
Chromium Blog: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change - twapi
http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html
======
cookiecaper
I've been trying to refrain from commenting on these stories the last few
days, but oh well.

This whole debate is stupid and of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to
go. Mozilla supports it, Chrome supports it, Opera supports it, Flash will be
supporting it in the near future, meaning any of the other desktop browsers
will support it.

The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264
hardware acceleration. Well, dude, you'll just have to deal with software
decode for some videos. The world does not revolve around iOS, no matter how
much you want it to.

There is no good reason to support H.264 -- WebM provides roughly equivalent
features and quality and MPEG-LA will be out for blood ever more as the clock
ticks down on H.264 patents.

Everyone knows that there is no valid argument here for supporting H.264 other
than "but... that'll decrease the battery life on my iPad or iPhone! :(".
That's life, man; technology moves forward and old things get obsoleted, even
mind-blowingly shiny things made by Apple.

I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.

~~~
VengefulCynic
Ignoring the cost in ignoring the revenue from millions of iOS users, let me
focus instead of the looming legal question of WebM. If Google were to
indemnify WebM users (sites who encode in WebM, developers who release
decoders, OEMs who release hardware decoders), I would be much more willing to
embrace WebM. As is, there is a very cogent argument to be made that the MPEG-
LA group has already suggested that some of their patents may be encapsulated
in WebM and users could be opening themselves up to lawsuits as co-defendants
with Google. H.264 isn't free, but it's a known cost and licensing from MPEG-
LA indemnifies you from any legal costs that might be associated with patent
trolls popping up to sue you to death.

~~~
cookiecaper
This point has already been discussed a lot, but I'll just review it quickly
for you.

Basically, if you use any software at all, you can't go around living your
life in constant fear of patent threats. WebM is probably safer than most
because you have a big entity to fight most of your battle for you, presuming
such a battle ever materializes.

Of course it's possible that MPEG-LA will be angry to see their H.264 revenue
stream run consistently drier and sue in hopes of retaliation and a
declaration that all WebM users must pay MPEG-LA royalties anyway. There's no
guarantee that this will happen, however, and that MPEG-LA hasn't made an
attempt to "nip this in the bud" demonstrates that they may not be all that
certain they have a case here.

Google released WebM explicitly to circumvent the restrictions with H.264 so I
suspect they did their due diligence and deviated from the H.264 patents in
the necessary ways, but as above, there's nothing you can do if you irritate a
group that has money and lawyers and wants to try their hand at milking
something out of you. That's a general fact of life whether you use WebM or
not.

If you're really worried about the FUD MPEG-LA puts out to scare you into
paying protection money, then I guess you are free to pay that, if it makes
you feel happier. But "Google shouldn't promote free standards because it
might make someone angry and then they might sue you" is just not a very solid
argument -- we can't refuse to do anything because someone might sue us. There
will always be vultures out there, and we can't stop progress because of them.

~~~
kenjackson
Why would Google do their due diligence and not share it? MPEG-LA has detailed
very clearly where each patent claim applies to the H264 spec.

Google owes it to its users to go through the MPEG-LA document and do at least
one sentence explaining why WebM doesn't infringe each point. It would be a
month exercise for a dev and product manager, but well worth it.

~~~
Tloewald
It ccurs to me that there's one possible motive for Google doing what it's
doing that isn't purely cynical -- it may want the MPEG-LA to sue it now and
reach some kind of settlement than wait a few years and ambush it.

~~~
kenjackson
The problem with that is that MPEG-LA's licensors can sue more than once.

In fact if I was MPEG-LA I'd do exactly that. I'd work with my licensors to
ensure not everyone sue at once, but rather do it all in succession. Literally
have WebM in courts everyday for a decade. And remember, only one licensor
need win, and they don't have to grant WebM RAND terms. They could just come
right out and say, "take it off the market". And since there's no
indemnification, they could in theory even go after end-users of phones,
although not likely.

Of course the same can be done against H264, but it appears far less likely.

But a "flush out the enemy" strategy doesn't seem likely given the raw number
of patents and licensors associated with H264.

------
pilif
What I find funny is that half the Internet was complaining when Google
announced to support H.264 in the first place when, clearly, supporting
nothing but open formats was the right way to go (see Mozilla's decision to
only support theora)

And now that Google is removing H.264 support again, half the Internet is,
again, up in arms about the decision, using the same arguments as before.

Well, I guess this time it's the half of the Internet that wasnt complaining
last time :-)

~~~
pornel
There was no WebM back then. The only alternative was Ogg Theora (even before
1.1 improvements IIRC), which Google didn't consider as suitable alternative.

