If I stole diamonds and gave them away to someone who then gave me data from which I made money I'd still be earning from my theft! I'd still be a thief and subject to the law of the land.
For me it's pretty simple… Google can afford to support the "common standards" in their browser. Why not both WebM and h.264? And since h.264 is already licensed on both OSX and Windows, they don't have costs there, right? THere's no excuse, really.
If they choose to drop support for h.264, there are other browsers. Chrome is nice, but a lot less nice without h.264 support. I can just not use it………………………
Which, in the end, is probably what will happen. I'm fine with Safari and Firefox, why bother wrestling with a browser that doesn't cover my browsing bases?
I wonder how much market share Chrome will lose as a result of dropping h.264 support, and, will that change Google's mind?
Wil also be interesting to see how it plays out. In the meantime, Safari+Firefox rule….
And this, just as I was starting to like Chrome on OSX…...
...it's fast, blazing fast a page loads up almost straight away BUT links don't work, you have to wait for them, it's as if Chrome loads a non functional image of a page before filling in the gaps.
I won't miss it when I delete it over this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jensonb
They are charging. If you own a copy of Windows, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPod, a PlayStation 3, a Blu-Ray Player or any other device that can play or record H.264, and you paid for it, you paid for H.264. What they are not charging for is internet streaming which is not behind a paywall, and they have extended that in perpetuity, meaning they plan never to charge for that.
The "charge" is probably magnitudes less than Google makes from one click through on a YouTube WebM video.
No offence but this is just a ridiculous assertion.
There is no charge to the end user and a very minimal small charge to those that do the encoding. If you are talking about people "paying for it" because the cost to the producers is rolled into the hardware, then you are wrong in the specific sense as that tiny cost is actually *not* purposely figured in to the pricing.
You may be correct in the limited general sense that all costs incurred by a company are eventually rolled into the price whether it's done explicitly or not, but we are talking about possibly $0.02 on a device costing $700.00 in the case of the iPhone. So in this sense you are being technically accurate in terms of the detail, but disingenuous at the same time in the implication that this is a real charge that the consumer experiences.
Where in Jensonb's post did he mention anything about the magnitude of the charge? A quote I saw recently and rather liked is "we all know technically correct is the best sort of correct". Jensonb is entirely right - Apple and the like pay licensing fees for H.264. Apple's source of money is selling products. So you buy an Apple product, you are effectively paying for H.264. Sure, the percentage of the purchase cost that is attributable to H.264 is negligibly small, but it is there.
As a non-academic and programmer myself let me tell you that I *vastly* prefer open source software. Your claim is utterly absurd: the Internet as we know it wouldn't exist without open source software and open standards (Sendmail, Apache httpd, pretty much all scripting languages, the BSDs where the TCP/IP stack got invented, etc). You *do* know that Mac OS X is underpinned by open source software, right ? And Apple and all its users are "academic", right ?
Wait, wut ?! Because some unscrupulous people copy and paste open source code without obeying the license into closed commercial software open source is bogus ? And it's the fault even of those "thieving" open source programmers giving software away with reasonable licensing conditions ("either attribute" or "if you use this, you should share too") ?!
As a programmer by profession, I wholeheartedly agree.
Who said so ? It vastly simplifies my work to have access to the source code of libraries. As an example: our persistence layer was suddenly throwing exceptions on production machines. It baffled us. Because our ORM software was open source I could look under the hood, place breakpoints and find out what was going wrong exactly (as we couldn't figure it out based on the exception messages alone). Thanks to that openness we managed to fix the problem within a day (and send of a patch for the ORM software too so that other people wouldn't get bitten by the same bug). Next to said open source ORM software we also use a closed source application server. Getting support for that is dreadful: multiple phone calls to some call center in Bangalore and sometimes weeks before someone competent has the time to look over the issue report and provide some suggestions.
It's the same as working on a car: if the car maker supplies you with all the manuals and design documents you have a fighting chance of servicing or tweaking the car yourself instead of having to drive to a "licensed" garage for even the smallest of things.
