

Google's dropping H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/01/googles-dropping-h264-from-chrome-a-step-backward-for-openness.ars

======
jwr
I fully agree with the article. Google's move makes me very angry, for two
reasons:

1) Google uses us as tools in its battles and wars, because it is us who will
be inconvenienced for years to come if companies continue to fight over video
codecs. Sure, the explanations are grandiose — "we fight for openness" and the
like — but the fight is being done by our expense.

2) Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable. H.264, an ITU/ISO standard, documented,
with reference implementations, with a free/oss encoder (x264) and hardware
support in a bazillion devices is called "closed and proprietary". Meanwhile,
Adobe Flash (which this whole fight will just strengthen) is just fine, thank
you. Oh, MP3 and AAC are fine, too.

I'll skip over technical details in this post, suffice it to say that I know
and understand why H.264 (especially Main and High profiles) is vastly
superior to On2 VP8 (now renamed WebM).

~~~
SimonPStevens
x264 may be free software to download, but you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA
license fees under most circumstances if you actually use the videos you
encode with it.

~~~
speleding
> you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA license fees under most circumstances

As far as I am aware software patents only hold in the USA and a few other
countries that the US has strong armed into accepting them. So I don't think
you need to worry about the MPEGLA coming after you if you are somewhere on
the other 90% of the planet.

~~~
SimonPStevens
I am far from a lawyer, but there are several international patent treaties,
signed by a wide range of countries. See -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internationa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_international_patent_treaties)

Also there's the World Intellectual Property Organization
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Org...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Organization))
of which the majority of counties are members.

Yes, specifically _software_ patents may be considered a bit of an unconfirmed
area, but I doubt it's something many people would want to risk going up
against.

------
danbmil99
One detail that caught my eye:

> ISO and ITU do not require the members working on their various standards
> and specifications to give up any specific patent claims that may cover the
> technology that they define.

Quite the contrary -- the ITU specifically had language that every contributor
agreed to provide their contributions royalty-free. Unfortunately the politics
got complexated when it became a joint ITU/ISO thing. Some of the biggest
players made noises that they would agree to a "royalty-free baseline profile"
(ie without some of the more patent-rich features, such as interlace and
B-frames).

At the last minute, like Lucy from Peanuts, they took their ball and went
home, leaving all the smaller players who had an interest in a truly free
standard high and dry. This event IMSHO left a vacuum that resulted in pent-up
demand for a truly free codec, which created room for Theora and WebM.

[disclaimer: I was involved]

~~~
rajbot
Do you remember how Microsoft snuck a Trojan into their IPR statement for the
integer transform? Something along the lines of, "We agree to the standard
royalty-free terms, _as long as everyone else does_ ".. It didn't take long
for everyone to adopt the "Microsoft amendment" to their IPR statements, and
for one token member to object to royalty-free terms, and the whole thing came
tumbling down.

~~~
danbmil99
sounds familiar. I was involved around '03, when Polycom and about 25
companies were up against the 4 or 5 biggies over the patent issue. It was
like watching a bunch of school kids get beat up by teenage bullies. Very
ugly.

MPEG-LA are really just a bunch of thugs. They remind me of Tony Soprano:
"Satisfaction guaranteed -- or double your garbage back!"

------
Xuzz
I don't think Google has affected _anything_ with this move. By any counts out
there, Firefox has double the market share of Chrome. It might reduce the use
of HTML5 video versus Flash video in Chrome itself, but for the whole web, it
doesn't make a difference when Firefox already took this position with twice
the market share.

~~~
macrael
I would argue that _none_ of the desktop browsers are having an effect in this
area. The only thing that is really driving the adoption of html5 <video> is
mobile devices and their poor or nonexistent support for flash.

Many sites that serve mobile devices html5 video still serve flash to html5
capable desktop browsers.

~~~
bad_user
Mobile devices will support WebM; simply because desktops/laptops still rule
and there's tremendous pressure to support desktop technologies for content-
delivery that are popular.

And I would argue that the majority of traffic for websites like YouTube comes
from desktops / laptops.

------
antimatter15
On page two, "Consistency Counts", the argument isn't right. "Openness" is
sadly very ambiguous, but as noted earlier in the article, there's a
difference between being developed openly and having patent encumbered
royalties. Flash is actually an open specification, and anyone is free to
develop tools that create flash content (distributed as source or binary)
without paying royalties to Adobe in any part of the world. Anyone can create
a flash player too without paying royalties.

VP8 and Flash are not open standards, but they are royalty free. AVC was
openly developed and is an ISO standard but is not royalty free.

