Has anyone actually made any money with Ogg Theora? If not, it's not an attractive target.
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Jobs Responds to Google's WebM Video Standard Announcement as Patent Questions Begin to Surface
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Has anyone actually made any money with Ogg Theora? If not, it's not an attractive target.
WHO claims it is violating patents? Please tell me. Some blogger. On the other side we have a multi billion dollar company that says there are no issues. I wonder who has more to lose in this, and I wonder whether you have wondered about anything.
Also, VP8 is not controlled by a single firm, it's open source. Anyone can take it and do whatever they want with it. Is Webkit 'controlled' by Apple? Are Apache or Firefox 'controlled' by anyone?
I fail to see your logic. And you seem to be quite misinformed in many respects.
Well I never have heard on anybody. Doesn't mean that there aren't any though. The fact is that absence of evidence doesn't indicate evidence of absence. As you might point out, just because nobody has been sued doesn't mean that they won't be or even could be.
So you rather chose to believe what some blogger said than what Google is saying. I guess they have more and better lawyers than that guy. We don't really know what Jobs thinks about this. We don't now if this email was legit, and even if it is, he hasn't said a word himself. My guess: he hasn't decided yet what to do.
Funny, how people already know exactly how good or bad something is, before they've even seen it in action. We're talking about web videos here, and while VP8 might be slightly less efficient than H.264 it is still very good, sufficiently good for the web. Plus, web sites can still offer their extremely high quality videos in H.264. No one forces them or you to use WebM.
This is something that concerns me a bit actually; not that it isn't controlled by a single company (I definitely don't want a single company in a market having inappropriate control over barriers to entry to that market), but that the much needed hardware acceleration won't be possible until the spec's bitstream and decoder are settled. Only so much improvement is possible beyond that point too, so I can imagine it is a very difficult decision to make (with high stakes given the surrounding market forces).
Maybe someone knowledgeable here could comment on the typical development timeframes for hardware decoders and whether using FPGAs is feasible (since I remember a group working on a Theora decoder using FPGAs to 'allow for open-source')?
If you're talking about the one steve jobs linked to,even he doesn't claim that,he posted on another forum:
The point is that Firefox and Opera are big enough to prevent HTML5+H.264 from ever taking off as a web standard. Which means that Flash will stick around. I wonder if that's what you want.
Also, don't discount IE9 as WebM browser so quickly. Flash is not bundled with a single browser. People have to download it. Still, it is on nearly all web computers. That's because it is a fast+easy download, and if you realise how tiny standalone codecs actually are (around 1MB), I have no doubt that people will just click on that button that says 'please install before watching this video', just like it happens with Flash. Also, my guess is that it will come preinstalled on many computers.
So, no. the huge majority will support WebM, with Safari (so far) as the single browser that doesn't. Safari has less than 5% market share and shows no tendency to grow as fast as Chrome is doing. Google still has so much more influence on web technologies, Apple should acknowledge that.
That plugin will die as soon as the license fees are enforced. Or it will cost money (and then die). Why do you think that Firefox doesn't support H.264 in the first place?
It 'looks like' because some blogger said so and Steve allegedly linked to it? Your standards for believing things people say on the Internet must be really low.
Yeah right. As if most people didn't already sit on 5MBit+ cable or DSL lines, with LTE and similar bandwidth for mobile devices just around the corner. We're not talking about a high-bitrate HDTV replacement here, but about some way to replace Flash on the web. Is Youtube now suddenly reaching more people because Flash switched to H.264?
Yes, H.264 is the slightly more efficient codec, but WebM is 'good enough'. HTML5+H.264 will never take off on the web until they waive their license fees. Easy as that.
Absolutely true, and that was not really my point.
It was thrown together with well-patented standards like GIF or MP3, as if it's already clear that there were patent infringements. Which is not clear at all.
And that person was then going on educating us that VP8 is in exactly the same situation, which it isn't.
Well, I don't see that hardware acceleration is really needed that much, at least not on the desktop. I don't see people screaming and installing the Flash 10.1 beta like crazy. Most people don't care one bit about this.
Mobile use is a different story, mostly because hardware acceleration usually consumes less power. On the other hand, mobile use implicates a much lower resolution.
If phones support WebM hardware acceleration in say, 2 years, I don't see any mass market problem for the standard. Which phones have specific hardware to play H.264 right now?
Actually, no. Safari already supports it in the same way Microsoft has announced IE9 will when released. If you have a WebM QuickTime component on your system, Safari will play the video, same goes for Theora+Vorbis+Ogg. (However, as far as I know, there is no 3rd Party WebM QuickTime component available yet)
That's a straw man argument. I never said that Theora is completely safe. It is a fact though that technologies don't infringe rights until someone comes along to prove the opposite, which hasn't happened so far. Also, you can't bunch it together with MP3 and GIF, and not with WebM/VP8 either. WebM has a multi billion dollar company backing it up, along with a lot of support in the industry from day 1 on.
Agreed, and even their new 3-coloumn layout is annoying. Google is getting a bit to big and needs some good competition. Note I say good, because 99% of the other search engines out there suck.