You clearly aren't a programmer who understands the benefits of open source software. But you're an end-user; understand this: the message board we're arguing on, the database holding the records and the operating system are all open source (check uptime.netcraft.com). The standards for getting this text to you are all open (http, sql, ascii). Are we wrong to benefit from this ?
Err, right. Have you looked at Red Hat recently ? They only do fully open source software ? Or the multitude of relatively small businesses that provide support for open source software (Percona, EnterpriseDB) ? Or open source startups like SpringSource that got bought for hundreds of millions of dollars ? Evil commie hipsters, hmm ? Open source plays a *very* important role in the software business and has had so for at least two decades now.
By the way, you're also completely wrong about what the issue here is though. It's not about open source, it's about open standards and about patents. Especially that last item is a whole can of worms to open and about which I have several opinions, but I'm not going to bore you with it now, just a few quick notes: I mostly oppose patents (I think it's a bit of a mafia-style "protection money" you have to pay up for software (like x264) that the patent holders haven't even created themselves !). If musical constructs would have been patentable, we would for instance probably never have heard masterpieces from Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms. The US patent system does the opposite of what it purports to do: enable innovation.
Your premise that Academics weren't paid for their Research tells me all I need to know that you know nothing about Academics.
Ads... and serving up as many as possible, on as many platforms and content as possible.
Android
Was only developed and released free to serve up mobile ads. (period). Even developers acknowledge this fact, considering that the Marketplace doesn't seem to be working well for developers that would like to be paid outright for their efforts.
Search, Books, Services, Maps, Gmail, etc... is ALL about ads, nothing to think that the WebM ploy is about anything else BUT ads.
WebM
When released and integrated with their own devices, without a doubt, will have a Java-based layer to overlay ads. And surely the proposed WebM Plugin will be the same as Flash, but just different enough to get out of a patent dispute with Adobe.
You think for a moment that Google embraced Adobe and Flash, integrated it into Chrome and Android, without "looking under the hood"(?), or getting something other than a "selling point"?
WebM Plugin
This is seriously sinister, since it would allow Google to even serve ads overlayed on content that they are not serving on their own servers/services, since the layer code is built into the plugin.
Think: Vimeo, Facebook, or your own website's videos being overlayed with ads because the WebM plug-in is needed/installed. This without needing the consent of the owner of the video or the server publishing it, since Google received the consent to do so, by the end-user accepting the EULA when they installed the WebM plugin. Not to forget, but Google Analytics will also be built into the plugin, naturally, for it to be able to work properly.
At the moment, I doubt Google would try this trickery with H264, and besides they don't need to, because Adobe's Flash takes care of that for them with their wrapper.
NOTE: fact is that Google and many others are working on a way to overlay HTML5-H264 videos with ads anyway. One way or another, HTML5 video will have ads, and there's nothing anyone can do about that.
There is no such thing as "free". There are and always will be strings attached. And no, I'm not wearing a tin-hat or thinking conspiracy. Actually, you have to see this move by Google as doing good business and keeping focused: sell and deliver more ads!
There are so many things wrong with this article, but after reading 800+ posts on one ars article, 400+ on the initial article, 300+ here, I'm done posting on this and am surprised more aren't already ad naseum.
You can take the google/apple/DED/gruber/whatever pill, wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe.
Gosh, thanks for granting your permission for us to have opinions.
I must be hard for a far seeing fellow such as yourself to be obliged to (as you apparently must) wade through the many and redundant posts on this topic. I'm surprised you lasted as long as you did, mucking about with the defenders of this or that, but my hat's off to you. Go in peace.
HTML5 is not a codec, and the standard still supports the use of plugins. Flash and HTML5 are not necessarily mutually-exclusive; very different things, really.
Yes it is because nobody will re-encode their video in WebM. The only two options are Flash or HTML 5 with H.264. Flash now has an advantage.
By which time they will have created something better
Probably a few standards by that time.
Quote:
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
[?]
The current timeline calls for completing the drafting of a final standard for HEVC by approximately July 2012.
