's VP8 nor Theora were assembled by a standards body such as ISO. VP8 was developed independently and entirely in secret by the company On2, prior to the company's purchase last year by Google. Theora was created by a group of open-source developers…
Every browser should just support every codec in the universe. I don't care if it's illegal or patent infringing. Do it anyway. VLC, Mplayer, and ffmpeg are all open source, all work, and are all still around. This goes for image formats and audio codecs as well.
Let's just make forks of Chromium and Firefox that include built-in support for as many codecs and file formats as possible. Someone wants to use a psd in an img tag? Sure! Someone wants to use a flac in an audio tag? Go for it! Want to use a bink video in a video tag? Be my guest.
Even if it's illegal, who cares. You can do it the same way that Windows Media Player and Ubuntu handle it. Every time the user comes across a video they can't play, a popup asks them to click a few times, and then voila! They have the codec.
Web developer are always going to have a crappy time of it. We will never ever be able to simply make one site one way and have it work nicely on all devices with web browsers. Give up on that dream. But the dream of making things good for the users, is achievable. Aim for that first.
I understand where you are coming from with this but let's consider the security implications of embedding just anything in the browser.
A prime example is embedding custom fonts with CSS. The code that handles them wasn't built with arbitrary fonts downloaded from untrusted sources in mind (I think the guy that wrote the code said that's insecure and a bad idea).
Getting rid of flash is more difficult then getting rid of x264 since its obviously used all over the web. Dropping support for x264 now will prevent a similar issue in the future. Its a great first step.
Having a company like Mozilla pay a royalty on each user would cripple Firefox and any new browsers that may come along.
While this is clearly an opinion piece arguing for inclusion of H.264 in Chrome, I feel like this article actually does a great job of actually portraying most of the facts that affect both side of the argument. Certainly it feels like the most informative article I've read on the subject (again, despite its bias.)
I don't believe I'm reading such reactionary scaremongering FUD from Ars. Google supporting (and helping develop) an open codec with no royalties attached is construed as a BAD THING?
I don't think it's a step backwards, but clearly there is a double standard here by fully supporting Flash. I knew it from the beginning that supporting Flash wasn't in alignment with their open web vision, yet they still did it to spite Apple and its iPhone. I hope they get rid of Flash within a year.
Much of the debate is centered around the quasi-ubiquity of h264 and accepting the royalties involved and it's proprietary nature as a compromise that we are willing to make, which is very short sighted and dangerous.
Also the typical patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might violate patents without naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's motives.
I keep hearing the Flash analogy, which is nonsense, flash doesn't just do video playback, the technology is ubiquitously used in a variety of ways and is not comparable to a video codec, and does not have any of the patent licencing issues h264 has.
This move is a step forward towards openness as it will force publishers and users to consider the non-proprietary alternative.
The problematic word here is force. I don't enjoy being forced to "consider" using something by being prevented from using anything else, and when the people doing the forcing claim it's for "freedom" and "openness" I just scratch my head.
I mean, isn't it strange that browsers that only support certain vendor-chosen codecs are described as more open than the browsers that allow the user to install any codec they like?
Google is putting its foot down to ensure that web video isn't hijacked by a codec that is owned by a notorious organisation, and they're doing it at great cost to themselves- in terms of the blowback from this, and the amount of money they spent on On2, and the patent litigation that is almost certainly coming if webm gains any significant adoption. Mozilla and Google are fighting for your and my right to produce fully compliant browsers without having to pay somebody else. They're fighting for your right to fork.
Google is putting its foot down to ensure that web video isn't hijacked by [h.264]
What on earth do you mean by "hijacked"? Web video has been dominated by h.264 since it was added to Flash, and Google itself is among the most prominent pushers. It didn't sneak in through the back door, it reached it's current status the same way anything else on the web has: by being useful.
Mozilla and Google are fighting for your and my right to produce fully compliant browsers without having to pay somebody else.
This is what gets me scratching my head, because it's Mozilla and Google who are the ones trying to make browsers, not me. Mozilla and Google are acting in their own interests (which is fine, don't get me wrong) but they keep telling me that it's for my sake even though, if asked, I would tell them not to do what they're doing. It feels more like an ideological bludgeoning than a favor.
