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MPEG LA Declares H.264 Standard Permanently Royalty-Free
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Many parties involved: patentholders, contentproviders, browserdevelopers, consumers
Um, only if implementing and shipping a decoder is possible in free and open-source browsers, including on embedded devices.
Also its quite possible that AVC and WebM become recommended, or neither.
Um, only if implementing and shipping a decoder is possible in free and open-source browsers, including on embedded devices.
Also its quite possible that AVC and WebM become recommended, or neither.
Should is something, but the fact is they aren't.
This whole thing is GIF the sequel. Too bad the current generation is too young to remember that. And too bad Microsoft never really got to supporting the true free alternative, PNG until it was too late and Unisys' patents had expired.
Except this time round its not so simple as a picture format. Were now talking about displacing h.264 which is hardware decoded on billions of devices, with such a hugh investment from both consumers and businesses it is a solid format to work with.
On the other hand we have webM a unproven format, that requires buying a new GPU, settop box, Laptop, Phone etc. Not only this but it requires buying new software to encode(and decode) it and the format is yet unproven to be royalty free for all.
And just to kick it in the teeth two hardware decoding chips consume more battery life. Yep you will still need to support h.264 as Blu DVDs, iTunes, Podcasts, Youtube, and just about every other piece of media on the market including Flash video is in h.264.
The last thing we need is two formats competing because we all know what will happen, you'll go to a website and get promoted to install a new codec Mweb which will happily take over your computer.
This need to be seamless to work.
Just a note. Blu-ray != DVD. At all. HD DVD is closer to DVD than Blu-ray is.
Other than that you are right, WebM requires a pretty big re-investment. On the GPU side it wouldn't be as bad. GPUs can decode WebM in shaders. No it isn't as efficient as having dedicated silicon to do it, but it does the job.
The company, Mozilla, makes roughly 100 million a year in profit off of their free product through their close relationship with Google.
Giving something away for free does not mean the same thing as not generating a profit off of it. I don't pay a dime to receive CBS, ABC and NBC on my home television, but should they choose to use h264 to encode their HD streams, I would certainly expect them to pay licensing fees, as they generate massive revenue off the advertising associated with their content.
A solid format that is non-free. The Web is about Free (as in freedom) and open standards. Tying vital web infrastructure to a patent troll is something we've gone through and we shouldn't repeat the mistakes we made back then.
FUD. You think H.264 decoding is done at the gate level on your chips ? These are programmable ASICs you're talking about. The H.264 decoding is actual a software program that runs on top of it. This can be updated to do VP8 and you will get the benefits by updating the software on the device, not by changing the device completely.
Not to mention On2 has been doing this stuff for years. VP8 unproven ? It has been around for quite a while. Its older version, VP3, was used to make Theora. These are people who know their stuff.
Your fears are unfounded and if you really believe what you say, it shows how much you know about both the hardware/software interactions you talk about and the history of the product you claim is unproven.
By that thinking, H.264 is not in the clear either. Who's to say the MPEG-LA holds all the patents on it ? Who's to say some kind of Unisys isn't out there with a submarine patent waiting for the right moment to pounce ?
Seriously, Patent FUD is FUD. It can be applied to any technology. The MPEG-LA has been going against Theora (which is VP3, an older version of VP8 used for WebM) with this FUD for 8 years. Still no lawsuit.
Also, no one is calling for WebM to replace everything H.264 is used for. The HTML5 video tag is 1 use of a video codec. This isn't Highlander and "There can only be one" made for a good movie, but in the real world it doesn't apply. H.264 (AVCS) can still be used for Blu-ray, iPods, commercial games. The web however should use a Free codec as its basis, and that is WebM, so that all browser implementors can implement HTML5 in a way the user can use it and no platform is left behind like we had in the late 90s early 2000s.
No, I said nothing of the sort. All I said was "less investment." You made up all the other stuff.
And companies with actual expertise in video are investing in H.264. In addition to Apple and Microsoft. Again, all I'm saying is that with less money involved, there would be less investment. Not "no investment". Not better or worse results.
WebM doesn't have potential to improve. WebM is what WebM is. It's a final spec. And there is no reason to think that the next version will be better than H.265 (or whatever) or vice versa.
Mozilla thinks they would. The word "sold" isn't as limiting as you think it is.
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/
I agree with knightwrx the web is free and anything use in the web infrastructure should be free and open standards, this has nothing to do with apple or google or who won the codec war, those company that charge for there service will use what ever codec they want, but the base standard for video in the web should be open and free of any royalties completly.
this is gif all over again people.
