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Google Announces 'WebM' Open-Source Video Format, Plans for Android Television Integration
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I suggest you read. I did not make it up. I read the same x264 dev article and it pointed out exactly what KnightWRX below
I explained the JPEG vs TIFF point to explain it. Do not try to tell me at the same file size TIFF is better because it is not. VP8 is more like JPEG and h.264 is more like TIFF. It comes down to bandwidth. No one has been arguing that VP8 should replace h.264 for everything it is used. VP8 is better for the web than h.264 is the biggest different.
I personally would not want to store and save VP8 files on my computer. I would much rather have the larger h.264 codec be used for those. Storage is cheap and plenty of it. Bandwidth on the other had is another issue. We are already today running very low on it and it is not keep pace with the growing demand for it.
I can't find anywhere in the article that it says that. And H.264 baseline is not the only profile used on the web. For example, the Extended Profile is intended for streaming video.
No one is arguing your JPEG v TIFF comparison. It's just not a good analogy to the VP8 v H.264 comparison.
As I asked before, can you show any evidence that VP8 is a smaller file size at the same quality level?
You could make the DNG vs. RAW argument. Maybe. Or the MP3 vs AAC argument.
But TIFF (which retains all detail) is vastly superior in terms of quality and bit depth resolution vs. the (very lossy) JPEG format; of course a TIFF takes more storage space, it's apples and oranges.
Any one who spends even a little bit of time with Handbrake knows that you can have a small, lossy, crappy H.264 and a higher res, larger MPEG-2 (or whatever). It's all about about the encoding.
Personally, I'll stick with H.264 until VP8 is ubiquitous, and not before.
I don't know if anyone has mentioned this but webM is vp8 + vorbis in a subset of the matroska container, I think this is great news admittedly I don't know much about html5 but I do know MKV can do softsubs mp4 can't. So correct me if I'm wrong isn't another advantage of webM softsubs, I mean I have a deaf cousin just imagine if all video on the web was softsubbed, it'd not only be "cool" but also useful.
As someone who deals with TIFF, PNGs, and Jpeg everyday I have to agree with the other guy, it's a horrible analogy. Not putting you down, I understand how you could come up with that analogy, but it's a bad one. Tiff is lossless, and jpeg as well h.264 and VP8 are lossy. DV is lossless, so if I were to compare an video format to tiff then I would use that. I would assume that if a vp8 video at a lower setting produces a better image than h.264, then the same would be true at a higher setting.
Pigeonholing will not help you.
Because there is absolutely no proof, that VP8 is patent free and technological as good as Google Inc. claims.
In contrast to that, i've proven for myself via MeGUI and x264 (always the newest versions) that it is possible to encode 720p material with only 0.10 bpp in crystal clear quality. Granted, it will take 2-3 days on a 2.8 GHz Mid 2009 MBP to encode a 2 hrs movie, but you get unbeatable quality. And we know for sure, that H.264 is not patent free. That is a good and stable foundation.
Would you acquire something for $140m and give it away for free? No, you would not. You would do it only, if you can make more profit with it.
Proven by who?
H.264 was (and is) designed for anything from low end mobile phones to high end studio production environments. It is such a broad standard, that it would take you weeks to find all the different usage scenarios for H.264.
VP8 cannot be used on data discs like BD, because the encoder skips frames, which means you have not a fixed framerate. There is no way to correct the omission of such important information. At least not one which would make sense.
Now imagine all the movie studios, if they want to encode their material for a BD and for either PAL, NTSC or 24p! That must be funny with VP8.
24p on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24p#24p_in_high_definition_disc_formats
But you get the point.
Lets say say both a VP8 file and h.264 file are each a 100 megs. The VP8 files is going to look better because it would be like a 500x500 resolution. The h.264 file would be at 250x250. Now if you compared both of them at 500x500 resolution the h.264 would look better but be twice as big.
Now I now that those numbers are not going to line up as I choose things that made the math easy.
The other catch is VP8 is well cheaper. Firefox currently is not supporting h.264 because it would cost them 5 million a year to do it and that will increase in 2015.
Are you sure about that?
DV doesn't have any temporal compression, but it looks like it has lossy spatial compression.
Well my point was that in the analogy that the OP DV would make more sense as something comparable to Tiff, and not h.264.
You're going to have to give me a link, because in an analogy both vp8 and h.264 would be the same as jpeg not jpeg and tiff.
Then you are splinting hairs and you know it. You are nit picking. To a layman point of view it is known TIFF is a much higher quality file but it comes with the draw back of being by far much much larger in just raw file size than a jpeg.
But your statement that DV was lossless is clearly wrong. DV uses lossy compression.
You can't compare DV to TIFF in that regard. TIFF is uncompressed or losslessly compressed, DV is lossy compressed - but at a high enough bitrate that the quality is reasonable.
You have to look at the big picture of the comment, the point, not completely focus at a small fact of the argument. People pretty much use DV the same way they use TIFF because with DV there's pretty much no detectable quality loss as opposed to h.264. People pretty much use it the same way people use a raw image file, or a tiff file, and that's the point that I'm making about it. While people use h.264 the same way the same way they use jpeg.
But you completely missed the point of the analogy.
The point that was trying to be made is h.264 would be a larger format for the same resolution video file than VP8.
Just like TIFF would be a larger file size for the same resolution size than JPEG.
At the same resolution h.264 and TIFF would look better than the counter parts but they would larger file size.
