You're not enabling innovation by paying the cost. Innovation occurs irrespective of patents. Patents are just a way to make money and control software, they do not encourage innovation.
I can't think of a single company that would stop innovating if there were no patents. There's tremendous incentive to innovate -- sales, market position, and brand image.
Personally, patents have prevented me from innovating. I've implemented lots of cool things in the software I develop, and had to remove them because part of it infringes on some vague patent some big company, or some troll company, owns.
Maybe the patent system isn't the best way to protect IP and it is a mess, I agree. I have a friend who has an audio patent for his invention, pain in the a$$ situation, but at this stage of the game, while his patent was challenged by the trolls (who only had vaporware) and they sort of won because the judge was clueless, at least he had something as protection. Without it, no recourse at all.
First, your example is wrong. I use Safari - which is based on webkit. Safari is proprietary. Just like all the other browsers based on Webkit.
Chrome is BSD/GPL. The only part you can't take is the Google Chrome logo and trademark.
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Second, we were talking about user space - where proprietary software outnumbers 'open' software many fold. Yes, for servers, open source is common, but still doesn't greatly outnumber proprietary software.
Perhaps the point is the quantity of "open" software vs. the quantity of use.
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Nonsense - it's not patent trolling at all. MPEG-LA is responsible for licensing a wide range of patents and codecs. That's their business. As part of that business they have the right to enforce their patents and find infringers.
That "wide" range of codecs is anything MPEG, and 1394. For that matter, all the patents they already know about should be all they need to start a case against webm. Going out of your way to ask the world if you have a patent against another competing codec to come together so we can fight it just because it now is gaining momentum is quite trolling.
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Obviously coming from someone who has never created anything of value.
We live in a free market society. People create things so that they can profit from them. If you remove the profit motive, the incentive for creation drops dramatically. There would be VASTLY less innovation if people couldn't profit from them. Patents help to ensure that people can profit from their innovations.
Sounds great in theory, but in practice it is a little more complicated than that. Submarine patents can be hidden for years until someone else makes a successful product, killing any profit to be made. The entire mobile industry is in a holdup due to all the stupid lawsuits filed.
Kinda hard to want to invent stuff when much more powerful people already will shoot you down.
And quality, OGG and WebM are horrible, I as a web designer cringe at the thought that my well crafted videos are only being served by those two codecs I would pay extra, myself, to be able to use H.264 (exclusively) and well, I do pay for it anyway since I do own at least five Apple devices and soon to get more. You get what you pay for, I have worked with php solutions for years now and I pay developers gladly for the php shopping carts, or CMS programs. Sure you can get semi-free crap coded in China, but that is what you have, semi-free or cheap crap from China so you spend your precious time to troubleshoot so it will function (maybe).
No, so over it. Just freakin' pay for it, (unless it is Adobe overpriced crap, always on the look out for alternatives for that!)
That said I still have to waste my time to encode a video three times so I can serve it up as html5, it is a major pain, but dealing with Flash is even worse, so I just do it. But I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, want H264 off the table. In case I wasn't clear, I mean EVER!
Just because webm exists doesn't mean the end of h.264. I also fail to see your "horrible" when I have both examples of 720p material sitting right here. If by OGG you mean the audio portion vorbis consistently ties aac and is a little better at lower bitrates.
... Safari uses QuickTime for video and IE uses DirectShow for video -- if you install the WebM plugin for these systemwide (which Google has or will make available), they will play in Safari and IE.
The only codec that will not have any way of playing in all browsers will be h264...
This is not true.
Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.
That "wide" range of codecs is anything MPEG, and 1394. For that matter, all the patents they already know about should be all they need to start a case against webm. Going out of your way to ask the world if you have a patent against another competing codec to come together so we can fight it just because it now is gaining momentum is quite trolling.
MPEG-LA is simply asking the people who are most familiar with their code to make an assessment of infringement. While MPEG-LA has plenty of lawyers and such, I doubt that have a full staff of engineers with access to the source code from their various members.
