

Putting x264 developer's technical analysis of WebM into perspective - Indyan
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/05/20/webm-analysis

======
ZeroGravitas
The amusing thing is that it was actually a good review, as the author is too
smart to actually lie about it (though he does make a few minor technical
blunders). Just the surface layer of nerd rage over a core of deeply technical
nit-picking leads everyone to believe otherwise and link to it as if it
revealed anything we didn't already suspect, or indeed hope for.

I mean he says it's better than H.264 baseline. If you're watching it on an
iPod or iPhone then that's the only profile they support. In other words
Android phones will have better maximum quality video than Apple's. Is that
part getting overlooked somehow?

To reiterate, if you only want to create one file for all your web viewers
then H.264 baseline is your best option, and VP8 beats that.

Another general theme is that it's very similar to H.264. If you put your
armchair patent lawyer hat to one side for a moment, isn't "similar to H.264"
a really good thing to say about a codec? Personally I think it's good for
H.264 to be knocked off its pedestal. Just because Steve Jobs mentioned it in
a keynote it seems to have attained the same mystical halo that surrounded
PPC, Altivec, AAC or Firewire, untouchable by mere mortals with their X86,
MMX, MP3 and USB2 when really they're all just fairly standard technologies
with pros and cons and susceptible to external market forces like any other
tech.

All the flaws he finds are unquantified in their impact, much like the recent
attack piece on Ogg by his colleague where fatal flaws were later revealed to
save 7-bits per media file or be 0.1% less efficient than MP4. Maybe they are
real problems that annoy software encoder purists, design flaws or actual bugs
that can't even be fixed until a spec revision but do you actually care as a
customer? (Again was H.264 handed down from God or is it just a committee
written spec like most other technologies. Are we claiming it perfect or
flawless just because it's the incumbent?)

About the only one that he quantifies is lack of B-frames. (Actually left out
because of patents, yet this still gets criticized by someone who thinks
they're also careless about patents) But B-frames have costs as well as
benefits, something clearly shown by the fact that they were left out of H.264
baseline as well. If they're all sunshine and lollipops then why leave them
out? Like many things in codecs and software generally, it's a tradeoff, more
decode power for extra compression which may make sense on a destkop but not a
laptop or mobile device.

Finally, note how often in this (and his preview article) he says VP8 will not
be a serious challenger _unless_ (!) they adopt psy optimizations that make
x264 so much better than the other H.264 implementations. You'd think this was
either impossible, or unthinkable, but it's not. It's only a matter of time
and at least the Xiph guys have experience of doing exactly this on a similar
codebase and they've been working on VP8 for weeks already.

~~~
astrange
> though he does make a few minor technical blunders

Such as?

> I mean he says it's better than H.264 baseline. If you're watching it on an
> iPod or iPhone then that's the only profile they support. In other words
> Android phones will have better maximum quality video than Apple's. Is that
> part getting overlooked somehow?

"Better" doesn't mean "much better"; a better residual coder is useful, but
H.264 has better reference frame system - On2 seems to love idiosyncratic
systems which aren't as good - and much more flexible adaptive quantization.
Which is the basis of x264's psy optimizations, so the same (fundamentally
good) ideas probably can't be implemented as well.

> It's only a matter of time and at least the Xiph guys have experience of
> doing exactly this on a similar codebase and they've been working on VP8 for
> weeks already.

IIRC Theora barely implemented rate-distortion optimizations in the first
place, let alone Psy-RD - you have to get that out of the way before you can
do the really interesting things. However, I don't think VP8 uses the weird
Hilbert coding of the older system, so it might be easier to implement all of
that. Besides, you can just copy it from x264.

------
jrockway
The technical analysis is sound -- technically, WebM is not as good as H.264.
But considering it's mostly for cat videos, it doesn't really matter.

The super high quality stuff will take an extra minute or two to download, but
you won't have to pay a licensing fee for it. The movie and the hardware and
software that play it will be much cheaper. A compromise, yes, but not a
really difficult one.