It does not matter than TIFF is a lossless and h.264 is compressed. It was more just using 2 things people understand. TIFF is a higher quality file than JPEG. The other part of the information does not matter.
As for DV most people do not know what that is unless you work in the industry.
Do I expect apple to really support VP8. Not really because they still do not support Xvid on Apple TV which is sad. Microsoft supports it on their extenders like the 360. It requires you downloading an update from Microsoft but it will play an Xvid file format.
You keep saying the same thing without answering the question. Do you have any evidence that VP8 is a smaller file size at the same quality level? Maybe a quote from the x264 dev article because I can't find anywhere that it says that despite your claim.
Dude, you seriously don't know what the heck you are talking about. Resolution and bit depth are whatever you set them to be when you encode the video. If you have hardware support (cough, cough, H.264, cough, cough) you can actually get more aggressive with some of the settings, but the concept is still the same. VP8 is going to be at a disadvantage, in part due to the technology it's built on and partly due its lack of maturity as a spec.
Why don't you spend some time encoding various videos (DVD rips or whatever) in Handbrake with various settings (target size, bitrate, constant quality) with both H.264 and MPEG-4 to see if can't better understand the relationship between these settings, as well as how it affects the amount of time it takes for encoding to finish.
What we know today about WebM/VP8 is that it is less mature and less sophisticated vs the other codecs so it doesn't have have the same quality when it comes to compression or encoding efficiency. And it's useless for encoding HD video, which is the one place where a "free" codec could actually help the little guy in terms of small movie production outfits.
First, MPEG-LA is widely licensed via a patent pool by a number of large hardware manufacturers and is a known quantity. We don't have any idea who could crawl out of the woodwork claiming patent license issues with WebM/VP8, esp. if the reports that VP8 borrowed code or ideas from either MPEG-4 or possibly even H.264.
Ironically, it seems that the MPEG-LA group is already assuming that WebM/VP8 violates one or more H.264 patents and is working on setting a patent licensing pool to collect royalties on WebM/VP8 in the future.
So much for "free". To quote a famous Slashdotter, "Entertainment wants to be paid, information wants to be free, you want to be cheap."
It's not a drawback, it's a tradeoff in image quality.
The JPEG (like an MP3 file) throws away large amounts of detail (lossy compression and lost bit depth) in the image in the hopes that you won't notice or don't care that it's missing. Maybe, maybe not. But I guarantee if you make adjustments to that JPEG image in Photoshop (or whatever), you'll notice the degradation when you start to see posterization -- blocky banding where you should see smooth gradation between color tones.
A TIFF retains all that detail, allowing you to make repeated adjustments on the same image without losing detail (and with the right tools you can do this non-destructively so you can "undo" changes or revert back to the original without making intermediate copies of the image).
Maybe stick to analogies that you are technically familiar with in the future? This one is a bust when you presenting it to a bunch of photographers and graphics artists who deal with this on an everyday basis...
Google my friend.
"X264 on VP8"
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
I don't know if this is the one they are talking about, but it certainly fits the description.
Let's see that one actually filed, gone through discovery, gone through motions and done with trial before we declare anything. A patent pool license is worth nothing if you're not the IP holder. The MPEG-LA can't charge VP8/WebM users for a license if it doesn't hold any IP over it.
You think a company the size of Google hasn't already looked at the data from the UPSTO and didn't make sure of things before such an announcement ?
Seriously, this is just FUD for now. Let's leave it at that.
I think everyone got so entrenched in the TIFF vs H.264 debate that they all missed the point.
The point was simple folks : There is more than 1 image format out there and they all co-exist. They are used for different purposes depending on what they excel at.
This is the same for Video codecs, Audio codecs, Database engines, etc... VP8 is not a threat to H.264. They can coexist. Same with iPhone OS and Android. Same with Mac and PC. Same with OS X and HP-UX.
The "There must be only one" mentality that is so prevalent here is sickening. Seriously, the world isn't black and white.
I've already read the article. I just can't find anything in the article that supports his claim.
Well, there it is, Apple dismisses VP8 :
http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/21/steve-jobs-email-dismisses-vp8-video-codec/
So much for loving "open".
http://www.thinq.co.uk/news/2010/5/21/steve-jobs-email-dismisses-vp8-video-codec/
So much for loving "open".
what do you expect. Apple does not support any of the open source codecs out there. Apple TV, iPod, iPhone ect none of them can play the widely used Xvid codec that a lot of open source and free encoders use because they can no afford to pay the huge fees to MPEG-LA. Hell a lot of the ones people like were projects people worked on in their free time for fun so there is zero money to be made off of it but since it is software they are required to pay fees for it.
Microsoft allows it things to play Xvid. I know for the fact the 360 can. Now 360 can not do it out of the box but the first time you try to play Xvid the 360 will go out to the marketplace and ask you to download the free codex pact that includes it from Microsoft and it will play them just fine.
Also from that announcement t I expect the apple fanboys to go screaming about VP8 sucks and it should die. It does not take much in history to go back and find prime examples of this blind following. Just go back and look at the PPC intel switch. On this boards up until the day of the switch it was the majority was against it and said intel suck for *blank* reason. With in minutes of the a announcement it was the other way around. IBM sucks, PPC sucks Intel rules.
Or you can look at HP love for a while that was here when HP announced they would include iTunes on their computers. People love HP and though they were great if you had to go PC. Day before they were hated.