Google announces free WebM video codec as H.264 alternative - Page 3

one more web video standard. do consumers need one? i mean ordinary consumers, people who watch web video.

My business always worked in the best interest of the final consumer. Why not every business works this way.

Last time I was at a party with an open bar, I certainly paid for it the following morning.......

The Magic updated to 1.6 a while ago, well the Google experience version (the one without HTC sense UI) did anyway.

SonyEricsson just released the X10 with 1.6 they say a 2.x update will come late this year.

h264 is an open standard. It is not free. Open does not mean you can't charge.

Annual license fixed for 10 years details (PDF)

Well I wasn't TRYING to be pedantic, I was trying give a sense of the scale. So if that made you bristle then I apologize for my figures not being accurate.

As I see it, that isn't just a reason for Apple. Any user of H.264 will have the same benefits of patent indemnity. Now if Google were to extend patent indemnification to WebM users, then they could feel more secure about taking it up. It might also convince the big players like Apple and Microsoft to incorporate it.

I would like to read more analysis from experts that this thing is "fully baked" though. Google is really pushing it out there like it's ready to go head-to-head. It reminds me a bit of when Windows 7 was a public beta. Testers would submit their comments and be told that those parts were committed and Microsoft had no intention to change it. It seems to conflict with Google's big emphasis on "open". Open as in accessible, YES. Open as in free, YES. Open as in community input, NO. The spec itself is frozen. But then I find a lot of Google's stance on "open" systems to be very schizophrenic. For all their railing against Apple's "walled garden", Google's search is a big black box.

amen html5 ftw

HTML has nothing to do with the codecs.

It's CODEC Agnostic.

It's the browser vendors/OS vendors that manage the codecs.

Correct.

And things are moving fast.

No, I think that you jumped the gun in your desperation to continue your ridiculous attacks on all-things apple.


Great post.


Correct. And as someone pointed out earlier, it is most likely that end-users won't have to pay a cent for it directly.

Firstly, I thought H.264 (& previous H.1xx/2xx/3xx standards) was the denomination of the ITU, not ISO. ISO MPEG-4 part 10 (Advanced Video Codec) is a different standards body but same product.

Secondly, it already is the dominant standard, has been for years. The media industry (& definitely the best quality content) exists outside of the computing/web market. If you're watching commercial HD content on services like cable, satellite, BD (VC-1 is now a minor) & even the digital cinemas - you're watching H.264. The vast majority of HD video content is consumed in this way. The biggest provider of ownable, legal video downloads (iTunes) also adopted the standard, along with the MPEG-4 audio, 5 years ago.

And that's the real challenge with all of this. When iTunes released Movies & TV Shows in H.264 the content creators had no encoder expertise and the quality was useless, panned by the critics. It ensured AppleTV never got off the ground. Thanks to Blu ray they now have good H.264 encoders and the same spec video looks great. So unless those same real content providers are prepared to encode WebM to any degree of quality this whole technology standard (open or licensable) is stuffed.

McD

I guess it doesn't fit the Apple PR spin to mention that H.264 is controlled by MPEG LA. The format is only formalized by an ISO standard. The underlying technology(aka patents) does NOT belong to ISO.

Wow. x264 developers trashing a rival codec in a forum.

That's got to be at least as biased as Microsoft/Adobe/Google/Flash/Zune/Droid/Intel (pre 2006)/etc bashing on AppleInsider.

Yes, because the linked post is just trash talk with no technical specifics to back it up.

@ Asherian,

Word is that the 1.5 year old HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1 won't ever get an official Android v2.2. What are the chances the iPhone 3G gets v4.0 the day of or just before the G4 iPhone hits shelves?

$5 million per year for copies that Mozilla distributes itself. That wouldn't cover any 3rd parties who redistribute it. Redistribution of Firefox is explicitly permitted -- even encouraged.

For example, each of the various Linux distributions which maintain their own repository version of Firefox would not be covered by Mozilla's $5 million - they'd have to register with MPEG-LA as separate distributors paying separate royalties.

If you download and burn DVDs of one of those Linux distributions, and then give those DVDs to your friends, then you yourself become a distributor, and theoretically either you would have to register with MPEG-LA and start paying royalties, or else each of your friends would have to purchase the license directly from MPEG-LA before they started using the software. (However, it is dubious whether it would even be possible for MPEG-LA to seriously keep track of distribution on that level, so admittedly it may be difficult to enforce.)

Google's Chrome browser also has an open-source counterpart named Chromium. Chromium can be freely redistributed but official releases of Chrome cannot -- Official Chrome can only legally be obtained directly from Google. That's because Google's H.264 license only covers copies of software obtained directly from Google. Chromium is generally obtained from downstream distributors.

Chromium source code ships from Google to 3rd party distributors with the H.264 decoding feature ifdefed out, specifically to avoid the patent licensing issues for downstream re-distributors. Several of those re-distributors have commented the H.264 portion of Chromium back in, but technically, any such redistribution of an H.264 enabled Chromium is being done without inclusion of an H.264 license, leaving any recipients of the software open to potential H.264-related lawsuits depending on their country of residence.