

Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video - audionerd
http://newteevee.com/2010/04/12/google-to-open-source-vp8-for-html5-video/

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aphyr
This is _awesome_ news. No patent encumbrance means Firefox will support it.
Terrific performance means the rest of us will actually use it. Google backing
the technology means Youtube, with their unfathomably large proportion of the
world's video content, will support it.

Sweet.

~~~
tjogin
How would it benefit Google to re-encode every video on YouTube into VP8?

~~~
FooBarWidget
Why is everybody talking about recoding? Can't they just keep the current
videos as they are and encode new things in a different codec? As far as I
know all the old H263 videos on Youtube have never been recoded. And why would
they? Recoding H263 to H264 would just degrade quality.

~~~
nailer
I understand what you're saying, and I'd love to be educated if you know more
about the topic, but aren't they both perceptual encoders? Ie, wouldn't the
parts of each frame they're identifying as unimportant be quite similar?

(I'm quite certain I'm wrong on this point, but I'm interested in learning
why)

~~~
sp332
Each encode removes information from the video. No matter how nice the
encoders are, the video quality will degrade every time.

~~~
nailer
I understand the sentence, but what I'm trying to understand is why the
information removed is (significantly) different - since they're both
perceptual codecs, there should be a large overlap in what is removed from the
output.

Eg, take a frame which has a solid chunk of blue. Codec 1 removes some of data
to make things more consistent and then compresses it. Codec 2 looks at the
output of codec 1, sees the consistently large blue area, doesn't see any info
worth removing, and compresses it.

~~~
FooBarWidget
I don't know all the maths behind it, but try saving a JPG, close it, open it,
save it again, repeat a few times. You'll see quality degrade every time you
close it. My guess is that the lossy compressors try their best to preserve
the previous compression artifacts, but in doing so they introduce more
compression artifacts.

------
cageface
Kudos to Google for being smart enough to realize that an open web is a win
for them in the long run and for having the guts to compete on the strength of
their products and not on platform/api lock-in. Obviously it's still an uphill
battle to get this adopted across the board but they're setting the right
example here.

~~~
andreyf
_At launch, On2 went so far as to claim that it could provide “50 percent
bandwidth savings compared to leading H.264 implementations.”_

Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube
content, this move is far from altruistic. The more viewers adopt a bandwidth-
superior format, the less terabytes of data to stream, the less the cost of
running YouTube. They have absolutely no benefit from any kind of
"platform/api lockin" to H.264 or any other video standard, only that there
are less bits to stream.

I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a
free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees per year.
I'd expect Microsoft to ship this instead of H.264 in the next major IE, and,
if this comes with a good and open hardware interpreter, Apple to follow soon
after.

~~~
jmillikin

      Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic.
    

Who cares? Companies are allowed to make the world a better place without
having to self-flagellate themselves. Google could easily have just paid the
H.264 licensing fees and told Mozilla to toss off, or even built VP8 support
into Chrome and used YouTube to force-feed it to the world. They chose to
cooperate, and should be praised for that.

    
    
      I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees
    

Several companies, most notably Apple, have already spent what must be
millions of dollars on licensing fees and hardware. Regardless of which is a
better long-term choice, it can be very difficult to reverse that much
momentum. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of non-consumer multimedia
equipment which is designed to use H.264.

Additionally, VP8 does not have much application support yet. It'll take a
while for codecs to be written, debugged, and distributed to users. There may
be significant lag time before VP8 displaces Theora among F/OSS users, or
H.264 on OS X.

~~~
allyt
They chose the path that would lead to the fastest adoption of the technology
which lowers their bandwidth costs. Keeping the technology Chrome-only is
against their financial interests.

Apple and MS pay yearly licensing fees for H.264. As soon as they adopt VP8,
they can stop.

~~~
ash
Apple and Microsoft are among the H.264 licensors. I think they don't pay any
licensing fees:

<http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx>

------
randall
This is basically a done deal, fwiw. Other folks who I've talked to in a nda-
ish sort of manner have been expecting to not support OGG long term, and
instead support VP8 as the "open standard." It's an open secret in industry
circles, and this I think confirms it. Can't wait till next week.

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sachinag
Are there any chips out there that do hardware decoding of VP8? That's a
critical path item to get Apple on board - they've learned from Nintendo;
battery life is too precious to sacrifice for a mere codec.

~~~
plorkyeran
VP8 support is currently mostly nonexistent. It's currently just a minor
proprietary codec that almost no one cares about or uses. Of course, Google
certainly has the money and resources to fix this relatively quickly if they
really want to.

------
ErrantX
Ok I am going to say it: I think this finally secures a big big future for
Chrome.

It will now be the only browser to support all three of the main codecs - and
Google will control one of the two open source / royalty free ones (indeed
it's arguable that status may be more secure that Ogg Theora because, simply,
Google are likely to aggressively defend any submarine attacks).

All told - great news.

~~~
bad_user
And don't forget that Chrome was the first to come up with one process per
tab, and they also ignited a cut-throat JS performance race.

Also clean design with native widgets on supported platforms and overall crazy
fast (when I boot my computer, Chrome is the first app the starts).

Mozilla should be worried.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
What is this mozilla you speak of?

(Being an early adopter since phoenix, already moved to chrome and never
looked back)

------
glhaynes
Is it possible for existing H.264 hardware decoder chips to be used to (even
partially) help decode VP8? Or will we see a new generation of chips that does
H.264 and VP8?

~~~
wmf
Potentially. Theora activists keep repeating that "there's no such thing as a
hardware decoder; they're all programmable DSPs", but in addition to
programmable hardware you also need the desire and resources to actually
implement VP8 decoding firmware for all these different chips.