Where in Jensonb's post did he mention anything about the magnitude of the charge? A quote I saw recently and rather liked is "we all know technically correct is the best sort of correct". Jensonb is entirely right - Apple and the like pay licensing fees for H.264. Apple's source of money is selling products. So you buy an Apple product, you are effectively paying for H.264. Sure, the percentage of the purchase cost that is attributable to H.264 is negligibly small, but it is there.
I think I actually covered this in my post, i.e. - "technically correct but disingenuous." (in the way it was presented)
The Consumer *may* (no one actually knows), pay some *tiny* fractional amount that is rolled into the cost of the device. The consumer is also (technically) "paying" by supporting companies that use the codec.
In neither case is the consumer aware of the cost. In neither case is it even the tiniest of fractions of the cost of the device and services they are buying. And in neither case would removing or adding the fees make any difference in the cost of the handset.
In both cases it's much closer to asserting "your paying for the electricity Foxcon uses in their factories," than it is to "your paying a fee for that service." I just thought it was disingenuous the way it was presented as a "cost" similar to the other costs of using a smartphone. We are also all paying Steve Jobs' taxes in a sense, but it's really a nonsense thing to say and implies something that isn't actually true in any real sense.
WebKit comes from KTHML, which is licensed under LGPL. So, everyone can use it and even fork it (WebKit itself is a fork), but the code must always be released publicly under LGPL.
By the way, WebKit does already "include HTML5". It's probably the engine that supports it better, at the moment...
Nothing in WebKit uses KHTML/KJS. That code has long since been purged.
All code in the Qt port is then added into KDE where it uses it and then adapts it outside of KPart.
Apple wants HTML 5 to succeed so it will never limit WebKit.
First, H.264 is fully open, it's just not free (open != free). Secondly, AI is not alone here. Read last week's Arstechnica treatment on this. It has a lot more detail, and is in basic agreement with this article. Lastly, the cost of H.264 is negligible for the parties that have to pay for it (capped at $6M per year for the biggest licensees with at least 60M users), so I still don't understand why Google is doing this.
That may be true but whenever flash is mentioned on here it's referee to as a closed proprietary format because adobe own it. Yet it is a standards that can be implemented without paying royalties. So it seems that the defenition of open is changed to always favour what apple is doing.
The Consumer *may* (no one actually knows), pay some *tiny* fractional amount that is rolled into the cost of the device.
There is no "may" about it. If no one bought Apple products, Apple would have no money and would not be able to pay the licensing fees for H.264. Some very tiny part of the purchase cost of an Apple product is effectively paying for H.264.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Prof. Peabody
In neither case is the consumer aware of the cost. In neither case is it even the tiniest of fractions of the cost of the device and services they are buying. And in neither case would removing or adding the fees make any difference in the cost of the handset.
In both cases it's much closer to asserting "your paying for the electricity Foxcon uses in their factories," than it is to "your paying a fee for that service." I just thought it was disingenuous the way it was presented as a "cost" similar to the other costs of using a smartphone. We are also all paying Steve Jobs' taxes in a sense, but it's really a nonsense thing to say and implies something that isn't actually true in any real sense.
This I all agree with and rather helpfully articulates why there is no benefit in WebM to the end user - compared to H.264, it gives poorer quality video, drains your battery faster and it doesn't even save you any money. Anyone who thinks that a move to WebM would be good for them as a consumer is mistaken.
That may be true but whenever flash is mentioned on here it's referee to as a closed proprietary format because adobe own it. Yet it is a standards that can be implemented without paying royalties. So it seems that the defenition of open is changed to always favour what apple is doing.
No one here is trying to change the definition of open. Open has never meant free (as in zero cost).
The problem with Flash being proprietary is that it's Adobe who define the standard and who do all the coding. And they suck at coding for the OS X platform. If Flash actually worked well on OS X and iOS I wouldn't give a monkey's about it being proprietary. All I'm interested in is quality.
They are charging. If you own a copy of Windows, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPod, a PlayStation 3, a Blu-Ray Player or any other device that can play or record H.264, and you paid for it, you paid for H.264.