Hmm...possibly good, but possibly bad...because are they actually opening this, or just promising not to charge royalties? If it's the latter, this doesn't change anything-we still need an open standard for HTML 5.
I can't see how this has anything to do with Apple's DRMed up store...
I don't see the connection...GoogleTV is a very different platform from what Apple's doing. They're only indirect competitors.
I can't see how this has anything to do with Apple's DRMed up store...
I don't see the connection...GoogleTV is a very different platform from what Apple's doing. They're only indirect competitors.
They haven't changed anything. This annoucement is basically saying : "What you have now and expires in 2016 won't expire". Status quo, perpetually. All the same problems as before.
Thanks! That's what it looked like, but some people were so excited I thought maybe I was misunderstanding.
Do you have any proof that Google did this? MPEG-LA has already been doing this for years - committee rules simply forced them to review royalties every few years or so. As far as I can tell, free distribution content has always been free from royalty charges. For all we know, the committee has been wanting to go permanently free for awhile and the simple bureaucracies of dealing with a committee have prevented it (such as a couple of patent holders holding out)
Remember the MPEG-LA can only change things every so often and just doesn't make arbitrary rule changes.
It doesn't matter if FireFox is distributed for free.
The HTML5 spec requires that all technology in the spec be royalty-free. It's a requirement. That means that unless they get rid of all the associated licensing fees for EVERYONE (including HULU, Apple, Amazon, Lynda, etc), H.264 can't be used as a default codec for the HTML5 "video" tag, because that tag is part of the HTML5 spec.
FireFox is obligated by their license to only include royalty-free technologies. Plug-ins can be added of course, to support non-royalty-free technologies, but they can't be included in the actual package, and if that's the case, they also can't be called upon by the HTML5 "video" tag.
This post is extremely misleading (especially the headline) and I'm guessing that it will be changed soon, because right now it is factually wrong in its conclusions.
The HTML5 spec requires that all technology in the spec be royalty-free. It's a requirement. That means that unless they get rid of all the associated licensing fees for EVERYONE (including HULU, Apple, Amazon, Lynda, etc), H.264 can't be used as a default codec for the HTML5 "video" tag, because that tag is part of the HTML5 spec.
FireFox is obligated by their license to only include royalty-free technologies. Plug-ins can be added of course, to support non-royalty-free technologies, but they can't be included in the actual package, and if that's the case, they also can't be called upon by the HTML5 "video" tag.
This post is extremely misleading (especially the headline) and I'm guessing that it will be changed soon, because right now it is factually wrong in its conclusions.
For those of you who think this will kill Adobe and Flash think again. Flash has used H264 video for a few years now. Very few commercial based companies bother using FLV video anymore and it has been that way for awhile. If anything this helps Adobe just as much as HTML5 because Adobe has been pushing the use of H264 on the web for a long time. In fact Adobe Flash was the first method of H264 web video delivery outside of maybe Quicktime which never really look off on a large scale.
You people need to get your facts straight before you spread your hatred towards Adobe.
Personally I really think Firefox needs to rethink it's position. They are sort of being hypocritical in a way because they have supported H264 video for years through the Flash plugin. They were ok to ride the H264 wave when they didn't have to touch the code in any way but now all of a sudden it is evil.
Mozilla is really in a bad position now. I and many people love Firefox but I can see it's userbase really going down if they do not support H264. Nobody in the video world gives a crap about Ogg. I work for a video production and design company. We stream live video for corporations and I can tell you without a doubt we would never consider using Ogg. I recently participated in a streaming video webcast that talked about the future of HTML5 and Flash streaming video and there is very little to no place at all for Ogg.
You people need to get your facts straight before you spread your hatred towards Adobe.
Personally I really think Firefox needs to rethink it's position. They are sort of being hypocritical in a way because they have supported H264 video for years through the Flash plugin. They were ok to ride the H264 wave when they didn't have to touch the code in any way but now all of a sudden it is evil.
Mozilla is really in a bad position now. I and many people love Firefox but I can see it's userbase really going down if they do not support H264. Nobody in the video world gives a crap about Ogg. I work for a video production and design company. We stream live video for corporations and I can tell you without a doubt we would never consider using Ogg. I recently participated in a streaming video webcast that talked about the future of HTML5 and Flash streaming video and there is very little to no place at all for Ogg.
Fine, how about you pay then for a license to H.264 for them and anyone who forks their code base so that the code isn't tainted by patent license concerns ?
