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.
But this goes both ways; h.264 may be infringing on some patents that On2 or anyone else has.
The point is, if VP8, VP6 or anything else was infringing, it was a company making money that could be sued. This is better than say Vorbis where it was made in the public domain to begin with. Big companies like Activision and whoever made Unreal, Sandisk use it, and have not been sued.
Those who used MPEG1-Layer 3 aka mp3 audio did what they thought was proper licensing and now years later companies out of the blue start suing over it, and won and lost appeals. Regardless, it still costs much in the way of litigation.
Fearing patent suits isn't a good reason to not move on. MPEG-LA has stated on their own web site, that they CANNOT with 100% certainty guarantee that all the patents for h.264 are accounted for, and as such, grant no indemification either.
It is a better situation than mp3 was, but by no means is h.264 safe either.
The google books issue is something that can be debated elsewhere;
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.
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.
i have to laugh at the comments that point out how the commentator has all the problems solved and proclaims the ones actually doing the work as 'idiots'.
of course Stallman has done absolutely nothing in his career but sit around and mouth off right? to bad he never accomplished anything...sad. if only he was more like you.
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.
This is true, but the bottom line is results, and the results that VP8 generates isn't that far off from h.264.
This is of course, an initial test, and while VP8 lost, it still isn't utter crap like theora is, and is usable. That test video I used earlier on youtube, the nvidia pure video test, looks fine too, except of course it will be a larger file. Some pointed out about x264, which is fair, but that tool wasn't ready since day one with h.264 either.
Look, I prefer h.264. It is such a great improvement over the MPEG4-SP/ASP standard which if it weren't for a bunch of pirates may have never gained traction, since what we have today is what MPEG4-SP/ASP should have been.
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.
Stallman may believe Google won't kill the openness of WebM, and Google won't. But yesterday just raised the target of WebM in MPEG-LAs eyes, and their members are the ones who have already looked into the WebM code and made "it looks like you're infringing" noises.
As long as WebM was a curiosity only it wasn't worth anyones while to engage the patent issues. Now it probably is and Stallman has absolutely no clue as to whether or not WebM will prevail, he's just beating the Free Drum as loud as he can with the hope the patent holders leave them alone.
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.
i have to laugh at the comments that point out how the commentator has all the problems solved and proclaims the ones actually doing the work as 'idiots'.
of course Stallman has done absolutely nothing in his career but sit around and mouth off right? to bad he never accomplished anything...sad. if only he was more like you.
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.
It is. The non-commercial license was extended through the expiration of the covered patents. That means forever because once the patents expire, they are then public domain by definition. The change was made after the last H.264 made-up-dust-up when Mozilla first said they wouldn't implement a native H.264 codec.
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.
I have scoured their licensing terms about encoders and decoders and have not found any exceptions for non-profit use. Web use is already accounted for.
Please link to and quote the clause where this is stated. This is news to me.
Stallman may believe Google won't kill the openness of WebM, and Google won't. But yesterday just raised the target of WebM in MPEG-LAs eyes, and their members are the ones who have already looked into the WebM code and made "it looks like you're infringing" noises.
As long as WebM was a curiosity only it wasn't worth anyones while to engage the patent issues. Now it probably is and Stallman has absolutely no clue as to whether or not WebM will prevail, he's just beating the Free Drum as loud as he can with the hope the patent holders leave them alone.
so will this mpeg-la go after anyone implementing this technology? or do they think they will target google specifically?
google doesn't claim they 'own' webm. they are merely a 'sponser'.
i have to laugh at the comments that point out how the commentator has all the problems solved and proclaims the ones actually doing the work as 'idiots'.
of course Stallman has done absolutely nothing in his career but sit around and mouth off right? to bad he never accomplished anything...sad. if only he was more like you.
He codes and he recreates what has gone before because those things he recreated from offend his "Free" sensibilities. He was and still is (inexplicably to me) charismatic enough to get enough people to fund his personal quest. Is that accomplishing something, sure, but its not like he's some shining beacon of tech truth, purity and advancement. He's just a man with an axe to grind and has ground it well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by screamingfist
ha. i don't need to be stroked by anyone on this forum.
You weren't being stroked. Your post was being called uttterly ineffectual, which I agree it was.
ha. i don't need to be stroked by anyone on this forum.
I was hoping you'd come out with something better than some mumbo jumbo about Richard Stallman being somehow better than a poster. That's all. Sorry I just prefer an well thought out argument to a personal attack. I guess it's better to attack the person, when you don't have a valid and logical argument to offer up. *shrugs*
... Fearing patent suits isn't a good reason to not move on. MPEG-LA has stated on their own web site, that they CANNOT with 100% certainty guarantee that all the patents for h.264 are accounted for, and as such, grant no indemification either.
It is a better situation than mp3 was, but by no means is h.264 safe either.
The google books issue is something that can be debated elsewhere;
Yes, but H.264 has a strong patent portfolio behind it, as well as a large group of companies who have a decided interest in defending it if it does become the target of patent suits. It's in a much stronger position that WebM, which has nothing much of anything behind it besides Google's word, and we've all seen what that's worth. And this is all besides the technical issues that have been discussed throughout the thread and which show WebM to be particularly weak in several areas. Essentially this is "trash technology" that Google is throwing out into the market for the sole purpose of generating FUD.