Nonsense - it's not patent trolling at all. MPEG-LA is responsible for licensing a wide range of patents and codecs. That's their business. As part of that business they have the right to enforce their patents and find infringers.
It's by definition patent trolling. Even your justification for it is EXACTLY what patent trolls do. Patent trolls buy up patents and make a business out of their "right to enforce their patents and find infringers".
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Obviously coming from someone who has never created anything of value.
Yeah, that must be it. I'm not going to list the things that I've done, but I'm a professional software developer that has to play the patent game myself. I've got patents with my name next to them, I ship software millions of people use.
I don't know if you're in the same boat, but your comment is not necessary, ignorant, and really just shows you've nothing valuable to contribute to the discussion.
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Patents help to ensure that people can profit from their innovations.
The problem is the definition of "innovation". The vast majority of software patents are junk patents. They're not "innovation", they're just things someone gets around to doing first. I know this first hand.
Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.
I was speaking in the context of native browsers (hence the word "browsers", and not "plugins").
Google has already re-encoded YouTube into WebM. I used to work for a major source of videos in the Canadian market, and they're in the process of WebM-encoding now. It's trivial work to do when you already have the infrastructure, as most do. Other major providers like Vimeo and BrightCove have also already done it. It's not only not "highly unlikely", it's basically already done.
My comment is that if you take off the shelf browsers and use HTML5 video (NOT FLASH...I thought we all agreed Flash is awful?), WebM will be played from every browser (provided you have the free QT plugin on OS X and WMP Plugin on Windows). Firefox will never play h264 in HTML5.
As for the comments on WebM quality -- you guys should take a look at the git log of libvpx. There's been a phenomenal amount of work done in a short period of time to improve both the quality and the speed. Most of the problems with WebM quality (which are grossly overstated) are due to immature encoders. It's not really fair to evaluate the codecs themselves by comparing x264-encoded videos with libvpx-encoded videos, because x264 is excellent quality and has been refined over many years with massive quality improvements. libvpx hasn't had that time to mature yet, but it will.
Edit: Correction -- apparently MS has released a Firefox extension for Windows that'll enable h264 playback, but it's Windows only...and you need to install a FF extension.
MPEG-LA is simply asking the people who are most familiar with their code to make an assessment of infringement. While MPEG-LA has plenty of lawyers and such, I doubt that have a full staff of engineers with access to the source code from their various members.
And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?
Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."
How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.
Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.
Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."
And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?
Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."
MPEG-LA does, in fact, make it easy to pay their members money. But it would be far more cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive if licensees needed to deal with each patentholder separately. I am pretty sure you know this already.
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How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.
Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.
Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."
MPEG-LA does not claim to own VP8 - they believe that VP8 includes infringing software.
As far as why now and not earlier, there are two reasons:
However popular VP6 and other On2 codecs were, they were nearly invisible to the vast majority of computer users (so, not worth the time and effort)
Google picked a fight by removing support for H.264
I doubt Google is really surprised by any of this. In fact, it is likely the reason they chose not to indemnify those who implemented VP8.
The MPEG-LA license is really pretty small - it seems the most anyone would pay would be $6.5M per year per product type. Someone like Apple likely pays the max for both the encoder/decoder in their OS as well as paying a separate fee for individual titles in iTunes. Google can certainly afford this, as well. It could hurt smaller developers and content providers but I am not feeling too sorry for Mozilla who has a lot of their bills paid by Google.
Neither Apple, Google or MPEG-LA made the rules; they are all simply playing by the rules as they exist. Well, Google is kind of hoping to skirt around the rules but now it appears that they will likely not succeed. If you want change, it's time to start contacting your elected officials.
I'm not sure how this plays out. Google could pay whatever licensing is determined which will most likely be reasonable and continue with VP8. I think the more likely outcome is that VP8 will die much as VC1 did.