Also, I take issue with your saying "fully compliant". Codec support hasn't been a standards compliance issue since Ogg was (rightfully) pulled from the spec.
If anything, the fact that the spec is codec-agnostic suggests that the most "spiritually" compliant position would be for the implementation to be, as well. But that's not what we get from Mozilla or Google. For that kind of openness we have to turn to...Microsoft and Apple? Weird.
You're right, that was a poor choice of words. I meant dominated.
>Mozilla and Google who are the ones trying to make browsers, not me.
The point is that you shouldn't have to pay royalties to someone to ship a competitive browser which has support for the most widely used codec. Think of Rockmelt or Flock. If they had to pay millions to stay competitive, isn't that a net loss for the internet?
>Also, I take issue with your saying "fully compliant".
You're right again, I meant a competitive browser.
>If anything, the fact that the spec is codec-agnostic suggests that the most "spiritually" compliant position would be for the implementation to be, as well
I don't understand exactly what you mean here. I thought the whole point of HTML5 was that video becomes a first class citizen, so if I had to install a plugin for each codec, wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose? Or are you saying that every browser should include support for the widest range of codecs that it possibly can? I think its unfair to ask a non-profit organisation like Mozilla to license a codec for many millions of dollars. Could you elaborate?
Or are you saying that every browser should include support for the widest range of codecs that it possibly can?
No. Quite the opposite, actually.
I am saying that a reasonable approach would have been for the browsers to defer support to the operating system. Apple does this. Microsoft does this. Mozilla, Google, and Opera have instead chosen to limit support to only the codecs they implement in-browser. (I say "would have been" because there's practically zero chance of this happening now.)
One effect of this is that even on a system with h.264 already present you can't view it in those browsers. This is not a requirement of the HTML5 spec, an h.264 licensing issue or a technically intractable problem, but a choice made by those browser vendors to favor certain codecs.
The point is that while the debate is frequently framed as a standards issue it's really more about the ideology of implementing things on top of those standards.
Is it really at a great cost to themselves? How do we know that total cost of license fees per copy of Chrome plus license fees per copy of Android is less than the cost of buying On2?
Well, H.264 licenses top out at 6 million, I think. On2 was acquired for 133 million(check Wikipedia). And they've only removed H.264 from Chrome, it would be disastrous for them to do the same with Android. So even if they were to license H.264 for its patent lifetime, they've lost more money than they've saved.
I guess I don't understand the "force" aspect. As a distributor wouldn't you already be implementing WebM or Theora to satisfy Firefox/Opera? If so, how does Chrome all of a sudden force you to change?
As a Chrome use, what changes? All three codecs can be watched, H.264 however is through a sandboxed Flash player.
>Also the typical patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might violate patents without naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's motives.
Stating that Webm might turn into a patent minefield is FUD now? What happened to journalistic freedom and rational discourse?
If I say "with additional research, it may be discovered that there's a correlation between eating corn and various degenerative diseases, and therefor you should not eat corn" with no evidence to support that assertion, it is FUD. Similarly, if I say "with additional research, it may be discovered that WebM infringes on patents, and therefor you should not use it" with no evidence to support that assertion, it is FUD. If a claim is unsupported but used as a criticism of something - especially a reason not to use a product - then it is FUD.
1) Google uses us as tools in its battles and wars, because it is us who will be inconvenienced for years to come if companies continue to fight over video codecs. Sure, the explanations are grandiose — "we fight for openness" and the like — but the fight is being done by our expense.
2) Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable. H.264, an ITU/ISO standard, documented, with reference implementations, with a free/oss encoder (x264) and hardware support in a bazillion devices is called "closed and proprietary". Meanwhile, Adobe Flash (which this whole fight will just strengthen) is just fine, thank you. Oh, MP3 and AAC are fine, too.
I'll skip over technical details in this post, suffice it to say that I know and understand why H.264 (especially Main and High profiles) is vastly superior to On2 VP8 (now renamed WebM).