Google doesn't have RMS's consistency on the matter. They balance practicality
with idealism.

------
TomOfTTB
If Google really wants to force WebM adoption they need to go "all-in". Set a
deadline for pulling all h.264 videos from YouTube and force Apple and
Microsoft to support the WebM standard.

I know that sounds worse than what they're doing but hear me out. Right now
they're creating an environment where everyone will have to do twice the work
to support HTML5. That's not good for anyone.

So if they're insistent on making WebM the standard they need to pull out the
big guns and force Apple and Microsoft to capitulate. It'll be bitter and
nasty but at the end we'll get a standard out of it and not a fragmented mess.

~~~
cracell
This "twice the work" argument was clearly addressed by the post. Firefox has
a much larger market share than Chrome and has already clearly stated they
will not support h.264. If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the
work" it was Firefox and Google has just decided to support them in it.

And using their position as owner of YouTube to force h.264 out before WebM is
ready would just hurt YouTube and make everyone with a mobile device made
prior to WebM decoders being included (assuming that gains momentum) unable to
watch YouTube videos.

~~~
rwl
> If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was
> Firefox...

Huh? As I understand it, H.264 was never an option for Firefox due to the
patent encumbrance and licensing fees they would incur for distributing it.

The people who chose to use H.264, despite knowing that the second most
popular browser wouldn't support it, made twice the work for _themselves_.

~~~
CountSessine
There were three options.

One was to build in explicit support for h.264 in Firefox and for Mozilla to
pay the MPEG-LA ~$5million/year in licensing fees.

Another was to punt to the operating system and let
gstreamer/directmedia/quicktime do the decode. Even though it would have been
without cost to them, Mozilla chose not to do this as part of their moral
stand against h.264. This was why they were so sharply criticized.

The third option was to let the Firefox Flash plugin do the decoding, which is
what we have today.

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weixiyen
Not sure why Google is getting so much hate. I would direct it at the
following instead:

\- MPEG-LA

\- Firefox

\- Opera

I'm not sure what everyone expected here. There was no way that h.264 would be
the standard format for the video tag.

This is one of many moves to push WebM forward as the undisputed standard.
It's been less than 1 year since public announcement of WebM, and Google IO is
around the corner in May '11. Expect more positive news on the WebM front.

There are 3 major arguments left standing against WebM

1) h.264 is better than vp8

2) prevalent hardware support for WebM

3) iOS

Would anyone really be that surprised if 2 of the 3 are addressed within the
year?

------
extension
H.264 is just not going to work for web video, even as a defacto standard.
Firefox will never support it and it prevents any small time player from
entering the browser game down the road.

It's also a serious risk for big corps who don't have a license. Keep that in
mind when you criticize Google. You're asking them to expose themselves to
liability (or pay huge license fees).

If we're going to the trouble of phasing in a <video> tag that will take years
to become viable, we might as well throw in a properly unencumbered codec that
will also take years to become viable. Why bother with <video> if it's just
going to go rotten as soon as it gains critical mass and the patent trolls
pounce?

Nothing critical is breaking today, we're just going to have to wait a bit
longer to play with the shiny new video tag, which is well worth it to have it
done properly. Just be glad that one of the tech megacorps is pushing for
standards and freedom as part of their business plan. Usually it's the other
way around.

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mikeryan
This seems to work under a bit of a hazy assumption that there needs to be a
"baseline" video codec. The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline"
image format since the dawn of the web.

If using a baseline format was their real argument they wouldn't be supporting
a patent encumbered MP3 format for the audio tag, same as Firefox.

~~~
Lagged2Death
>The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the
dawn of the web.

IE's historically poor support for PNG is probably the main reason so many
sites still use GIFs where PNGs would be better. (Edit: And for that matter,
as others have pointed out here, PNG was invented because the owners of the
GIF patents threatened to sue the entire Internet.) Browser support for TIFF
is an inconsistent mess.

In the case of the img tag, the most common browsers all supported two common
formats pretty well (JPEG and GIF), so those two formats became the de-facto
baseline image formats organically.

