He's an engineer that breathes Assembly and C code. Spare me his motives seeing as he's put a ton of work into the FOSS x264 camp.
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Google Announces 'WebM' Open-Source Video Format, Plans for Android Television Integration
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He's an engineer that breathes Assembly and C code. Spare me his motives seeing as he's put a ton of work into the FOSS x264 camp.
HTML5 has nothing to do with codecs. They are codec agnostic. Your OS and Browser have everything to do with the codecs.
How does telling me that apply to what I said ? GIF had nothing to do with HTML 3.2 either, which was image format agnostic, yet it still managed to be a big headache.
If HTML5 wants a chance to giving users something better than "Works for 99% of users" Flash, it better have a codec that 99% of users can use. H.264, with its restrictions is not it.
VP8 is such a codec.
He's exagerated and bended the truth before on his blog. Xiph had to correct him a few times when he outright lied about VP3/Theora and the Ogg container format.
He's even stated that he's biased against ON2 on their codecs, which makes his analysis something to take with a grain of salt.
Interesting argument.
I'd like to see you apply it to (non-video) Flash, as well....
P.S. In practice, VP8 is as good as H.264. Today. And it's OPEN and FREE.
BS.
The reason there is no HTML5 video standard, is that Apple and company were pushing for the proprietary H.264, while arguing that the free Ogg Theora (based on VP3) was not up to par.
Well, the "not up to par" reasons are gone, now that WebM is open and free.
Other than pressure from Apple and MPEG-LA, there is nothing to stand in the way of W3C designating WebM as HTML5 video standard.
Yes there is. Common sense. The W3C should not force a codec. They didn't for IMG, they won't for Audio, Video shouldn't be any different. It's not the W3C's place to advocate a choice of encoding formats.
However, the people here that are so adamant about being against VP8 are being very short sighted and forgetting why it's important that all browsers support a non-encumbered codec.
Fair enough point.
But without standardization, you can imagine Apple and MS refusing to integrate WebM in their browsers (MS has said it will support it through a plugin, but that's kind of a cop out.)
I am just hoping that between Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc., support for WebM will reach critical mass, and if Safari refuses to support it (like they refuse to support Ogg audio), nobody outside this forum will care.
Apple is a non-issue. Safari market share is ridiculously low. If anything, this will just drive Mac users to alternate browsers. Safari isn't really anything special anyhow, and I used to be the biggest KHTML fanboy, having switched to Konqueror in KDE 2.0 for all my browsing needs.
MS is the big dog here. From their blog, it actually sounds more like their HTML5 video implementation will simply support any system installed codecs, with h.264 simply shipping default with Windows. This is great and will prevent something like the PNG/MNG and SVG issues. Pushing a codec to people to install system wide is much easier than adding an image format to Internet Explorer.
What browser do you use that does ?
I don't think I've ever had that issue, with any browser. And I've used some pretty funky stuff back in my Linux days.
What browser do you use that does ?
I don't think I've ever had that issue, with any browser.
The youth hostel manager installed Chrome on all the windows computers as part of the internet agreement. (Yes, not using IE was part of the agreement.)
A lot of the people were having trouble with Chrome, random crashes, stalling, as far as full blown BSODs. Changed them to Safari or Firefox, the problems are gone.
I've had my own problems with Chrome too, when I still had my old windows computer, it would crash and put lots of lovely colours on my screen. They might of fixed it now, but it leaked memory worse than Firefox 3.0~.4
Now everybody is coming to me to fix their computers...
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Dude, you don't know funky until you do the Linux form scratch project with only Beta software. :S
So you're hopping on the "Trash Google because Steve said so" bandwagon ? First I've heard of Chrome having problems, did you even use a release version or just one of the many Betas ?
And BSODs ? Ain't an application bug if it causes a kernel panic.
So you're hopping on the "Trash Google because Steve said so" bandwagon ? First I've heard of Chrome having problems, did you even use a release version or just one of the many Betas ?
Oi, I love Google, and I'm hoping I can go to one of their internships (and one of Insomniacs
). I couldn't care less what Steve says.My Univeristy is practically in bed with Google.
Memory leaks will cause BSODs and Kernel Panics if it doesnt stall the OS first. Especially if its not within a particular runtime that does memory checks.
If the OS can't handle misbehaving apps, it's not the application that's the problem. If the OS would rather crash than crash an app, again, you have a whole other kind of problem than a crashy web browser.
And that means what exactly.
In the next year hardware accelerators will be coming out for WebM. In 2-3 years a majority of computers will be able to do it.
Converting pass stuff over to it will be fairly quick and in 2015 when the fees for h.264 will be increasing by a plus forking out cashing for it will push a lot to abandon it any how.
Remember 5 years everything will be able to handle the accelerator no problem and its lead will be gone. A lot of codec had leads and have been pushed off.