One more thing...defenders of WebM forget that this whole bit of MPEG-LA checking out a competitor for patent violations has happened before. Microsoft developed VC-1 as an alternative to H.264 and offered it as an alternative for the potentially lucrative Blu-Ray market. They even offered it to standards bodies. Then the MPEG-LA looked at it and discovered that it was riddled with already used patents in the MPEG-LA patent pool.
Microsoft had a couple of choices. Either fight the MPEG-LA in court for years and suffer the real possibility of losing (and having to pay royalties and treble damages) or join the patent pool. In the end, they joined the patent pool and managed to get VC-1 approved as an alternate encoding standard for Blu-Ray anyway.
Microsoft chose the practical choice and it paid off for the industry. Microsoft makes no money off the patent pool when you subtract the royalties they have to pay. But the industry got a chance to move forward on one standard that is used EVERYWHERE. Web video? Check. Broadcast video? Check. Satellite video (including the satellites)? Yup. Mobile devices (phones, tablets). You bet. Military applications? Remember the Wikileaks video? Do you think it would have been easy to distribute to the press had it not been encoded in something they already knew how to play?
Google is betting on the might of its size and influence combined with the market dominance of Youtube to bring WebM to the forefront. The whole thing was a play to marginalize Apple and Microsoft in the mobile web video space. But the move pissed off nearly everyone who actually produces video content for a living since up until WebM, their job was a lot easier, especially with Flash video falling by the wayside.
Just because webm exists doesn't mean the end of h.264. I also fail to see your "horrible" when I have both examples of 720p material sitting right here. If by OGG you mean the audio portion vorbis consistently ties aac and is a little better at lower bitrates.
Not by it's existence, but everyone who thinks open source is more important than having code done right (i.e. swallowed Googles BS) is insisting it is going to be the standard codec. I was responding to the thinking that Webm will save us all. So, now all of us on the coding end have to work triple hard to basically serve up one video (encode in Ogg, WebM and H.264). Thanks a lot.
I tried encoding the Ogg/WebM versions with the same compression as I encoded the H.264, I do want to switch to html 5 video now, not later. I just couldn't get the quality to be as good at the same file size as the h.264 one. The videos were horribly obviously much lower quality. For the project I was working on, smallest file size was very important. With the H.264 version I got great quality and great compression. So now anyone viewing my websites with Firefox and Chrome will see the crappy quality video, so yes I have issues with that. And I have moved on from Flash, so the fallback for Flash in the html5 code is only for older browsers not modern browsers so it won't play the H.264 video via FLash Player with Firefox or Chrome.
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Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody
This is not true.
Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.
Yes, but as I posted above, modern browsers will not play it by default in an html5 tag, it will serve up the video codec for the browser and not the Flash player even with the Flash fallback code, that is only for browsers that can't read html5 tags.
Billions of dollars worth of research and investment went into the work of h264. The innovators deserve to be compensated for their work.
Asking businesses and developers to work for free is not fair or moral especially when they have bills to pay and children to feed just like everyone else.
There is no such thing as a free lunch no matter what google tells you.
Google is betting on the might of its size and influence combined with the market dominance of Youtube to bring WebM to the forefront. The whole thing was a play to marginalize Apple and Microsoft in the mobile web video space. But the move pissed off nearly everyone who actually produces video content for a living since up until WebM, their job was a lot easier, especially with Flash video falling by the wayside.
Maybe the patent system isn't the best way to protect IP and it is a mess, I agree. I have a friend who has an audio patent for his invention, pain in the a$$ situation, but at this stage of the game, while his patent was challenged by the trolls (who only had vaporware) and they sort of won because the judge was clueless, at least he had something as protection. Without it, no recourse at all.
Without software patents, your friend wouldn't be sued by some vaporware patent troll in the first place. Think about that for a second.
Sure, other people might be able to copy what he did more easily, but he would also be free to incorporate other people's good idea in his own product. Then it all comes down to who did a better job integrating the features, and better at marketing. Much better system than submitting to the basically tech illiterate lawyers and judges.