I think the situation with video is similar. If Firefox, Chrome, and Opera
(the influential browsers used mainly by the early-adopter, techie crowd) all
support one specific codec for HTML5 video, that will become the de-facto
baseline video format organically.

~~~
blasdel
TIFF itself is an inconsistent mess :/

------
jsz0
I'm not sure what Google's motivations are but they are taking a huge risk
here. If WebM gets a strong patent challenge, or isn't widely
adopted/supported for other reasons, then Google is going to demonstrate their
ability to pick the wrong horse in a very high profile way. It will be
interesting to see what type of fallout that creates. Imagine a new world
where Google, with all of its power, cannot influence the future of the web? I
think that would have some major ramifications.

------
protomyth
I just don't get why my reaction should be different for WebM than it was from
OpenXML. A "standard" controlled my one company is not something I think I can
trust.

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Luecke
When are they going to remove MP3 support from the audio tag?

~~~
cookiecaper
Never. Google is not actively attempting to promote Vorbis or non-MP3
technologies at the moment. It'd be silly to waste resources doing that as MP3
patents are nearing their end-of-life. MP3 is already a lost battle and the
patents have so little life left in them that it's not worth trying to squeeze
what can be gotten out of that.

------
slackgentoo
FYI, the person in charge (Mike Jazayeri) previously worked at Microsoft. I am
not suggesting anything, just find it is quite interesting.

~~~
jrockway
It's almost like employment is some sort of contract instead of some sort of
religion.

~~~
slackgentoo
I think it is interesting to think how a person's past (work) experience may
influence the person's current thinking and judgement. Nothing else.

------
rtrunck
Has Google donated the patents they hold encompassing WebM to the public
domain?

~~~
mbrubeck
No, but the WebM license includes a perpetual, royalty-free patent license:
<http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/>

The patent license is irrevocable unless you file a suit against VP8 users
claiming that VP8 violates your own patents. (This is a common clause for
open-source patent grants; basically it means that Google can still use its
patents "defensively" as a deterrent against other patent suits, but it can't
use them in an "offensive" first-strike.)

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drivebyacct2
Just when I thought there was a chance that this topic would get a break on
HN. I guess I appreciate the link, if Google hadn't tweeted about it (I'm
assuming they will) I probably wouldn't have seen this link.

Their answers are right, but it's the answers that aren't present, that are
more telling. They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do
it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms. In my
opinion, those are the only questions worth asking.

Their answers about H.264 having little adoption with the <video> tag and
about having to dually encode with the current HTML5 video scene anyway is
spot on. WebM gets you native playback in every major browser but IE, with
Flash fallback working in IE. There actually is a day, very soon that, Flash
assisted, anything will play WebM.

Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed
Google also failed to discuss further in this post.

~~~
othermaciej
Are you saying Safari doesn't count as a "major browser"?

~~~
kenjackson
And lets be clear Safari on the desktop isn't the interesting one. Its the iOS
devices. The iOS devices won't have Flash to fallback on either. So basically
every iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch won't be able to watch your WebM videos AT ALL.
There is no fallback, unless you encode to H264.

Now maybe you can say that in this new HTML5 web world mobile Apple devices
are irrelevant. I personally think you'd be wrong.

H264 is the only codec that will generally be supported on every device,
either directly or by Flash. From Chrome to Firefox to iOS to IE.

~~~
redthrowaway
If Youtube goes WebM/flash only, iOS will support WebM, period. Not being able
to watch youtube videos would be like the Flash noise of a year ago, but
worse, as there's no reason _not_ to support WebM.

~~~
kenjackson
Apple and Jobs aren't shy about saying, "Nope, not doing it". Especially with
those they view as enemies and trust me, Google is their arch enemy now, much
moreso than Microsoft.

A big reason they may not do it is backwards compat on HW accleration. They
have a working solution on all devices today (H264). They're not likely to
want to screw their old customers over a codec they aren't particularly fond
of that was rammed down their throat by Google.

Here's what I'd do if I were Apple, host my own video service, that serves
H264 or Flash. MS and Apple throw their marketing weight and services around
that (their various products auto upload to this new service). Now all iOS
devices can play this video AND so can everyone else. YouTube dies a MySpace
like death.

If YouTube tries that I really think they may be sealing their own fate.

To put it another way, people are NOT going to give up their iOS devices. But
they will use a different video service.

~~~
rmc
If YouTube and all online video is WebM, then iOS will have no way to play 99%
of videos (no flash remember). Apple can't afford for ipad to be "the device
that doesn't play videos"

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benreesman
let's all acknowledge this controversy for what it is: an apple vs. google
popularity contest. and with that said: suck it apple. suck it long, and suck
it hard.

sent from my iPhone.