As royalties are a sort of "private taxes", in my opinion, their economical effect may be compared to the one generated by excises.
Excises are not necessarily paid by the consumer: it depends on the elasticity of the demand. In some cases the full amount of the royalty may be paid by consumers, in others fully by producers and sometimes both are paying in a variable percentage.
Anyway, if you read the license, you see that royalty are between 0,10 USD and 0,20 USD per item sold... And there's a maximum cap.
So, yes, we may be paying for h264... But no more than 20 cents!
Your premise that Academics weren't paid for their Research tells me all I need to know that you know nothing about Academics.
Wait, wut ? That's a textbook example of a straw man argument: I never stated academics don't get paid to do research. I attacked the proposition that "At the end of the day, the main beneficiaries of open-source are academics ..." by arguing that everyone using the internet is using at least *some* form of open source software and/or open standards along the way. Moreover, it is pretty easy to comprehend that for line of business programmers it is much easier to track down problems if they have access to the source code of the pre-canned modules they glue together to solve some problem. The claim that only academics benefit from open source software is therefore false by providing at least two broad and obvious counterexamples.
As for the main discussion itself: it's interesting to note the parallel between h.264 <-> WebM and the GIF <-> PNG format wars from a decade ago. PNG was created to have a non-patent encumbered alternative for loss less image compression. It didn't replace the GIF format outright (mostly because Internet Explorer 6 had pretty horrible PNG transparency support) but it did manage to become a widely used format. However, PNG has technical superiority over GIF where WebM as a format doesn't as far as the reports from experts in video compression that I've read state. This does not mean however that it's impossible for WebM videos to get better over time as more research is put into writing better encoders that still stay true to the format specification. Ogg Theora had similar improvements over time for instance. In the light of GIF and PNG, is it really a problem that there are also two video formats ? Let the "open source hipsters" use WebM or if you don't want to have to pay patent "protection money". If you have a license to use h.264 then sure, use it. Either way, all relevant browsers will play one format or the other over time or both through some plugin.
Comments
If I stole diamonds and gave them away to someone who then gave me data from which I made money I'd still be earning from my theft! I'd still be a thief and subject to the law of the land.
Is that what Google is doing?
For me it's pretty simple… Google can afford to support the "common standards" in their browser. Why not both WebM and h.264? And since h.264 is already licensed on both OSX and Windows, they don't have costs there, right? THere's no excuse, really.
If they choose to drop support for h.264, there are other browsers. Chrome is nice, but a lot less nice without h.264 support. I can just not use it………………………
Which, in the end, is probably what will happen. I'm fine with Safari and Firefox, why bother wrestling with a browser that doesn't cover my browsing bases?
I wonder how much market share Chrome will lose as a result of dropping h.264 support, and, will that change Google's mind?
Wil also be interesting to see how it plays out. In the meantime, Safari+Firefox rule….
And this, just as I was starting to like Chrome on OSX…...
I won't miss it when I delete it over this.
They are charging. If you own a copy of Windows, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPod, a PlayStation 3, a Blu-Ray Player or any other device that can play or record H.264, and you paid for it, you paid for H.264. What they are not charging for is internet streaming which is not behind a paywall, and they have extended that in perpetuity, meaning they plan never to charge for that.
The "charge" is probably magnitudes less than Google makes from one click through on a YouTube WebM video.
Nice.
Another reason why I dumped them a long, long time ago.
They expire in 2027.
By which time they will have created something better
No offence but this is just a ridiculous assertion.
There is no charge to the end user and a very minimal small charge to those that do the encoding. If you are talking about people "paying for it" because the cost to the producers is rolled into the hardware, then you are wrong in the specific sense as that tiny cost is actually *not* purposely figured in to the pricing.
You may be correct in the limited general sense that all costs incurred by a company are eventually rolled into the price whether it's done explicitly or not, but we are talking about possibly $0.02 on a device costing $700.00 in the case of the iPhone. So in this sense you are being technically accurate in terms of the detail, but disingenuous at the same time in the implication that this is a real charge that the consumer experiences.