They also didn't have to pay a license. The Flash plugin is not part of Firefox nor was it supported by the Mozilla foundation. Where did you even get this ? Adobe paid the license to MPEG-LA and distributes the plug-in themselves.
Mozilla and the Firefox project are not involved in Flash. At all.
Hence why there's WebM and why Google completely opensourced VP8 after their acquisition of On2. Because H.264 is a problem, same as GIF was and we don't need to repeat the mistakes of the past. Let's have all the players support the Free and free alternative, which is as good if not better in some usage scenarios (PNG had full alpha channel vs GIF's transparency on/off bit). WebM is that. Every consumer/vendor wins by having WebM be adopted for Web use.
Set top boxes and proprietary systems and optical media can still use H.264 if they like.
This isn't enough really, though it helps, but doesn't change adoption.
They need to come up with cross-licensing agreements so all three (H.264, Ogg Theora, VP8) can co-exist since not all operating systems and browsers have equal support now.
They need to come up with cross-licensing agreements so all three (H.264, Ogg Theora, VP8) can co-exist since not all operating systems and browsers have equal support now.
CompuServe created the GIF image format for transmitting images through its online service back in 1989 (1987?). They decided it would be nice if they could save bandwidth in this format by incorporating data compression as part of the file format. They opted for a lossless compression algorithm known as LZW.
In the mean time, Unisys corporation had held a patent on the LZW compression algorithm since the early 1980's.
When the WWW took off, two image formats quickly emerged as the most popular: JPEG (lossy) for photographs, and GIF for other things such as progressive display, animations, and low-def images that compressed well using lossless techniques.
After GIF was firmly entrenched as a popular file format, Unisys decided they wanted to flex their muscle and start suing everybody whose software implemented GIF images, on the basis that those images contained LZW-compressed data. They targeted web browsers that could display GIFs, and paint programs that could create and view GIFs. Those who could afford to, paid the ransom to continue using the format.
Those who were not in a position to pay patent licensing fees, either took their chances by continuing to use the technology without a license, hoping they could fly under the radar, or else they got together with an open source consortium which created the PNG format. PNG avoided the patent by using a different compression algorithm. At the same time, the PNG format introduced new features intended to make it technically superior to GIF on other grounds.
By the time PNG really caught on, though, Unisys' patent on LZW compression had already expired.
Just a note. Blu-ray != DVD. At all. HD DVD is closer to DVD than Blu-ray is.
Other than that you are right, WebM requires a pretty big re-investment. On the GPU side it wouldn't be as bad. GPUs can decode WebM in shaders. No it isn't as efficient as having dedicated silicon to do it, but it does the job.
I think it's a bad idea to build hardware that is dedicated to one format!
Those GPUs should simply provide raw power in terms of floating point, parallel instructions and other 'building blocks' that most modern codecs could take advantage of. I'm sure it's easier to say than to accomplish, though...
Everything you said is true, I want to add that PNG was officially ready long before the patents Unisys had expired. It was superior, it was well defined, it was simply ready to put all the GIF bullcrap into the past.
The thing is, this is smack dab in the late 90s, where Microsoft was the rule. Microsoft paid Unisys for GIF and it ended there. They never implemented PNG. When they finally got around to it, they implemented it poorly (the big feature, the 8 bit alpha channel, was implemented wrong and thus transparency never quite worked. It was on or off, there never was any blending which created very nice effects in KHTML and Gecko at the time). They also completely left out MNG, which was basically an animated form of PNG.
Since Microsoft had so much clout and market share, using PNG images for a while was near impossible, and when it became available, there was no advantage since you didn't benefit from its new features over GIF. People just continued to use the entranched, patent encumbered GIF.
We now have a chance for web browser makers to make a difference and all get behind the true Free alternative so no one gets left behind.
This is how it is. Why is it that you guys think "hardware h*.264 decoding" is some kind of gate logic applied only to H.264 ? Seriously, this idea that somehow "H.264 hardware decoders" can only decode h.264 in hardware needs to die. One simply needs to add a new decoder in the firmware to have the hardware be able to decode it.
There's nothing hard about programmable ASICs. This is 2010 for cripes sake, not 1974.
Some are more programmable than others. Otherwise there would be no reason older GPUs (Nvidia 7, 8 series and ATI 2k, 3k,4k series) couldn't accelerate h.264 fully versus offloading some of the work to the CPU as they do (or in Apples case not accelerate any at all).
I have also noticed that we have hardware acceleration for codecs that are (were) mainstream. MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 seem to be pretty much it.