Google drops support for H.264 video in Chrome to push WebM - Page 4

It's not a matter of being a selling point. It's about managing customer expectations. If you have flash on a phone, the consumer expects it to work. And if it doesn't, the average consumer isn't savvy enough to understand that it's flashs fault, they just would say the device is slow or has terrible battery. Apple benefits from the consumer understanding that they just don't have flash rathr than having the blame for poor performance thrust on them

No one said H.264 is open-source but the FUD you are trying to spread has already been addressed above:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showp...&postcount=108


Hope Google has it's lawyers and lobbyists ready if they decide to try that.

It is only partially free, to end users like i said. Things that encode/decode are completely screwed, and is why Mozilla still will not support it. H.264 benefits NO ONE. Sorry but its trash and the only reason people on here remotely give a damn is because its the main one Apple supports.


If Google's claim that they are choosing to only support OPEN standards for videos, there is literally nothing MPEG-LA can do, other than A) make it open source or B) file patent claims against WebM to try and take it down.

I personally dont care about h.264, i use Chromium and that wont be changing at all. I would much rather see a completely open standard that anyone can take advantage of than something with "strings attached".

Safari is complete crap compared Firefox and chrome. This will have effect on market share. You think tgr average internet user takes any interest in codecs? For them chrome is already a ejn because you don't have to install flash. Besides, most video websites still use flash on the desktop and a lot - including YouTube - support both webm and h.264.

Google are right to do this. I can't a law suit winning against an open standard. If it does they will switch to ogg theora. Flash is still included for user benefit and the fact it is movigng towards webm now. Strange how this horrendously biased article does not mention that yet others I have read on this topic make it perfectly clear.

That rules out Flash.

Good luck with that. If you ever find software without strings attached it's only because you haven't looked hard enough for the strings.

People still go to homestarrunner? Sheesh... that was a funny site about... oh... 10 years ago.

This thread is like an astroturfer's convention.

LOLOL!

Google's embrace of a vendor-specific and only-really-supported-on-Windows Flash for video is a curious decision IF they are as principle-driven as they claim to be. IF.
They're starting to act more like Microsoft: NIH.

Are you really doing being so stupid, so hypocritical, so Microsoftian?

Do you want an army of people to start working against you rather than for you?

If not I strongly suggest an open letter a la Steve Jobs' on Flash, to explain yourselves.

yeah we call them ads.

I don't use Chrome but I had it on my system. I just uninstalled it with AppCleaner just to make sure it was all gone for good. Probably an over the top reaction, but I just don't like google right now.

since most ads are flash based i see why they kept that...but what about apple? how does apple want ads delivered? would a move to webm try to put a stomp down on apple's ad goals? (if they have any)
?

Well, they think if they just chant, "It's open, it's open, it's open, ..." people's eyes will glaze over and think it's great. That seems to be the case with the open source zealots who have invaded these forums lately. (Hopefully, they aren't representative, otherwise, the entire concept of open source is doomed if most of them are really so easily duped.)

One big difference though is that Flash is a registered industry standard that is royalty free while H.264 is not. Adobe make money off the tools not the format.


What Internet Explorer! If Chrome doesn't have it and nor does Firefox, that just leaves IE as lets face it, nobody uses Safari on the Mac and nobody is ever going to. Apple made sure of that when they made repeated awful releases that's just put off anyone that tried it to ever try it in the future.

Personally I don't know if I even have been watching H.264 videos or not. The only thing I do ever notice is when my phone cant play a flash video.

fixed that for you

Most people are really, really stupid, in general. So yea, I can see that.

The FUD around WebM is completely ridiculous. WebM is NOT "open", it's based on technologies that DO have patents. Of course, google doesn't want you to know that fact. All the patent holders need to do is flip a switch and WebM is suddenly patent-encumbered just as badly as H.264.

The only argument left is pure quality of the codec, of which WebM is completely inferior to H.264, AND there is way more H.264 video out there due to apple's push for HTML5.

Which brings us back to the main point: Google did this to try to trump apple. And it won't work, people are completely pissed off and threatening to uninstall chrome just look at the google message boards.

Stallman usually is very knowledgeable about these things and he supports webm. i don't think he would do so if what you say is true.

Stallman wears a very large set of ideological blinders. I would hardly take his opinion on the issue as authoritative. WebM will almost certainly turn out to be patent encumbered in a number of ways, and people will waste piles of money implementing it and then defending themselves in court. Google doesn't care because it's not important to them; all they care about is disrupting the industry with the hope that when the dust settles they will end up on top. This has nothing to do with Google's "devotion to open source" (one word: Flash) and everything to do with Google's willingness to play the open source communities to its advantage while engaged in a scorched earth campaign to control media on the Internet. That very simply is the bottom line here.