Where in Jensonb's post did he mention anything about the magnitude of the charge? A quote I saw recently and rather liked is "we all know technically correct is the best sort of correct". Jensonb is entirely right - Apple and the like pay licensing fees for H.264. Apple's source of money is selling products. So you buy an Apple product, you are effectively paying for H.264. Sure, the percentage of the purchase cost that is attributable to H.264 is negligibly small, but it is there.
As a non-academic and programmer myself let me tell you that I *vastly* prefer open source software. Your claim is utterly absurd: the Internet as we know it wouldn't exist without open source software and open standards (Sendmail, Apache httpd, pretty much all scripting languages, the BSDs where the TCP/IP stack got invented, etc). You *do* know that Mac OS X is underpinned by open source software, right ? And Apple and all its users are "academic", right ?
Wait, wut ?! Because some unscrupulous people copy and paste open source code without obeying the license into closed commercial software open source is bogus ? And it's the fault even of those "thieving" open source programmers giving software away with reasonable licensing conditions ("either attribute" or "if you use this, you should share too") ?!
As a programmer by profession, I wholeheartedly agree.
Who said so ?
It's the same as working on a car: if the car maker supplies you with all the manuals and design documents you have a fighting chance of servicing or tweaking the car yourself instead of having to drive to a "licensed" garage for even the smallest of things.
You clearly aren't a programmer who understands the benefits of open source software. But you're an end-user; understand this: the message board we're arguing on, the database holding the records and the operating system are all open source (check uptime.netcraft.com). The standards for getting this text to you are all open (http, sql, ascii). Are we wrong to benefit from this ?
Err, right.
By the way, you're also completely wrong about what the issue here is though. It's not about open source, it's about open standards and about patents. Especially that last item is a whole can of worms to open and about which I have several opinions, but I'm not going to bore you with it now, just a few quick notes: I mostly oppose patents (I think it's a bit of a mafia-style "protection money" you have to pay up for software (like x264) that the patent holders haven't even created themselves !). If musical constructs would have been patentable, we would for instance probably never have heard masterpieces from Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms. The US patent system does the opposite of what it purports to do: enable innovation.
Your premise that Academics weren't paid for their Research tells me all I need to know that you know nothing about Academics.
Contribute to any of the well-run open source projects and you may have a different opinion.
It's not necessarily better (well, better than Microsoft's Longhorn team <g>), but some good ideas on team management have come from the FOSS world.
It's not quite the wild west it used to be 15 years ago. Then again, a lot of proprietary code was written sloppily back then. A lot's changed.
And a lot of the prominent projects get the vast majority of their code from Developers who are working as paid Developers for Corporations.
Linux itself has seen greater than $10 Billion invested in it from IBM, Red Hat, Novell, etc.
Apache has seen hundreds of millions invested in it. Hell, Microsoft invested $100k in 2008 for a sponsorship contribution.
Even X.264 now offers a Commercial License for outside investment to provide another commercial H.264 encoder for corporations to use.
Ads... and serving up as many as possible, on as many platforms and content as possible.
Android
Was only developed and released free to serve up mobile ads. (period). Even developers acknowledge this fact, considering that the Marketplace doesn't seem to be working well for developers that would like to be paid outright for their efforts.
Search, Books, Services, Maps, Gmail, etc... is ALL about ads, nothing to think that the WebM ploy is about anything else BUT ads.
WebM
When released and integrated with their own devices, without a doubt, will have a Java-based layer to overlay ads. And surely the proposed WebM Plugin will be the same as Flash, but just different enough to get out of a patent dispute with Adobe.
You think for a moment that Google embraced Adobe and Flash, integrated it into Chrome and Android, without "looking under the hood"(?), or getting something other than a "selling point"?
WebM Plugin
This is seriously sinister, since it would allow Google to even serve ads overlayed on content that they are not serving on their own servers/services, since the layer code is built into the plugin.