~~~
zhyder
(Odd, in all the HTML5 video debates on HN, I hadn't heard that argument from
Theora supporters before.) Most of the hardware decoders in smartphones are
programmable DSPs; e.g. TI's OMAP3 family. But there still are plenty of chips
out there that use fixed-function h.264 decoders, e.g. TI's DaVinci family.
The fixed-function ones are smaller, cheaper, and probably lower power.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
TI's DaVinci family includes programmable DSP and ARM based solutions and you
can buy various 3rd party software implementations of codecs such as H.264 to
run on them.

[http://focus.ti.com/dsp/docs/dspfindtoolswresults.tsp?sectio...](http://focus.ti.com/dsp/docs/dspfindtoolswresults.tsp?sectionId=3&tabId=1620&familyId=1300&toolTypeId=65)

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lenni
This is pure speculation but maybe Google uses VP8 in order to negiotiate a
better licensing fee once h.264 isn't free anymore. MPEG-LA would think twice
about loosing Youtube as a customer. This would go against Google's "Don't be
evil" but getting the world to accept yet another video codec will be an
uphill struggle, even for Google.

------
spatulon
Surely making the codec open source isn't in itself that interesting,
considering that x264 and FFmpeg form a high quality, open source codec for
H.264? It's not the code, but the spec that matters in spreading adoption of
VP8. (Of course, publishing the code would create a de facto spec).

More interesting still is the patent issue. VP8 is still effectively
irrelevant unless Google announces they've performed a patent search and found
VP8 to have no known patents covering its methods (or at least any that might
incur licensing fees). After all, it was the patent issue with H.264 that
bothered Mozilla.

~~~
jon_dahl
x264 is a codec implementation, not a codec standard. The x264 source code is
free, but what it produces isn't (at least in the US). Rumors are VP8 will be
free on both counts.

As for the patent issue, Google has no doubt done this during its ~9 months of
due diligence while buying On2. Not saying that issues won't come up, but
Google apparently felt comfortable with the situation.

------
krschultz
As the article points out, the big wildcard is Microsoft. I don't see what
logical reason Microsoft has for skipping VP8 other than the anti-Google
animosity, but that has led to illogical decisions on their part before.

~~~
jerf
I haven't tried this in IE for a while, but can't we do something like push
down an ActiveX control or plugin to render this video with IE pretty
trivially? It would simply become part of the magic incantation web developers
would use to embed video.

Flash did not obtain its dominance by coming installed with IE.

Unless Microsoft actively moves to block it, I don't know that Microsoft's
explicit support is actually that interesting.

~~~
WildUtah
/Flash did not obtain its dominance by coming installed with IE./

That's exactly how Flash won its dominance. It was installed by the PC
manufacturers (HP, Apple, Dell, &c) into IE5 and IE6 until it had overwhelming
market presence.

Adding video support later on cemented the position, but it was strippers and
steaks (for HP, Dell, Apple, &c execs) that won Flash its position.

------
MikeCapone
Can VLC decode VP8? Is there a sample video anywhere that I could download?

~~~
buster
There is a sample video of On2 on this page: [http://video.golem.de/audio-
video/2857/on2-vergleich-h.264-u...](http://video.golem.de/audio-
video/2857/on2-vergleich-h.264-und-vp8.html) Text basically says that those
are crops of FullHD movies.. keep in mind that this movie is from On2, so its
validity is at least questionable ;)

~~~
MikeCapone
It does look much better, but I'd love to see the same done by an independent
source.

------
modeless
This may not solve the problem, as companies like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe,
Nokia, etc need to get on board as well. They are likely to continue the same
arguments they raised against Theora; most importantly that VP8 is still
vulnerable to patent extortion despite being independently developed. It's
probably too much to ask for Google to provide indemnification from patent
lawsuits, but hopefully they've at least done some work to help assuage these
concerns.

~~~
vetinari
Adobe is already shipping VP6 as a part of Flash Player, so VP8 should not be
a problem. Maybe that is what Google will get for integrating Flash into
Chrome, that made news few weeks ago.

MS, Apple and Nokia will be harder nut to crack, because all three of them are
patent owners in H.264 portfolio. Nokia may cave when Youtube switches, maybe
even MS, but Apple users will have life slightly more difficult for a while.

------
jaustin
How does this relate to Google's funding of ogg/theora for mobile codecs?
[http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/04/interesting-
ti...](http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/04/interesting-times-for-
video-on-web.html)

Given that theora is based on On2's VP3, could there be enough similarity in
the codecs that the theora DSP code is useful for quickly getting VP8 going?

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jxcole
Is anyone besides me worried that Steve Jobs is going to say "they tried to
kill the iphone, so we will never adopt their evil standards!"? Is the
animosity between google and apple enough to stifle development?

~~~
yesbabyyes
I think YouTube is enough to drive consumer demand, whatever Steve says.

~~~
joubert
YouTube runs h.264 for iPad and iPhone connections.

~~~
jrockway
Google runs YouTube.

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zokier
So we have a video codec. But which container is it put in? MP4? MKV? FLV? And
which audio codecs are used? Vorbis? AAC? MP3?

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aufreak3
This is INCREDIBLY great news and something I've been waiting for to hear for
ages. Well done Google!

~~~
aufreak3
.. or rather "well going-to-do Google"!

------
_pius
This is huge. Great news for the Open Web.

------
papachito
I'm not seing any confirmation from Google for now or any other sources. This
is probably going to happen anyway, but for now I won't take it as a sure
thing.

~~~
pak
It's kind of funny how having false publicity for it now has probably amped up
expectations enough that Google would look bad if they _didn't_ follow
through.