Where do you get this idea? I don't see MPEG LA breaking down the doors at Videolan, Handbrake, MPlayer, ffmpeg, Movist, etc.


Wrong again. Most of us like H.264 because it's widely used, has a range of encoders and players, gives high quality at decent bitrates and has hardware acceleration not only on some portable devices like the iPhone and iPad, but also on many modern video cards.

Offhand, I'd say your user name is right on target.

every new bit of software is potentially a target for patent legality. way of life in the USA. that is one of the reasons for the fear surrounding MS,apple, oracle, getting its hands on Novell patents and then squashing open source.
Stallman wouldn't promote webm if he thought there was any way google could at some time kill the openness of it. and he has been in the trenches on this for a long time and dealt with the legal ranglings et al. i would of course always do some research on my own but if given the choice of 'what does stallman say? vs 'what did some forum user say?' i will give the nod to stallman.

Brilliant post. This WebM move is truly a cornerstone in Google's history... where they made a turn... for the worse.

This is stupid. I love using Chrome, and I don't want to switch. I'm going to be bummed if I have to because of this.

But, why did this article quote user comments? If they were critics that'd be one thing, but for every intelligent comment on a blog there could be just as many idiotic and uninformed comments.

You are welcome to your opinion, but future events will contradict it.


They made the turn long, long ago, but this will be marked as the point when many people started to realize that, "Do no evil," was simply corporate bullshit.

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YOU sir have failed to see the point. You talk about how it is "not that much worse" than H.264 - most would disagree and ask "why settle for less?". For what reason other than to line Googles pockets with gold. Purely a financial issue. If you think has to do with openness than you are more clueless than you appear - if that were they case then they would not support a proprietary container (Flash) over H.264 which Flash supports.

Your logic (or lack thereof) astounds me!

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So your neighbour is being nice when steals your work and "gives" it freely away??? Grow up now and stop using those psychadelic mushrooms...

Google, and more likely Schmidt is trying to do his best Steve Jobs impersonation.

He figures if Steve could lay down the law and say that he would not support Flash, (when nobody else thought he would be able to really make it happen).
Maybe (he thought) he just needs a little 'cojones' and make this big decision too. Of course he thinks by deciding this, it will put Google in a better position, (and of course slow Apple down a little).

But, Steve Jobs has been making this type of decisions for a LONG time now. Back then, a lot of things were not aligned just right for them to work out to positive for Apple.
That was then, and now is now. Things are a whole lot different. Apple has the upper hand on everybody now. Everybody. Even the Phone Carriers are dancing to his desires.

Google sure seemed to have found a souped up car capable of racing and keeping up to Apple. But
just like in those good old days when muscle cars roamed the streets of America. The good old boys wanted to prove their mettle. A game of Chicken was in order.

In order for Schmidt to prove that he is as fast (or capable) as Jobs, he will try him on this once.

But, I am thinking that this might be the eventual beginning of the end for him. Page and Brin have given him all the leeway possible for him to do things his way. P & B (I don't think) ever wanted to step on Jobs' toes as much as has been done.

Who knows. This game of Chicken, might be leading to some disastrous consequenses.

First of all: writing, using and distributing a decoder or encoder for H264 is free for non-profit use, and even for commercial use there is a lower bound on the money you make off H264 video's before you have to start paying. As so many before me already mentioned, MPEG-LA has stated this will remain this way until the patents expired, which makes a lot of sense because they wouldn't benefit at all if everyone abandoned H264 because MPEG-LA acted like codec-nazi's: in the end, non-profit users are not what MPEG-LA hopes to get their revenue from to recuperate their investments in creating H264.

Second: in what way is it a bad thing that commercial entities making money off H264 encoders or decoders have to pay a trivial part of their profits to the inventors of the standard, and how is this different from *any other* piece of technology licensed to third parties? Do you think USB should be replaced because every cable vendor using the USB logo on their cable needs to pay licensing fees? Do you know how many patented and licensed technlogies are used in modern operating systems? Almost every bit of software down to the fonts and the way they are rendered has been licensed and paid for one way or another. Did you know there are companies who even *gasp* pay people to write software for them, so they can sell it or use it to support their own products?! It's what they call 'the economy' or 'creating value in exchange for money'. If you hate that idea so much, you should move to North Korea.