And, the Google Books Program, and Google's theft of property from hard working writers around the world has everything to do with this issue as it points directly to the corporate character at Google, their disregard for law and the creative efforts of others, and the fact that they don't even bother to consider who they are hurting, nor do they care, when they take actions such as this. Google is a predatory and sociopathic corporation.
It is. The non-commercial license was extended through the expiration of the covered patents. That means forever because once the patents expire, they are then public domain by definition. The change was made after the last H.264 made-up-dust-up when Mozilla first said they wouldn't implement a native H.264 codec.
So why is Mozilla still holding the line here? Seems counter intuitive to me. They addressed Mozilla's concerns and many of the content creators are the same entities as the patent holders and the hardware makers. How will this affect Sony's Google TV efforts? If Google is trying to force people to use Flash, what do we need HTML for?
Agreed 100% - what do you think Google will do with YouTube's recent embracing of HTML5 in light of this move?
They may be stuck with H.264/HTML5 if they want to actually continue to support their own Android devices, existing and future. (Yes, I know most of them aren't "theirs" but effectively they are) Most Android devices can't run Flash, so that isn't an option, and what version of Android provides acceptable WebM performance, assuming it could even be upgraded to. But, mostly, this is just a move to cause destruction, confusion and chaos and Google doesn't really care what the end result is in terms of video standards (something their open source fans don't seem to get -- i.e., google has no principals that guide it's behavior, least of all a devotion to open source, everything is just a tool to them) as long as they can use the chaos to their advantage.
He codes and he recreates what has gone before because those things he recreated from offend his "Free" sensibilities. He was and still is (inexplicably to me) charismatic enough to get enough people to fund his personal quest. Is that accomplishing something, sure, but its not like he's some shining beacon of tech truth, purity and advancement. He's just a man with an axe to grind and has ground it well.
You weren't being stroked. Your post was being called uttterly ineffectual, which I agree it was.
sorry you don't like the dude. maybe you should take a lesson from him on this charisma you speak of.
i KNOW i wasn't being stroked moron. i was saying i don't care and don't need someone to give me kudos. wise up genius.
Comments
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.
But this goes both ways; h.264 may be infringing on some patents that On2 or anyone else has.
The point is, if VP8, VP6 or anything else was infringing, it was a company making money that could be sued. This is better than say Vorbis where it was made in the public domain to begin with. Big companies like Activision and whoever made Unreal, Sandisk use it, and have not been sued.
Those who used MPEG1-Layer 3 aka mp3 audio did what they thought was proper licensing and now years later companies out of the blue start suing over it, and won and lost appeals. Regardless, it still costs much in the way of litigation.
Fearing patent suits isn't a good reason to not move on. MPEG-LA has stated on their own web site, that they CANNOT with 100% certainty guarantee that all the patents for h.264 are accounted for, and as such, grant no indemification either.
It is a better situation than mp3 was, but by no means is h.264 safe either.
The google books issue is something that can be debated elsewhere;
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.
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.
i have to laugh at the comments that point out how the commentator has all the problems solved and proclaims the ones actually doing the work as 'idiots'.
of course Stallman has done absolutely nothing in his career but sit around and mouth off right? to bad he never accomplished anything...sad. if only he was more like you.
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.
This is true, but the bottom line is results, and the results that VP8 generates isn't that far off from h.264.
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articl...red-67266.aspx
This is of course, an initial test, and while VP8 lost, it still isn't utter crap like theora is, and is usable. That test video I used earlier on youtube, the nvidia pure video test, looks fine too, except of course it will be a larger file. Some pointed out about x264, which is fair, but that tool wasn't ready since day one with h.264 either.
Look, I prefer h.264. It is such a great improvement over the MPEG4-SP/ASP standard which if it weren't for a bunch of pirates may have never gained traction, since what we have today is what MPEG4-SP/ASP should have been.
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.
Stallman may believe Google won't kill the openness of WebM, and Google won't. But yesterday just raised the target of WebM in MPEG-LAs eyes, and their members are the ones who have already looked into the WebM code and made "it looks like you're infringing" noises.
As long as WebM was a curiosity only it wasn't worth anyones while to engage the patent issues. Now it probably is and Stallman has absolutely no clue as to whether or not WebM will prevail, he's just beating the Free Drum as loud as he can with the hope the patent holders leave them alone.
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.
Dayum well said!
i have to laugh at the comments that point out how the commentator has all the problems solved and proclaims the ones actually doing the work as 'idiots'.
of course Stallman has done absolutely nothing in his career but sit around and mouth off right? to bad he never accomplished anything...sad. if only he was more like you.
Hmmmm not a good argument IMO.
Hmmmm not a good argument IMO.
ha. i don't need to be stroked by anyone on this forum.
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.
It is. The non-commercial license was extended through the expiration of the covered patents. That means forever because once the patents expire, they are then public domain by definition. The change was made after the last H.264 made-up-dust-up when Mozilla first said they wouldn't implement a native H.264 codec.