Just remove them altogether. There is no such thing as software patents outside the US anyway. They may not be slowing innovation now but lets look at this in a couple of years.
Just think, if apple won all their lawsuits and ended up the sole supplier of smart phones. They would have no motivation to improve that god awful notification system. There would never be proper multi tasking, the processor would never improve at the same rate. The only that win are the apple senior management and us consumers get screwed.
Tell that to Nokia, at least one of the suits they lodged against Apple in the UK involves software.
I know this is well beyond the comprehension of the drones on this board, but imagine if mathematic formulas were patentable. We would still be living in caves.
First of all, I don't believe software patents should exist. While I'm sure some software algorythms are truly innovative, there are just far too many one-click shopping patents out there. The US patent office is in a clear conflict-of-interest situation, because the more stupid patents they approve, the more money they make. Conversely, the less they look for prior art, the less cost they incur and the more money they make.
Having said that, all of the big industry players have agreed that software patents are among the rules of the game, and Google has decided its "above the law" in this respect, despite the fact that they've filed patents of their own.
The only way out of this mess is to abolish software patents. This way, no cross-licensing agreements need to exist, and Google will be on the same footing as everybody else, as opposed to trying to get a leg up.
Comments
You're not enabling innovation by paying the cost. Innovation occurs irrespective of patents. Patents are just a way to make money and control software, they do not encourage innovation.
I can't think of a single company that would stop innovating if there were no patents. There's tremendous incentive to innovate -- sales, market position, and brand image.
Personally, patents have prevented me from innovating. I've implemented lots of cool things in the software I develop, and had to remove them because part of it infringes on some vague patent some big company, or some troll company, owns.
Maybe the patent system isn't the best way to protect IP and it is a mess, I agree. I have a friend who has an audio patent for his invention, pain in the a$$ situation, but at this stage of the game, while his patent was challenged by the trolls (who only had vaporware) and they sort of won because the judge was clueless, at least he had something as protection. Without it, no recourse at all.
Yeah, what happened is they found signs of bing copying their search results then did an experiment.
Heck, even Microsoft didn't deny it and said the results were open to them to copy, when in reality Google's TOS say otherwise.
You think Yahoo let Microsoft use their search engine for free back in the day?
You might find this article relevant:-
http://searchengineland.com/bing-why...usations-63279
Drones buzzing around honeycomb.
You're not missing anything.
Q: How do you tell a Google executive is lying?
A: His lips are moving.
How original.
That's total bull.
First, your example is wrong. I use Safari - which is based on webkit. Safari is proprietary. Just like all the other browsers based on Webkit.
Chrome is BSD/GPL. The only part you can't take is the Google Chrome logo and trademark.
Second, we were talking about user space - where proprietary software outnumbers 'open' software many fold. Yes, for servers, open source is common, but still doesn't greatly outnumber proprietary software.
Perhaps the point is the quantity of "open" software vs. the quantity of use.
Nonsense - it's not patent trolling at all. MPEG-LA is responsible for licensing a wide range of patents and codecs. That's their business. As part of that business they have the right to enforce their patents and find infringers.
That "wide" range of codecs is anything MPEG, and 1394. For that matter, all the patents they already know about should be all they need to start a case against webm. Going out of your way to ask the world if you have a patent against another competing codec to come together so we can fight it just because it now is gaining momentum is quite trolling.
Obviously coming from someone who has never created anything of value.
We live in a free market society. People create things so that they can profit from them. If you remove the profit motive, the incentive for creation drops dramatically. There would be VASTLY less innovation if people couldn't profit from them. Patents help to ensure that people can profit from their innovations.
Sounds great in theory, but in practice it is a little more complicated than that. Submarine patents can be hidden for years until someone else makes a successful product, killing any profit to be made. The entire mobile industry is in a holdup due to all the stupid lawsuits filed.