Think: Vimeo, Facebook, or your own website's videos being overlayed with ads because the WebM plug-in is needed/installed. This without needing the consent of the owner of the video or the server publishing it, since Google received the consent to do so, by the end-user accepting the EULA when they installed the WebM plugin. Not to forget, but Google Analytics will also be built into the plugin, naturally, for it to be able to work properly.
At the moment, I doubt Google would try this trickery with H264, and besides they don't need to, because Adobe's Flash takes care of that for them with their wrapper.
NOTE: fact is that Google and many others are working on a way to overlay HTML5-H264 videos with ads anyway. One way or another, HTML5 video will have ads, and there's nothing anyone can do about that.
There is no such thing as "free". There are and always will be strings attached. And no, I'm not wearing a tin-hat or thinking conspiracy. Actually, you have to see this move by Google as doing good business and keeping focused: sell and deliver more ads!
Correct. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
There are so many things wrong with this article, but after reading 800+ posts on one ars article, 400+ on the initial article, 300+ here, I'm done posting on this and am surprised more aren't already ad naseum.
You can take the google/apple/DED/gruber/whatever pill, wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe.
Gosh, thanks for granting your permission for us to have opinions.
I must be hard for a far seeing fellow such as yourself to be obliged to (as you apparently must) wade through the many and redundant posts on this topic. I'm surprised you lasted as long as you did, mucking about with the defenders of this or that, but my hat's off to you. Go in peace.
HTML5 is not a codec, and the standard still supports the use of plugins. Flash and HTML5 are not necessarily mutually-exclusive; very different things, really.
Yes it is because nobody will re-encode their video in WebM. The only two options are Flash or HTML 5 with H.264. Flash now has an advantage.
By which time they will have created something better
Probably a few standards by that time.
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
[?]
The current timeline calls for completing the drafting of a final standard for HEVC by approximately July 2012.
Where in Jensonb's post did he mention anything about the magnitude of the charge? A quote I saw recently and rather liked is "we all know technically correct is the best sort of correct". Jensonb is entirely right - Apple and the like pay licensing fees for H.264. Apple's source of money is selling products. So you buy an Apple product, you are effectively paying for H.264. Sure, the percentage of the purchase cost that is attributable to H.264 is negligibly small, but it is there.
I think I actually covered this in my post, i.e. - "technically correct but disingenuous." (in the way it was presented)
The Consumer *may* (no one actually knows), pay some *tiny* fractional amount that is rolled into the cost of the device. The consumer is also (technically) "paying" by supporting companies that use the codec.
In neither case is the consumer aware of the cost. In neither case is it even the tiniest of fractions of the cost of the device and services they are buying. And in neither case would removing or adding the fees make any difference in the cost of the handset.
In both cases it's much closer to asserting "your paying for the electricity Foxcon uses in their factories," than it is to "your paying a fee for that service." I just thought it was disingenuous the way it was presented as a "cost" similar to the other costs of using a smartphone. We are also all paying Steve Jobs' taxes in a sense, but it's really a nonsense thing to say and implies something that isn't actually true in any real sense.
Apple can't do that.
WebKit comes from KTHML, which is licensed under LGPL. So, everyone can use it and even fork it (WebKit itself is a fork), but the code must always be released publicly under LGPL.
By the way, WebKit does already "include HTML5". It's probably the engine that supports it better, at the moment...
Nothing in WebKit uses KHTML/KJS. That code has long since been purged.
All code in the Qt port is then added into KDE where it uses it and then adapts it outside of KPart.
Apple wants HTML 5 to succeed so it will never limit WebKit.
First, H.264 is fully open, it's just not free (open != free). Secondly, AI is not alone here. Read last week's Arstechnica treatment on this. It has a lot more detail, and is in basic agreement with this article. Lastly, the cost of H.264 is negligible for the parties that have to pay for it (capped at $6M per year for the biggest licensees with at least 60M users), so I still don't understand why Google is doing this.
That may be true but whenever flash is mentioned on here it's referee to as a closed proprietary format because adobe own it. Yet it is a standards that can be implemented without paying royalties. So it seems that the defenition of open is changed to always favour what apple is doing.