Third: on the topic of Mozilla: it's a shame the people in charge at Mozilla are too dickheaded to just announce they will not support H264 natively because of patent issues (that part they already have covered), but that instead they will write a plugin that hooks into the OS codecs (which already have been licensed and paid for by the OS vendor). Problem solved, everyone happy. The only reason they haven't done this *yet*, is because they are still quietly hoping that somehow the whole world will agree and ditch H264 for something else and that HTML5 will list a different codec as the one and only one for <video> tags. This simply won't happen because companies already invested billions in hardware and software supporting H264, and none of them have anything to gain throwing that out because someone else likes their stuff to be 'open' or 'free'. The sunken costs of licensing H264 are huge, almost everyone and their mother already supports H264 and paid for it. Mozilla's hard-headedness doesn't make sense and it's a purely ideological stance they are taking.

Last but not least: I understand that it's easy to pull out the fanboy argument on a forum dedicated to Apple, but let me remind you that Microsoft is also putting full-force support behind H264, just like Sony (with Blu-Ray), just like all those companies that were behind HD-DVD, just like Adobe (Flash has H264 built in), just like Nvidia and AMD (their cards decode H264 natively), and so on, and so forth. There's a much simpler explanation why H264 is so widely used: it's simply the best codec available, and the companies using it do not mind paying royalties to use it, because they make a lot of money using it in their products. Again, the market has already spoken on this issue, and it chose H264, in spite of the royalties involved.


Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but if you ask me, your opinion on this issue is foolish. You're basically saying you want to settle for a lower quality video codec, for which no professional tooling is available at all, which is almost totally unsupported by any hardware on the market, and which is likely just as patent encumbered as H264, because you 'like the idea that it is free and open'. Meanwhile the only sensible argument against the alternative codec that you can come up with is that other people (companies making profit from products using H264) have to pay royalties for using something they didn't invent themselves.

I really wonder what other products and services you refuse to buy or use in daily life because you don't agree on the distribution of the profits between all the companies in the production chain.


You must be joking. First of all, since when is Stallman an expert of video codecs? I'd rather trust the guys who coded x264 -regarded by many as the best H264 encoder on the planet- who dissected the VP8 codec to the last line, and explicitly stated that they question Googles claim that WebM is patent free, that they expect it to be a bigger target for patent lawsuits than VC-1 (which was also supposed to be patent-free, but turned out to be so patent-encumbered that it now has it's own patent pool) and that they advice companies that invest in WebM to be 'very cautious' until Google steps up and announces it will cover any risk anyone will ever run using WebM, and provide a clear and unambiguous analysis as to why WebM is *not* patent-encumbered. Right now all Google is saying is "Hey everyone! Use WebM, it's patent free, but we can't show you how it doesn't infringe any of the same patents on H264 even though it's remarkably similar in so many ways it's almost a copy of H264 baseline profile, and we don't provide any protection for patent infringement claims at all".

Second: why is Stallmans opionion on these things still relevant? The guy has extremely strong opinions on so many things, which in itself isn't a problem, if it weren't for the fact that 9 out of 10 times he's completely missing the point that there is more to technology than just wanting everything to be free and open. Stallman is like people who hope to rid the world of all diseases, bring world peace and create a fully sustainable economy based on 100% renewable energy, all in one lifetime. These are all good things to want and to work for, but anyone who's even the least bit rational about it knows that they are unattainable goals and that it is better to settle for a compromise than to keep fighting windmills and not accomplish anything at all.

You still are ignoring my post, as in, I already stated that Google and Apple have selfish reasons for doing what they are doing. Bringing to my attention that this will line Google's pockets with gold only supports what I already said.

Seriously, if you are going to ad hominem, do it right - don't skim over my post and try to think you are educating me about something when I already said it.

And you can do research yourself and find that webm isn't that far away from h.264, unlike theora, or you can keep talking out of your ass.

Are you another fucking stupid apple idiot? I swear! I already posted this, so here it is again for you, since you can't be assed to read: Google paid $106 million for On2 who developed VP8, aka webm. They also created VP3, and they had their patents on it, and decided to free them to the open domain by giving it to Xiph.

If they want to give their property away, why do you fucking care?

Don't post shit back unless you want me to punch you in the face.

I suspect removing support for H.264 is going to blow up in their face, it will really just push people away from their browser. I doubt anyone is believing their garbage about supporting open source, what a bunch of bafoons.