Kinda hard to want to invent stuff when much more powerful people already will shoot you down.
You might find this article relevant:-
http://searchengineland.com/bing-why...usations-63279
We know, it's one of their methods of getting more relevant search results based on what their users browse.
Wholesale copying of search results would be obvious and therefore stupid to do.
And quality, OGG and WebM are horrible, I as a web designer cringe at the thought that my well crafted videos are only being served by those two codecs I would pay extra, myself, to be able to use H.264 (exclusively) and well, I do pay for it anyway since I do own at least five Apple devices and soon to get more. You get what you pay for, I have worked with php solutions for years now and I pay developers gladly for the php shopping carts, or CMS programs. Sure you can get semi-free crap coded in China, but that is what you have, semi-free or cheap crap from China so you spend your precious time to troubleshoot so it will function (maybe).
No, so over it. Just freakin' pay for it, (unless it is Adobe overpriced crap, always on the look out for alternatives for that!)
That said I still have to waste my time to encode a video three times so I can serve it up as html5, it is a major pain, but dealing with Flash is even worse, so I just do it. But I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, want H264 off the table. In case I wasn't clear, I mean EVER!
Just because webm exists doesn't mean the end of h.264. I also fail to see your "horrible" when I have both examples of 720p material sitting right here. If by OGG you mean the audio portion vorbis consistently ties aac and is a little better at lower bitrates.
... Safari uses QuickTime for video and IE uses DirectShow for video -- if you install the WebM plugin for these systemwide (which Google has or will make available), they will play in Safari and IE.
The only codec that will not have any way of playing in all browsers will be h264...
This is not true.
Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.
That "wide" range of codecs is anything MPEG, and 1394. For that matter, all the patents they already know about should be all they need to start a case against webm. Going out of your way to ask the world if you have a patent against another competing codec to come together so we can fight it just because it now is gaining momentum is quite trolling.
MPEG-LA is simply asking the people who are most familiar with their code to make an assessment of infringement. While MPEG-LA has plenty of lawyers and such, I doubt that have a full staff of engineers with access to the source code from their various members.
Nonsense - it's not patent trolling at all. MPEG-LA is responsible for licensing a wide range of patents and codecs. That's their business. As part of that business they have the right to enforce their patents and find infringers.
It's by definition patent trolling. Even your justification for it is EXACTLY what patent trolls do. Patent trolls buy up patents and make a business out of their "right to enforce their patents and find infringers".
Obviously coming from someone who has never created anything of value.
Yeah, that must be it. I'm not going to list the things that I've done, but I'm a professional software developer that has to play the patent game myself. I've got patents with my name next to them, I ship software millions of people use.
I don't know if you're in the same boat, but your comment is not necessary, ignorant, and really just shows you've nothing valuable to contribute to the discussion.
Patents help to ensure that people can profit from their innovations.
The problem is the definition of "innovation". The vast majority of software patents are junk patents. They're not "innovation", they're just things someone gets around to doing first. I know this first hand.
This is not true.
Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.
I was speaking in the context of native browsers (hence the word "browsers", and not "plugins").
Google has already re-encoded YouTube into WebM. I used to work for a major source of videos in the Canadian market, and they're in the process of WebM-encoding now. It's trivial work to do when you already have the infrastructure, as most do. Other major providers like Vimeo and BrightCove have also already done it. It's not only not "highly unlikely", it's basically already done.
My comment is that if you take off the shelf browsers and use HTML5 video (NOT FLASH...I thought we all agreed Flash is awful?), WebM will be played from every browser (provided you have the free QT plugin on OS X and WMP Plugin on Windows). Firefox will never play h264 in HTML5.
As for the comments on WebM quality -- you guys should take a look at the git log of libvpx. There's been a phenomenal amount of work done in a short period of time to improve both the quality and the speed. Most of the problems with WebM quality (which are grossly overstated) are due to immature encoders. It's not really fair to evaluate the codecs themselves by comparing x264-encoded videos with libvpx-encoded videos, because x264 is excellent quality and has been refined over many years with massive quality improvements. libvpx hasn't had that time to mature yet, but it will.