~~~
javanix
_The super high quality stuff will take an extra minute or two to download,_
but you won't have to pay a licensing fee for it.

I'm not so sure about that. Yesterday's analysis seemed to predict some
questionable usage of H.264 bits in the encoder.

~~~
jrockway
If that turns out to be the case, then everyone should go back to H.264. But
honestly, I have a feeling that Google looked into this before they decided to
use it for YouTube. Remember that patents cover _exactly_ what they describe,
not things similar to what they describe.

Google could always also just buy the patent, if it turns out to be a problem.
Basically, I am not ready to dismiss this yet. I trust Google's legal team
over one H.264 programmer.

~~~
av500
So far the only thing Google said is "they are very confident" which legally
means nothing. They are not going to indemnify everybody that gets sued over
VP8, are they?

------
barkingcat
I doubt that anything is really final in google's hands. just look at how fast
android is changing and evolving. Google will do what it needs to do to reach
their goals, even if it means that they need to break backward compatibility.
This is a company with so much resources it can probably design its own
reference hardware implementation of vp8 at whatever stage of its evolution,
regardless of backwards compatibility - and also persuade chip makers like TI
and Qualcolm to include it in their product line at a moment's notice ie
within 4 months or so. In this respect, I think the "finality" is overrated -
the reviewer / x264 developer is thinking too small.

~~~
jrockway
_the reviewer / x264 developer is thinking too small_

And, there is always a bit of "uh oh, my life's work is suddenly becoming
irrelevant, even though it's technically better". One thing I've learned from
reading HN is that good technical solutions rarely get you much. What you need
is a good product.

H.264 is a great technical solution, but a horrible product. VP8 is not as
good technically, but it's exactly the product the Internet needs. Sad, but
that's the reality of it.

~~~
Locke1689
Yeah, Jason's life work is really in jeopardy. I mean, as the primary author
of the best performing video encoder in existence in his _3rd year of
undergraduate study_ , how will he regain any meaning in his life?

~~~
jrockway
The word "bit" is crucial to the understanding of my post.

------
astrange
> Another problem with Jason's analysis is that he is comparing a new and
> "raw" video format to an established and mature encoder like x264.

VP8, and the libvpx codebase, is older than x264, as it said in the original
article.

~~~
jerf
Maturity has a man-hour component, too.

~~~
av500
So ON2 did not spend many man hours on this all these years? Less than a third
year student doing it part time? Oh well, google overpaid...

~~~
famrey
On2 does not have the resources of Google and the entire internet at their
disposal. Even the x264 developer pointed out that the VP8 spec was clearly
unfinished.

~~~
av500
Sorry, ON2 is a codec company that prior to being bought by google was in the
business of selling their codecs, VP8 included. Now, either they were good at
it, then it was OK to pay that price and we would have a good codec. Or they
were not and it needs google's resourses and "the entire internet" to fix
that, but then google overpaid. Which one is it?

~~~
famrey
It's a good codec. But as you can see, the specification was clearly not
finished. So On2 sold a codec package that wasn't very polished. Doesn't mean
it wasn't worth the money. It just means that polish needs to be applied, and
now that it's open, it will.

------
hackermom
From the entry on opera.com:

"The x264 developer's analysis is certainly interesting, but I don't think it
is the final word on "WebM vs. H.264". Not only is WebM doing well compared to
the H.264 baseline profile, which is what's relevant to HTML5 video, _but I
think WebM will continue to improve both quality-wise and performance-wise._ "

From the x264 developer's article:

"Update: it seems that Google is not open to changing the spec: it is
apparently “final”, complete with all its flaws."

Mhm.

~~~
wmf
It is possible to make improvements without changing the spec.

~~~
hackermom
Yes, within limits. And, you can of course just increase bitrate, which still
doesn't really solve anything.