~~~
Locke1689
Flash isn't an open standard anymore. As of Flash 9 when they started shipping
the DRM subsystem, free software cannot be fully compatible without rev eng.

~~~
knowtheory
Which is only a capability relevant when interacting with Adobe's flash media
server. There are several alternatives media servers available, most of which
are open source.

The problem of FMS parity is a wholly different ball of wax, aside from
(although perhaps relevant to) the behavior of the Flash VM itself.

~~~
Locke1689
What the hell? Who cares? The effect is that I can't and never will be able to
watch Hulu in an open Flash implementation.

------
rajbot
There are two different kinds of royalties associated with H.264. One is the
fee on each encoder or decoder, and the other is a _per stream_ royalty.
Although most of us are concerned with royalties on the codec, Google is more
concerned about the royalties on the streams.

Although the Ars article mentions that MPEG-LA won't charge per-stream
royalties for free youtube videos (for 5 more years, anyway), H.264 content
from the Youtube Store are already subject to per-stream fees, starting at the
beginning of this year. Also, Google TV streams may not fall under MPEG-LA's
definition of royality-free "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". Furthermore, MPEG-
LA hasn't yet made it clear exactly how much these fees will be!

WebM (vp8), along with lower-quality FLV (vp6), is a hedge against both
current and upcoming per-stream h.264 royalties.

~~~
daniel02216
The MPEG-LA promised in August that they wouldn't charge per-stream for free
videos ever.

[http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme...](http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf)

------
elwin
All of the articles, particularly this one, seem to be missing the point. They
attribute Google's actions to abstract ideas of openness or competition
between codecs.

But there is a concrete issue involved: under MPEG-LA's licensing terms,
Google should be paying $6.5 million a year to distribute a H.264 decoder.
Under that license, the end users only get the rights to use the software "for
personal and consumer purposes": they couldn't fork Chrome, redistribute it,
etc. The Ars article mentions this, but immediately moves on.

It's possible Google expects MPEG-LA to try to enforce the patents, and that's
why they're dropping H.264 support. After all, Google is the only browser
vendor not in MPEG-LA worth trying to get money from. The yearly licensing
amount just went up by $1.5 million, which might have influenced the timing of
the announcement.

Comparisons with Flash are irrelevant: it may be less open than H.264, but not
in the way that matters to Google.

~~~
recoiledsnake
$6.5 million is chump change for Google. And $1.5 million would be lying in
the seat cushions of Google executive.

------
magicalist
when firefox 4 is released (and is rapidly adopted+), if you are a major video
provider on the web and you want to use html5 video, you will need to serve
webm or theora or you will miss out on a quarter of the world web audience and
the majority of the european web audience.

if you weren't planning on doing so, you were either going to have to serve
video via flash or not at all anyway. google's decision only tips the scales a
little more.

+edit: note that I'm not prognosticating a new firefox monopoly or anything,
just that firefox 4 will rapidly replace most of the current firefox 3.*s out
there, which currently make up the referenced marketshare.

~~~
tres
Article states that Microsoft already has a h264 plugin for Firefox. I imagine
MS will probably do the same for Chrome. They have big vested interest in
ensuring that their DRM video will be ubiquitous. I imagine their licensing
fees to companies like Netflix makes it a good business decision.

And Google can laugh all the way to the bank while they build and promote
their own competing format.

~~~
magicalist
well, I'm not sure if I completely understand your line of reasoning, but note
also, as clark-kent notes below, that Microsoft will also allow VP8 to be
installed as a codec at the OS level and then work through IE9. The same will
be true with Quicktime and Safari, but my understanding is that that is still
hypothetical.

~~~
tres
To be certain, lots of conjecture on my part. I just found it very interesting
that Microsoft is essentially taking on the h264 licensing fees for Firefox by
releasing a h264 plugin for the browser. (I'm assuming that MS will be footing
the licensing fees -- or maybe they're just covered by a blanket $6.5 million
fee, so it's just the cost of building the plugin that they really have to
eat)

My extrapolation is a reach, but supporting h264 on Firefox doesn't make sense
except if MS is seeing cash from h264 ubiquity.

~~~
btn
Microsoft's Firefox add-on simply replaces the browser's <video> player with a
Windows Media Player object, so the fees have already been paid for as part of
their licence to include an H.264 decoder with all copies of Windows.