Edit: Correction -- apparently MS has released a Firefox extension for Windows that'll enable h264 playback, but it's Windows only...and you need to install a FF extension.
MPEG-LA is simply asking the people who are most familiar with their code to make an assessment of infringement. While MPEG-LA has plenty of lawyers and such, I doubt that have a full staff of engineers with access to the source code from their various members.
And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?
Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."
How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.
Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.
Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."
And why would they need to do this when each patent holder would/should do this themselves, without "pooling" together?
Did Google ask for a patent pool? Did the former On2 need one? I mean here's MPEG-LA basically saying, "We always are making it easy for people to pay our members money."
MPEG-LA does, in fact, make it easy to pay their members money. But it would be far more cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive if licensees needed to deal with each patentholder separately. I am pretty sure you know this already.
How nice of them to now start making one so soon after Google dropping h.264 from Chrome.
Again, MPEG-LA doing what it owns, licensing MPEG, is quite fine with me. Claiming to own VP8 and making a pool out of it is another. It's like that patent troll suing apple over the ipod for claiming to have invented the DAC.
Look, them going after someone for their "IP" isn't so much the issue with me. It's the whole "let's wait until you become popular, then we'll nickel and dime you into the ground."
MPEG-LA does not claim to own VP8 - they believe that VP8 includes infringing software.
As far as why now and not earlier, there are two reasons:
- However popular VP6 and other On2 codecs were, they were nearly invisible to the vast majority of computer users (so, not worth the time and effort)
- Google picked a fight by removing support for H.264
I doubt Google is really surprised by any of this. In fact, it is likely the reason they chose not to indemnify those who implemented VP8.The MPEG-LA license is really pretty small - it seems the most anyone would pay would be $6.5M per year per product type. Someone like Apple likely pays the max for both the encoder/decoder in their OS as well as paying a separate fee for individual titles in iTunes. Google can certainly afford this, as well. It could hurt smaller developers and content providers but I am not feeling too sorry for Mozilla who has a lot of their bills paid by Google.
Neither Apple, Google or MPEG-LA made the rules; they are all simply playing by the rules as they exist. Well, Google is kind of hoping to skirt around the rules but now it appears that they will likely not succeed. If you want change, it's time to start contacting your elected officials.
I'm not sure how this plays out. Google could pay whatever licensing is determined which will most likely be reasonable and continue with VP8. I think the more likely outcome is that VP8 will die much as VC1 did.
Microsoft had a couple of choices. Either fight the MPEG-LA in court for years and suffer the real possibility of losing (and having to pay royalties and treble damages) or join the patent pool. In the end, they joined the patent pool and managed to get VC-1 approved as an alternate encoding standard for Blu-Ray anyway.
Microsoft chose the practical choice and it paid off for the industry. Microsoft makes no money off the patent pool when you subtract the royalties they have to pay. But the industry got a chance to move forward on one standard that is used EVERYWHERE. Web video? Check. Broadcast video? Check. Satellite video (including the satellites)? Yup. Mobile devices (phones, tablets). You bet. Military applications? Remember the Wikileaks video? Do you think it would have been easy to distribute to the press had it not been encoded in something they already knew how to play?
Google is betting on the might of its size and influence combined with the market dominance of Youtube to bring WebM to the forefront. The whole thing was a play to marginalize Apple and Microsoft in the mobile web video space. But the move pissed off nearly everyone who actually produces video content for a living since up until WebM, their job was a lot easier, especially with Flash video falling by the wayside.
What happens next should be interesting...
Just because webm exists doesn't mean the end of h.264. I also fail to see your "horrible" when I have both examples of 720p material sitting right here. If by OGG you mean the audio portion vorbis consistently ties aac and is a little better at lower bitrates.