Mac OSX uses FreeBSD code, so does Windows. There's a piece of FreeBSD on a lot of computers out there.
Dude, a lot of markets are multi-billion dollar markets. That's not exactly a huge point in your favour. Apple themselves are a multi-billion dollar market.
The biggest Linux player (Redhat) only gets about 78.72 million net profit.
This discussion wasn't about OSS software in general.
Actually, I do have a Linux-based NAS box.
Right now it's literally sitting in my box of eWaste waiting for the next pickup day - because Samba does not work like CIFS and has never worked like CIFS. Why run something that is guaranteed to corrupt your files? I now use a couple of Windows Home Server systems with eSATA RAID arrays instead.
As the joke says, "it's not a coincidence that open source sounds like open sores".
Its more like that the GPL license rips those sores open with stiletto dagger.
At my old work, we only used Linux as the virtualisation cluster. (Running on a bunch of PS3s no less) The logon and database servers were Windows 2008.
(But the guys who installed it messed it up badly so I had to do it anyway :/)
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OH! You have to get Samba working first before you have the pleasure of it corrupting your files.
Believe differently all you want, what I stated came from the lead writer for the W3C and the video tag is finalized, no matter what the rest of the spec may be.
In the end, the choice was made. The spec doesn't define formats. Neither for IMG, neither for Video or Audio.
No one has come forth with patents that cover VP8 besides what On2 has. Let's cross that bridge when we get there. Everyone saying they might have a patent covering it right now are spreading FUD.
Didn't you read the thread ? We've gone over this dozens of times.
Google, as far as is known, owns all the relevent patents to VP8 through their acquisition of On2, which developed the codec in the first place.
Again, thread, read it people.
Ubisoft and Atari have made plenty of Money using Theora in their games like HOMM V and Ghostbusters respectively.
Threat of lawsuit = FUD. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. You tend to start to know the trolls that are just spreading FUD vs the real threats after a while. The MPEG-LA has been spewing their line about no one being able to write a codec without their patents for years and have yet to make a move on anyone about it. That is pure FUD, a la SCO and the Unix code in Linux...
Mac OS X is not FreeBSD. It might use some parts of the userland, but then again, it uses the GNU userland too. Should we call it GNU/FreeMacBSDOSX ? Of course not. What most users see and use does not have a single line of FreeBSD Code in it. Quartz, Finder, Cocoa, Carbon, heck even Darwin (no, Darwin is not from FreeBSD, it's Mach and it comes from Carnegie Mellon, not Berkeley).
Bits and pieces do not mean that FreeBSD itself is a success. It's very much a niche OS. It runs my home server and I've got a VM I use with it on my Mac. I'm one of the and proud users of FreeBSD, but even I know it's not a huge success per say.
The fact is, GPL, BSD, MIT, the license does not a success make. KHTML was GPL'ed and look where it is now, running about 10% of browsers out there. The MPL runs in 25% of browsers.
I believe the biggest Linux player is IBM, not RedHat. It could also be HP. Or maybe it's Novell. Or maybe it's that other smallish company... Google.
And are you saying Apple doesn't participate in huge markets ? That the cell phone market isn't huge ? That the PMP market isn't huge ? That the personal computer market isn't huge ?
You're grasping at straws. Look, you made a comment without thinking it through. That's fine. Just drop it, you lost this one.
I think you're the one deluding yourself right now. We have a tanked OS and one that has barely made a dent outside the US.
Yeah, flourishing. THe only Android phone I can get is the Xerpia, and that's $1k brand new.
You need to learn more about how one thing affects another in the computer world. Nothing is an Island, if you sneeze 50 million others will get a cold.
Linux won't become user friendly because the majority of people working on the GUI a bedroom nerds. Big companies wont spend time on Linux because the GPL license is a difficult thing to adopt and still make oodles of money.
The xperia here is 99$ with a 3 year contract. Android is everywhere now in Canada.
Why are you going back to GUIs ? He told you to let go of the damn home user desktop. Linux is a huge success in SERVERS. You know, those things that don't need to run GNOME or XFCE.
We just migrated about 150 Sun servers into 400 Linux VMs. Running on top of a Linux based host system. Our entire SAN, using Brocade products, runs off Linux (Brocade's OS is Linux). Our security perimeter ? Checkpoint Secure Platform which is based on Linux.
Linux is everywhere in the server room. Heck, you can hardly find a vendor that isn't pushing some form of Linux right now.
I'm not just talking about home use. the GUI tools for linux are unsuited for administration, hell. Even the Command line tools are difficult and unnecessarily complicated. Especially compared to Windows Servers Command Line utilities.
I don't deny that linux is a huge success in the server market, but the server market is a niche compared to the consumer market, and filled with computer illiterate people.
No, the server market is not a niche. Stop saying stuff like that. For people like me and other IT workers that work servers all day, we know there is no such thing as a "server niche". Our yearly server budget is higher than our desktop budget. By some kind of ridiculous margin.
As for GUIs and such, please again, let go. That is not a measure of Linux' success.
That's why I used the word compared.
No, but it surely limits its success.