Supporting H.264 makes sense for Microsoft as a licensor of the patent pool.

------
extension
_If it's going remove features for poorly-articulated ideological reasons, it
would surely make sense to apply that ideology consistently_

No, that doesn't particularly make sense. Choose your battles. They are
endless in number. Nobody has time to fight them all. Fight the ones that
matter most.

All else aside, there is nothing hypocritical per se about taking a stand on
one issue and not another.

------
agent86
Maybe I'm just a moron, but couldn't a lot of this problem be solved by making
the decoder free to use in all circumstances? They already allow free Internet
broadcast at no royalty, and have other free parts of their licensing now, so
they're clearly open to the concept at least.

If I understand things correctly, for people shipping decoders the royalty
amount is capped at $6.5 million a year. So they're making $6.5 million from
Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. All in all, probably a few
hundred million over everyone?

Would it not be more advantageous to leave that money on the table, completely
entrench your format EVERYWHERE, and then pick it up on the
professional/encoder side of things?

CNN, CNET, Fox, whoever, probably wouldn't mind paying a little more and
getting a single universal format for everything everywhere and home
users/hobbyists can play for free since they'll never hit the thresholds.
Startups can get going by working in the free zones (< 100k paid subs, free
un-paid use).

------
andraz
"Rather, the point is that in practice developers don't let royalties impede
their implementations."

This is simply not true, MPEG-LA would go after any commercially successful
project not paying royalties.

~~~
merijnv
Of course this can only happen if said project is based in a country which
actually upholds software patents. In countries were software patents are void
MPEG-LA's claims are also void in which case I'd like to see them try to sue
the developers/projects operating there...

------
ZeroGravitas
I'm continually amazed at the erosion of the term "Open Standard". There's a
whole segment here that reads like someone arguing "It's not about Free
Software, after all Internet Explorer is free", or "It is Open Source because
you can just look at the python code they provide".

If someone comes up with a catchy slogan for their concept whether it's "Free
Market" or "Fair Trade" it's simple politeness to engage with that and make a
substantive point rather than making up your own definitions to suit and play
semantic games.

~~~
robinhouston
That is a rather anachronistic complaint. The term “open standard” was a term
of art for standards such as H.264 long before the term “open source” was
coined.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
No it wasn't. "Open Standard" was coined and defined precisely to indicate an
affinity with "Open Source"

If you read the ITU reaction to the attempt to define "Open Standards" this is
obvious.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#ITU-T_definition>

Any limited use of "open standard" before that point was as meaningful as
someone referring to "free software" or "open source" before those terms were
defined.

~~~
robinhouston
Sorry, but that's wildly anachronistic too. The term "open standard" was in
widespread use long before "open source" was coined in 1998, and certainly
before the ITU-T definition in 2005:
[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&year_start=1975&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

A term does not need to have a formal definition in order to have a meaning.

------
spiffworks
Can we all please collectively stop abusing 'Openness'? Google is the
guiltiest of them all- shoe-horning open source, open standards, royalty-free,
patent-unencumbered and god knows what else into the same overly-generic term
complicates the debate. In fact, its clearly harmful- look at the way Gruber
has hijacked the debate and refocused everything on Google's 'hypocrisy' for
bundling Flash with Chrome.

For the love of God, stop saying 'Openness'

~~~
jokermatt999
That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google
may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were
already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're
going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee
unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format.

Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to
their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument
ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be
one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered
with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real
analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have
pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked
at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee
part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open
source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.

~~~
spiffworks
Yeah, Google really screwed themselves with that blogpost. To quote from a
ZDNet article "Out of 250 words, open was mentioned 8 times." I don't know why
they feel the necessity to paint everything that they do as open. This move
itself could have been explained in one line like so: "We believe that the de
facto codec for HTML5 video should be royalty-free, and to that end cannot
continue supporting H.264 in our browser any longer." That much would have
sufficed, and avoided a lot of the pointless bickering.

------
DjDarkman
Google dropping a highly patented codec from Chrome is a step backwards for
openness

Even the title doesn't make sense. They could say "step backwards for easy of
use" or "step backwards for MPEG LA", but saying "step backwards for openness"
is ridiculous.

If it's encumbered with patents, it's not open, no matter how many free
software implementations it has. Open means, open to anyone, not only open to
those who pay for it.