At least you try to post stuff, unlike others, so kudos.

But just so you and others know, the FSF (that Stallman is over) is the reason why webm, or VP8 was sent into the public domain in the first place. All patents related to the technology have an irrevocable license for use for anyone, and the libraries on it are BSD.

This codec existed with On2, the same people who made the VP6 codec that flash used before flash supported h.264.

So, yes, while Stallman isn't going to guarantee patent indemnification, it isn't as if webm is a home brew codec that started from the open source community.

strategically why do this...

better thought adobe PAYS google to dump it so pushes people to flash, and who is going to dump their cell phone to get the new codec,.....get real

Only any patents Google owned, not the patents that WebM will likely be found to have infringed. As has been pointed out in detail by others in this thread, it is almost certain that WebM is infringing numerous patents. Google doesn't care about this (because they've already shown -- Google Books Program, for example, where they ripped off authors, wholesale -- they have no respect for the fundamental and legal right of people to control that which they create), but it's telling they aren't willing to indemnify against damages for use of WebM, if they are supposedly so sure that it's not infringing any patents. That's also because they don't care, it won't be their problem, in their eyes. Just accept that Google is a destructive force in the world and everything they do will make a lot more sense.

For Chrome browser (and Chrome OS too) it won't really matter. presumably some plugin will be available for them to play H264 media, as there is now for Firefox. so techies will be ok, altho this will slow its overall consumer growth. ironically, Google won't be able to claim they offer "the whole web" without native H264 support. that could really hurt Chrome OS.

and because WebM is just not ready for mobile devices yet, there is no chance Android will drop H264 support until it is. relying on Flash alone would be suicide.

What would really matter is Google ending H264 for YouTube content, offering only Flash and WebM, which would shut out all iOS devices. but it can't now because of the WebM mobile device problem. and then there are the legal issues ...

so i can't really figure out Google's motives here. Arrogance certainly. tactical FUD to try to counter iOS's booming growth in 2011 probably. but ultimately it puts all Google products in limbo too.

because the HTML5/H264 train is already pulling away from the station, driven by the most powerful iOS locomotive, and headed for the destination of Real Profits. everybody in the media business sees they have to jump on board this year, or miss that trip altogether. nobody is going to instead wait at the station for some Google Chrome/Flash/WebM choo-choo to show up next year and take them for a ride - to Ad Town.

VP8 as a codec isn't terrible, it's on par with many other codecs but definitely nowhere near H264 main or high profile. Saying it's 'not far behind' is an understatement, if it is supposed to replace H264 it should be at least as good or marginally worse, without any other big negatives. This isn't the case: VP8 is clearly inferior in terms of encoding quality, and it has the added negative that it uses algorithms that can not be implemented in hardware efficiently, and that the spec contains bugs affecting image quality that are not going to be fixed by Google. So in that regard it's a lose-lose situation. If WebM ever takes off, it will take a while, and in the mean time the people behind h264 are working on h265, and the whole discussion can start all over again.

VP8 as a specification is terrible. The x264 guys analyzed it, and concluded you can hardly even call it a specification. Apparently most of it consists of obscure code snippets ripped out of the implementation, sometimes without any explanation, some stuff is very vaguely defined, some parts are downright missing. The specification is more like a description of the implementation than a specification of the algorithms. One x264 developer literally stated that it would be downright impossible to implement a decoder or encoder from the specs alone. Compare that to the h264 specs (I have a copy and studied them last year), which document all the mathematics and algorithms down to the last bit of the bitstream, using proper formalisms instead of code ripped out of an implementation. The arcane specs issue alone will be huge barrier for acceptance of VP8 by companies that need a video codec customized for their hardware.

This is all disregarding the issues with available tooling and hardware support. AFAIK te only VP8 encoder available is the one made by On2, and as long as the specs aren't cleaned up thoroughly that will remain the case for a long time.

So I think you can safely say VP8 is *way* behind every aspect of h264 except for Googles statement that it doesn't have patent issues, something they haven't been able back up with any facts for now.

Personally I really don't get why anyone would be cheering for VP8 except idealism, it just doesn't make sense at all.

I'm going to reverse my position on this issue. I think Apple should make VP8 technology available on Safari and MSFT should make one for IE. I'm still skeptical of Google's motive here but I think Apple and MSFT should work with Google and Mozilla on making VP8 a standard and making VP8 high def.

I don't understand why they can't just make h.264 patent free for the internet users and browsers indefinitely. It's better in so many ways and VP8 won't further googles business model in anyway.