Not by it's existence, but everyone who thinks open source is more important than having code done right (i.e. swallowed Googles BS) is insisting it is going to be the standard codec. I was responding to the thinking that Webm will save us all. So, now all of us on the coding end have to work triple hard to basically serve up one video (encode in Ogg, WebM and H.264). Thanks a lot.
I tried encoding the Ogg/WebM versions with the same compression as I encoded the H.264, I do want to switch to html 5 video now, not later. I just couldn't get the quality to be as good at the same file size as the h.264 one. The videos were horribly obviously much lower quality. For the project I was working on, smallest file size was very important. With the H.264 version I got great quality and great compression. So now anyone viewing my websites with Firefox and Chrome will see the crappy quality video, so yes I have issues with that. And I have moved on from Flash, so the fallback for Flash in the html5 code is only for older browsers not modern browsers so it won't play the H.264 video via FLash Player with Firefox or Chrome.
This is not true.
Most browsers have flash plug-ins installed, and if you have that, you will be served the h.264 files whenever they are available. Since most videos out there (YouTube etc.) are encoded in h.264, then you will be viewing h.264 most of the time, regardless of browser. Unless Google and all the other big content owners go out and re-encode everything in WebM (hugely unlikely), the h.264 version will be served up by the Flash plugin.
Yes, but as I posted above, modern browsers will not play it by default in an html5 tag, it will serve up the video codec for the browser and not the Flash player even with the Flash fallback code, that is only for browsers that can't read html5 tags.
Asking businesses and developers to work for free is not fair or moral especially when they have bills to pay and children to feed just like everyone else.
There is no such thing as a free lunch no matter what google tells you.
Google is betting on the might of its size and influence combined with the market dominance of Youtube to bring WebM to the forefront. The whole thing was a play to marginalize Apple and Microsoft in the mobile web video space. But the move pissed off nearly everyone who actually produces video content for a living since up until WebM, their job was a lot easier, especially with Flash video falling by the wayside.
Thank you!! You said it much better than I did!
Maybe the patent system isn't the best way to protect IP and it is a mess, I agree. I have a friend who has an audio patent for his invention, pain in the a$$ situation, but at this stage of the game, while his patent was challenged by the trolls (who only had vaporware) and they sort of won because the judge was clueless, at least he had something as protection. Without it, no recourse at all.
Without software patents, your friend wouldn't be sued by some vaporware patent troll in the first place. Think about that for a second.
Sure, other people might be able to copy what he did more easily, but he would also be free to incorporate other people's good idea in his own product. Then it all comes down to who did a better job integrating the features, and better at marketing. Much better system than submitting to the basically tech illiterate lawyers and judges.
Just remove them altogether. There is no such thing as software patents outside the US anyway. They may not be slowing innovation now but lets look at this in a couple of years.
Just think, if apple won all their lawsuits and ended up the sole supplier of smart phones. They would have no motivation to improve that god awful notification system. There would never be proper multi tasking, the processor would never improve at the same rate. The only that win are the apple senior management and us consumers get screwed.
Tell that to Nokia, at least one of the suits they lodged against Apple in the UK involves software.
I know this is well beyond the comprehension of the drones on this board, but imagine if mathematic formulas were patentable. We would still be living in caves.
But mathematical algorithms are patentable.
First of all, I don't believe software patents should exist. While I'm sure some software algorythms are truly innovative, there are just far too many one-click shopping patents out there. The US patent office is in a clear conflict-of-interest situation, because the more stupid patents they approve, the more money they make. Conversely, the less they look for prior art, the less cost they incur and the more money they make.
Having said that, all of the big industry players have agreed that software patents are among the rules of the game, and Google has decided its "above the law" in this respect, despite the fact that they've filed patents of their own.
The only way out of this mess is to abolish software patents. This way, no cross-licensing agreements need to exist, and Google will be on the same footing as everybody else, as opposed to trying to get a leg up.