~~~
alanh
It is apparent you did not read the article. Please go read it, or at least
this quote:

> _This explanation is lacking, to say the least. It appears to be a
> conflation of several issues: openness, royalty-freedom, and source code
> availability, among others. In the traditional sense, H.264 is an open
> standard. That is to say, it was a standard designed by a range of domain
> experts from across the industry, working to the remit of a standards
> organization. In fact, two standards organizations were involved: ISO and
> ITU. The specification was devised collaboratively, with its final
> ratification dependent on the agreement of the individuals, corporations,
> and national standards bodies that variously make up ISO and ITU. This makes
> H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images,
> or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs.
> H.264 is unambiguously open._

> _In contrast, neither WebM's VP8 nor Theora were assembled by a standards
> body such as ISO. VP8 was developed independently and entirely in secret by
> the company On2, prior to the company's purchase last year by Google. Theora
> was created by a group of open-source developers…_

------
Apreche
Every browser should just support every codec in the universe. I don't care if
it's illegal or patent infringing. Do it anyway. VLC, Mplayer, and ffmpeg are
all open source, all work, and are all still around. This goes for image
formats and audio codecs as well.

Let's just make forks of Chromium and Firefox that include built-in support
for as many codecs and file formats as possible. Someone wants to use a psd in
an img tag? Sure! Someone wants to use a flac in an audio tag? Go for it! Want
to use a bink video in a video tag? Be my guest.

Even if it's illegal, who cares. You can do it the same way that Windows Media
Player and Ubuntu handle it. Every time the user comes across a video they
can't play, a popup asks them to click a few times, and then voila! They have
the codec.

Web developer are always going to have a crappy time of it. We will never ever
be able to simply make one site one way and have it work nicely on all devices
with web browsers. Give up on that dream. But the dream of making things good
for the users, is achievable. Aim for that first.

~~~
bobds
I understand where you are coming from with this but let's consider the
security implications of embedding just anything in the browser.

A prime example is embedding custom fonts with CSS. The code that handles them
wasn't built with arbitrary fonts downloaded from untrusted sources in mind (I
think the guy that wrote the code said that's insecure and a bad idea).

------
davidjhamp
Getting rid of flash is more difficult then getting rid of x264 since its
obviously used all over the web. Dropping support for x264 now will prevent a
similar issue in the future. Its a great first step.

Having a company like Mozilla pay a royalty on each user would cripple Firefox
and any new browsers that may come along.

------
alanfalcon
While this is clearly an opinion piece arguing for inclusion of H.264 in
Chrome, I feel like this article actually does a great job of actually
portraying most of the facts that affect both side of the argument. Certainly
it feels like the most informative article I've read on the subject (again,
despite its bias.)

------
zecg
I don't believe I'm reading such reactionary scaremongering FUD from Ars.
Google supporting (and helping develop) an open codec with no royalties
attached is construed as a BAD THING?

------
nextparadigms
I don't think it's a step backwards, but clearly there is a double standard
here by fully supporting Flash. I knew it from the beginning that supporting
Flash wasn't in alignment with their open web vision, yet they still did it to
spite Apple and its iPhone. I hope they get rid of Flash within a year.

------
martythemaniak
A rebuke from Opera: <http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/01/13/openness>

------
yanw
Much of the debate is centered around the quasi-ubiquity of h264 and accepting
the royalties involved and it's proprietary nature as a compromise that we are
willing to make, which is very short sighted and dangerous. Also the typical
patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might violate patents without
naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's motives.

I keep hearing the Flash analogy, which is nonsense, flash doesn't just do
video playback, the technology is ubiquitously used in a variety of ways and
is not comparable to a video codec, and does not have any of the patent
licencing issues h264 has.

This move is a step forward towards openness as it will force publishers and
users to consider the non-proprietary alternative.

~~~
recoiledsnake
>Also the typical patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might
violate patents without naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's
motives.

Stating that Webm might turn into a patent minefield is FUD now? What happened
to journalistic freedom and rational discourse?

~~~
sorbus
If I say "with additional research, it may be discovered that there's a
correlation between eating corn and various degenerative diseases, and
therefor you should not eat corn" with no evidence to support that assertion,
it is FUD. Similarly, if I say "with additional research, it may be discovered
that WebM infringes on patents, and therefor you should not use it" with no
evidence to support that assertion, it is FUD. If a claim is unsupported but
used as a criticism of something - especially a reason not to use a product -
then it is FUD.