Originally Posted by d-range View Post
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.
I have scoured their licensing terms about encoders and decoders and have not found any exceptions for non-profit use. Web use is already accounted for.
Please link to and quote the clause where this is stated. This is news to me.
Stallman may believe Google won't kill the openness of WebM, and Google won't. But yesterday just raised the target of WebM in MPEG-LAs eyes, and their members are the ones who have already looked into the WebM code and made "it looks like you're infringing" noises.
As long as WebM was a curiosity only it wasn't worth anyones while to engage the patent issues. Now it probably is and Stallman has absolutely no clue as to whether or not WebM will prevail, he's just beating the Free Drum as loud as he can with the hope the patent holders leave them alone.
so will this mpeg-la go after anyone implementing this technology? or do they think they will target google specifically?
google doesn't claim they 'own' webm. they are merely a 'sponser'.
People still go to homestarrunner? Sheesh... that was a funny site about... oh... 10 years ago.
I'm glad, without you I wouldn't know what everyone's opinion is on stuff.
google doesn't claim they 'own' webm. they are merely a 'sponser'.
Uh, in what way???
i have to laugh at the comments that point out how the commentator has all the problems solved and proclaims the ones actually doing the work as 'idiots'.
of course Stallman has done absolutely nothing in his career but sit around and mouth off right? to bad he never accomplished anything...sad. if only he was more like you.
He codes and he recreates what has gone before because those things he recreated from offend his "Free" sensibilities. He was and still is (inexplicably to me) charismatic enough to get enough people to fund his personal quest. Is that accomplishing something, sure, but its not like he's some shining beacon of tech truth, purity and advancement. He's just a man with an axe to grind and has ground it well.
ha. i don't need to be stroked by anyone on this forum.
You weren't being stroked. Your post was being called uttterly ineffectual, which I agree it was.
ha. i don't need to be stroked by anyone on this forum.
I was hoping you'd come out with something better than some mumbo jumbo about Richard Stallman being somehow better than a poster. That's all. Sorry I just prefer an well thought out argument to a personal attack. I guess it's better to attack the person, when you don't have a valid and logical argument to offer up. *shrugs*
... Fearing patent suits isn't a good reason to not move on. MPEG-LA has stated on their own web site, that they CANNOT with 100% certainty guarantee that all the patents for h.264 are accounted for, and as such, grant no indemification either.
It is a better situation than mp3 was, but by no means is h.264 safe either.
The google books issue is something that can be debated elsewhere;
Yes, but H.264 has a strong patent portfolio behind it, as well as a large group of companies who have a decided interest in defending it if it does become the target of patent suits. It's in a much stronger position that WebM, which has nothing much of anything behind it besides Google's word, and we've all seen what that's worth. And this is all besides the technical issues that have been discussed throughout the thread and which show WebM to be particularly weak in several areas. Essentially this is "trash technology" that Google is throwing out into the market for the sole purpose of generating FUD.
And, the Google Books Program, and Google's theft of property from hard working writers around the world has everything to do with this issue as it points directly to the corporate character at Google, their disregard for law and the creative efforts of others, and the fact that they don't even bother to consider who they are hurting, nor do they care, when they take actions such as this. Google is a predatory and sociopathic corporation.
It is. The non-commercial license was extended through the expiration of the covered patents. That means forever because once the patents expire, they are then public domain by definition. The change was made after the last H.264 made-up-dust-up when Mozilla first said they wouldn't implement a native H.264 codec.
So why is Mozilla still holding the line here? Seems counter intuitive to me. They addressed Mozilla's concerns and many of the content creators are the same entities as the patent holders and the hardware makers. How will this affect Sony's Google TV efforts? If Google is trying to force people to use Flash, what do we need HTML for?
Agreed 100% - what do you think Google will do with YouTube's recent embracing of HTML5 in light of this move?
They may be stuck with H.264/HTML5 if they want to actually continue to support their own Android devices, existing and future. (Yes, I know most of them aren't "theirs" but effectively they are) Most Android devices can't run Flash, so that isn't an option, and what version of Android provides acceptable WebM performance, assuming it could even be upgraded to. But, mostly, this is just a move to cause destruction, confusion and chaos and Google doesn't really care what the end result is in terms of video standards (something their open source fans don't seem to get -- i.e., google has no principals that guide it's behavior, least of all a devotion to open source, everything is just a tool to them) as long as they can use the chaos to their advantage.
He codes and he recreates what has gone before because those things he recreated from offend his "Free" sensibilities. He was and still is (inexplicably to me) charismatic enough to get enough people to fund his personal quest. Is that accomplishing something, sure, but its not like he's some shining beacon of tech truth, purity and advancement. He's just a man with an axe to grind and has ground it well.
You weren't being stroked. Your post was being called uttterly ineffectual, which I agree it was.
sorry you don't like the dude. maybe you should take a lesson from him on this charisma you speak of.
i KNOW i wasn't being stroked moron. i was saying i don't care and don't need someone to give me kudos. wise up genius.
So why is Mozilla still holding the line here? Seems counter intuitive to me. ...
Ideology.