I think you need to understand what MS wrote. They said they are not going to ship IE9 with it but will allow VP8 to be installed into the codec library and it will pull from it. It is different than a plug in which is really shove it off to another program to handle. MS is shipping h.264 with it in the codec library already. You can added VP8 to it and it would fully support it. It is a lot like how Windows Media player works. By default it does not have a lot of codecs and requires them being installed. Once they are in it has zero problem playing anything.
All the talk about technical superiority, hardware acceleration etc. doesn't really matter a bit. Implementations can be improved over time, hardware supporting it will appear etc.
What matters is the fact that a well supported, truly open and good enough video codec is available as a choice for HTML5 Video. Don't like it or immediately need hardware accelerated codec - no one killed H.264, continue to use it. But at least now that users have a viable, free alternative, MPEG-LA will restrain from charging royalties to you and your providers. So you can still be happy thanks to VP8.
As far as Apple goes - it doesn't matter on the desktop - Firefox and Chrome being the reasons. They can be good and support both H.264 and VP8 on the iDevices or continue to only support H264 and let their users see low quality videos on Youtube. (Thoughts on how Youtube is evil will follow as a consolation)
Microsoft too - doesn't matter on the desktop - IE9 will easily play VP8 after a codec install and it's not like IE market share is on the rise or anything. And they are not a big player in the Mobile space.
So there you go - I think it's going to turn out pretty well for Google and the Truly Open Web.
What matters is the fact that a well supported, truly open and good enough video codec is available as a choice for HTML5 Video. Don't like it or immediately need hardware accelerated codec - no one killed H.264, continue to use it. But at least now that users have a viable, free alternative, MPEG-LA will restrain from charging royalties to you and your providers. So you can still be happy thanks to VP8.
As far as Apple goes - it doesn't matter on the desktop - Firefox and Chrome being the reasons. They can be good and support both H.264 and VP8 on the iDevices or continue to only support H264 and let their users see low quality videos on Youtube. (Thoughts on how Youtube is evil will follow as a consolation
)Microsoft too - doesn't matter on the desktop - IE9 will easily play VP8 after a codec install and it's not like IE market share is on the rise or anything. And they are not a big player in the Mobile space.
So there you go - I think it's going to turn out pretty well for Google and the Truly Open Web.
There was never a standard for IMG, worked fine. AUDIO won't have one, why should VIDEO? If anything it should be h.264 which is widely used and technically superior. Theora ISNT up to par and neither is WebM. Side by side comparions show it plus it has zero hardware support at this point, not to mention the looming spectre of patent lawsuits.
But for the sake of argument lets assume it IS patent lawsuit free. What benefit does that give me as a consumer? Just becaus a technology is based on patented work doesn't make it EVIL (unless you are a free-tard). Lots and lots of patented technologies are used on a daily basis, in fact MOST technologies are. Your cellphone? Patents. Your car? Patents. Your computer? Patents. Since when has the use of patented technology ever destroyed an industry or dramatically screwed over the end user? Can you give me one example?
The biggest threat anyone can give about h.264 is there is a theoretical possibility that the MPEG-LA could start charging for its use to end users in the future. On the other hand WebM could theoretically be found to be in violation of a number of patents.
Which of these is the more likely to occur? Well the MPEG-LA hasn't charged end users for any of the other technologies it has licenses for like MPEG and MP3, so precedent seems to indicate that they think free to the end user is an effective enough model. On the other hand, products that purported to be patent-safe have on numerous occasions been found not to be so, resulting in lawsuits and licensicing agreements.
Sooo, yeah i'm putting y money on h.264 staying free for end users (and an open standard mind you) and not WebM being truly patent free.
Plus h.264 is a technically better codec.
Even the analysis everyone quotes says that VP8 is superior to H.264 baseline, which is what video on the web uses. Side by side shots show VP8 as less artifacting than H.264 baseline. So you're wrong.
And again, it's not because the web is moving to VP8 that everything needs to move to VP8. For Blu-ray, it makes no sense. For DRM downloads, it makes no sense either.
For the Web, it makes plenty of sense.
H.264 is not free for end-users, it's free for non commercial use. Big difference.
So I jumped from Engadget to MacRumors reading the comments. I now conclude that people here are very ignorant on this issue and bias toward Apple and Engadget readers are the smarter bunch (as there are people over there who have very intelligent discussions on the technical side of all this while most people here are just badmouthing everything). Just wanted to let that out. Thank you and good day.
So I went to engadget, hoping to find some informative comments. Here is what I found (names removed):
sample of 9 engadget comments said:
For a lot of purposes, B-frames are a really bad idea. Depends on what you are trying to do.
In any case, this may force MPEG-LA to state clearly future license terms, and, to decide what to do about patent enforcement. I have no idea what they think the value of their patents is-- suppose Google, Microsoft, and Apple get together and buy out the H.264 patents and make everything a completely free web standard. I don't know much about patent lawsuits - given that there is a patent pool, when can we be sure that we have all the patents at issue in hand, and, another one won't appear out of a small office somewhere in Milpitas?