

Ogg founder moves to Mozilla to work on new video codec - bsimpson
http://gigaom.com/2013/10/15/monty-montgomery-joins-mozilla-for-daala/

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jph
This is excellent news.

Monty Montgomery is among my hero developers for nearly two decades now,
building Xiph, Ogg, Vorbis, Theora, and the like.

Mozilla and Monty sounds like a wonderful match for creating free open source
codecs, and bringing them to everyone.

Congratulations to Mozilla and Monty!

~~~
Jasper_
Don't forget cdparanoia!

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vitno
Check out his fantastic demo pages for a look at the work being done on Daala.
[http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml](http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml)

This is great news!

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jzzskijj
Excellent news that H.265 has competition, but at the same time I am feeling a
bit pessimistic. Consider Theora for example: Even if there is open source
VHDL available for Theora, it was only implemented in Nios II and LEON
processors and according to Wikipedia "there are currently no Theora decoder
chips in production". Even a license free codec wasn't enough to attract
interest from manufacturers.

Youtube delivers huge part of the "relevant" video material in Internet. And
Google has their own video codec. Would they include Mozilla's codec into
their browser (and smartphones) instead and start encoding videos in their own
service with Mozilla's codec? Quite unlikely. At least the article doesn't
mention anything about DRM, so would it be enough for Netflix?

~~~
ghjkld
I'm sure Google will be just as enthusiastic about incorporating Mozilla's new
video codec daala as Mozilla is about adding Google's image codec webp.

~~~
cromwellian
Seems like a big case of NIH syndrome if you ask me.

~~~
pcwalton
Mozilla has studied WebP and found it to be worse than JPEG in many cases.
[http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...](http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study_october_2013/)

~~~
cromwellian
They also found HEVC-MSP "worse" in some metrics. Seems a red herring to me.
WebP isn't just about replacing JPEG, it's about replacing GIF and PNG. Today,
on the web, if you want transparency or animation, you have to choose much
worse formats.

And why is it so awful to add WebP to the list of image formats gif, jpg, png,
but we can have a much longer list of supported audio codecs? What is
different about audio? Or video for that matter? The argument seems rather
arbitrary and self serving.

~~~
gillianseed
I agree with this, I've never understood why Mozilla (are dragging their feet)
when it comes to implementing webp.

It's hardly a huge maintenance burden, all development is done upstream and
there's an easy to use c library implementation, and of course it's fully open
source and royalty free.

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aw3c2
Direct link to his announcement:
[https://plus.google.com/110063726540320603118/posts/PdXWDAyT...](https://plus.google.com/110063726540320603118/posts/PdXWDAyTj2f)

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Already__Taken
Should I stop refreshing this page hoping for more?

[http://www.xiph.org/video/](http://www.xiph.org/video/)

~~~
Jasper_
He said he's going to continue working on these videos. He actually has
scripts for two more planned out.

Same exact job, just on somebody else's pay.

~~~
Already__Taken
Sweet. They must take a ton of effort to make.

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Jasper_
Monty was one of the smartest engineers I worked with at Red Hat. Brilliant
guy, quick on his feet. I'm a bit disappointed he's moving on, but at the same
time, he belongs at Mozilla. Once all the engineers are in the same room,
Daala is going to kick ass.

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yeukhon
So that's him living in MA working remote. He did not show up at monday
meeting!

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robinduckett
Sorry to be the one to do this, but

Relevant XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

~~~
mbq
Situation: there are 0 free and libre state-of-art video codecs; Xiph is
working on one supported by Red Hat and Mozilla.

Mozilla buys Monty Montgomery from Red Hat.

Soon: Situation: there are 0 free and libre state-of-art video codecs; Xiph is
working on one supported by Red Hat and Mozilla.

... very relevant.

~~~
gillianseed
How are VP8/VP9 (webm) not 'free and libre'?

~~~
mbq
As I understand, Google can go evil and use its patents to impose certain
restrictions, like killing potential independent VP10 project or messing with
webm's royalty-free status.

~~~
gillianseed
Since Google are offering them under a _irrevocable_ royalty free licence I
don't see how you could have come to 'understand' it that way.

Do you have any references to your claims?

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mschuster91
Oh no, please not ANOTHER codec in the mix. Hell, we don't have a single codec
that works OOTB in all popular browsers without external software (I consider
IE, FF, Chrome, Safari and their mobile counterparts). For now, it's WebM, Ogg
and H264 which one has to transcode and store just for shipping a video to
desktop and mobile.

And while we're talking about mobile, I'm sure that SoC decoding support will
take not 2015 to arrive, rather than 2016 - give or take a couple more years
because some patent troll will always dig up some dirt.

~~~
vitno
Please consider why we don't have a single codec that works OOTB.

H264 has all sorts of nasty licensing stuff, which Daala is not subject to. It
should also avoid all valid patent claims because it is based on lapped
transforms as opposed to DCTs.

also, Ogg isn't a codec... it's a container.

WebM is a totally different problem which is mostly not supported, my
understanding is, by Microsoft and Apple due to political reasons. This isn't
something that Daala impedes. It's probably even more politically possible to
adopt Daala than WebM due to the origin (Xiph/Mozilla).

~~~
mschuster91
I know ogg is a container, I just never can remember the names of the
individual codecs. And as a matter of adoption rates, which devices actually
ship Ogg audio/video support? Next to none do it in HW.

And who guarantees that no one holds some "shadowed" patents on something just
enough related to Daala to impede it? And... who says Apple won't f __k on
standards like they do at the moment, did with Flash /X11/... before, and will
ignore Daala while shipping their own stuff?

~~~
matthewmacleod
As far as I'm aware:

\- Apple support standard MPEG4 formats at the moment \- Flash was not a
standard, and \- Apple don\t currently ship proprietary video or audio codecs.

Let's face it - Vorbis solved a problem that theoretically existed, but had
minimal practical impact. The same applies to modern video codecs.

When the Ogg formats have provided genuine utility they are used (see e.g.
Speex in Siri and Google products) - and what would be really nice would be a
free-as-in-patents, hardware-supported, high-performance video codec which can
be implemented by all major vendors. Maybe it'll turn out that way.

~~~
mschuster91
The problem is just that unless the US dumps their patent system, no one has
any incentive to use FOSS codecs.

Hardware/SoC providers will focus on the "licensed" stuff because buying a
license will protect you from IP lawsuits, and the content providers will also
use the "licensed" codecs because the support is far more widespread (and
well, for mobile you _need_ HW acceleration if you don't mind burning through
the battery for a 2-minute cat video).

Long story short, as a manager of a company selling mobile handhelds, I would
not give a dime about the "open" codecs because the risk of stepping on a
patent mine is too high.

~~~
gillianseed
Both vorbis and flac are open codecs and are supported in a wide range of
devices, like every Android device for starters, same goes for webm which is
also open source and royalty free.

~~~
rsynnott
However, hardware support for WebM is very thin on the ground; the Tegra 4 is
the only mainstream shipping SoC to have it, and the Tegra 4 isn't _that_
mainstream. That Android support uses the CPU, and thus hits the battery and
performs poorly on older devices.