The Consumer *may* (no one actually knows), pay some *tiny* fractional amount that is rolled into the cost of the device.
There is no "may" about it. If no one bought Apple products, Apple would have no money and would not be able to pay the licensing fees for H.264. Some very tiny part of the purchase cost of an Apple product is effectively paying for H.264.
In neither case is the consumer aware of the cost. In neither case is it even the tiniest of fractions of the cost of the device and services they are buying. And in neither case would removing or adding the fees make any difference in the cost of the handset.
In both cases it's much closer to asserting "your paying for the electricity Foxcon uses in their factories," than it is to "your paying a fee for that service." I just thought it was disingenuous the way it was presented as a "cost" similar to the other costs of using a smartphone. We are also all paying Steve Jobs' taxes in a sense, but it's really a nonsense thing to say and implies something that isn't actually true in any real sense.
This I all agree with and rather helpfully articulates why there is no benefit in WebM to the end user - compared to H.264, it gives poorer quality video, drains your battery faster and it doesn't even save you any money. Anyone who thinks that a move to WebM would be good for them as a consumer is mistaken.
That may be true but whenever flash is mentioned on here it's referee to as a closed proprietary format because adobe own it. Yet it is a standards that can be implemented without paying royalties. So it seems that the defenition of open is changed to always favour what apple is doing.
No one here is trying to change the definition of open. Open has never meant free (as in zero cost).
The problem with Flash being proprietary is that it's Adobe who define the standard and who do all the coding. And they suck at coding for the OS X platform. If Flash actually worked well on OS X and iOS I wouldn't give a monkey's about it being proprietary. All I'm interested in is quality.
They are charging. If you own a copy of Windows, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPod, a PlayStation 3, a Blu-Ray Player or any other device that can play or record H.264, and you paid for it, you paid for H.264.
This is exactly the argument I was waiting for
Actually, this is not necessarily true!
I'm reading the license: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/...rmsSummary.pdf
As royalties are a sort of "private taxes", in my opinion, their economical effect may be compared to the one generated by excises.
Excises are not necessarily paid by the consumer: it depends on the elasticity of the demand. In some cases the full amount of the royalty may be paid by consumers, in others fully by producers and sometimes both are paying in a variable percentage.
Anyway, if you read the license, you see that royalty are between 0,10 USD and 0,20 USD per item sold... And there's a maximum cap.
So, yes, we may be paying for h264... But no more than 20 cents!
Your premise that Academics weren't paid for their Research tells me all I need to know that you know nothing about Academics.
Wait, wut ? That's a textbook example of a straw man argument: I never stated academics don't get paid to do research. I attacked the proposition that "At the end of the day, the main beneficiaries of open-source are academics ..." by arguing that everyone using the internet is using at least *some* form of open source software and/or open standards along the way. Moreover, it is pretty easy to comprehend that for line of business programmers it is much easier to track down problems if they have access to the source code of the pre-canned modules they glue together to solve some problem. The claim that only academics benefit from open source software is therefore false by providing at least two broad and obvious counterexamples.
As for the main discussion itself: it's interesting to note the parallel between h.264 <-> WebM and the GIF <-> PNG format wars from a decade ago. PNG was created to have a non-patent encumbered alternative for loss less image compression. It didn't replace the GIF format outright (mostly because Internet Explorer 6 had pretty horrible PNG transparency support) but it did manage to become a widely used format. However, PNG has technical superiority over GIF where WebM as a format doesn't as far as the reports from experts in video compression that I've read state. This does not mean however that it's impossible for WebM videos to get better over time as more research is put into writing better encoders that still stay true to the format specification. Ogg Theora had similar improvements over time for instance. In the light of GIF and PNG, is it really a problem that there are also two video formats ? Let the "open source hipsters" use WebM or if you don't want to have to pay patent "protection money". If you have a license to use h.264 then sure, use it. Either way, all relevant browsers will play one format or the other over time or both through some plugin.