

Flash, Google, VP8, and the future of Internet video - DarkShikari
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292

======
daeken
Not to pull attention away from this post, but if anyone is curious about the
Flash renderer I wrote (the one mentioned in the article), I've released the
source: <http://github.com/daeken/Arienette>

In retrospect, I should've stuck with it; I knew that Adobe's iPhone code
would be delayed as hell, but didn't think there'd be enough lead time to make
my money's worth off of it. If I would've known they were going to delay it
this heavily, I could've had a product out and making money already. Hindsight
is 20/20, I guess.

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ssp
_It also depends on what [Google's] target is: would try to push hardware
support too?_

A while back there was an IamA on reddit from a video codec hardware engineer.
I found this comment interesting:

 _We've been asked to support ON2's VP6 and possibly other codecs. Google
isn't done entering the video market, and this is part of that push. I can't
really divulge anything more sorry._

See
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9q7pp/for_my_fellow_ge...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9q7pp/for_my_fellow_geeks_i_am_a_video_codec_hardware/c0dxeez)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
One of the Mozilla guys pointed to a schematic for the new low cost Marvell
Armada ARM chipset (the one advertised as bringing a new generation of $100
dollar Android phones) and it had On2 listed in the decoding section.

I can't find the link because twitter search sucks and the Marvell site all
seems to consist entirely of Flash and PDFs.

~~~
kierank
First result when googling it:
[http://www.marvell.com/products/processors/armada/armada_600...](http://www.marvell.com/products/processors/armada/armada_600/armada618_pb.pdf)

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jon_dahl
This is probably the best analysis of the VP8 situation I've read. One
takeaway: if Google wants to make VP8 ubiquitous on the web, it probably could
(by leveraging YouTube), but that wouldn't kill H.264. It would more likely
set up two competing codecs, which would be good for everyone except the
patent holders.

~~~
app
It wouldn't be good for YouTube or other video sharing sites. There are two
(well, two that don't require Flash) competing video codecs now-- it's expense
that keeps them from both being utilized. Like the article says storage is the
mitigating factor to adoption by the video sharing companies.

~~~
jon_dahl
Depends if both codecs need to be implemented by every site. If Flash or HTML
5 supported both, content owners would be able to choose one or the other.

~~~
eggnet
If all HTML 5 browsers supported h.264 ubiquitously, nobody would care about
VP8.

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thristian
I have a hard time believing that VP8 would have any effect on HTML5 video:

\- So far as I know, Apple and Nokia refused to support Theora because they
were already heavily invested in H.264, and they didn't want to open
themselves to more patent risk than they already had. These reasons apply
equally well to VP8. \- Mozilla picked Theora because it was the most
production-ready patent-free codec. Even if VP8 had zero patent risk,
libtheora is already written and tested and portable.

Am I missing something?

~~~
DarkShikari
_Am I missing something?_

There's been huge buzz among Mozilla, FSF, and so forth about the Google
purchase of On2 and VP8. They're all basically pleading for VP8 to come out in
order to replace Theora. It was really sudden, just over the past few days.

 _Even if VP8 had zero patent risk, libtheora is already written and tested
and portable._

There are things that matter more than just being tested and portable, like
whether it's actually good.

~~~
lambda
It hasn't exactly been sudden; people have been asking if Google has been
planning this ever since Google announced it's intent to acquire On2. See
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/06/google_vp6_open_sour...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/06/google_vp6_open_source/)
for example. The buzz picked back up again once Google finalized the deal;
they spent a while in negotiation.

One of the barriers to adoption of Theora has been the quality issue; why
would Apple or Nokia take the extra risk and cost of going with Theora if they
already implement a superior codec? There's a chance that VP8 would help with
that, but it's still an uphill battle. It took years for Xiph to take VP3 to
something that they wanted to call a stable standard. Google has more
resources than Xiph, for sure, but they likely can't just dump VP8 as-is as a
new standard. There's also the issue of submarine patents, the hardware issue,
just getting this implemented and as widely deployed as H.264, and more, so
yeah, it would be tough for this to become a standard.

On the other hand, what the heck else is Google planning on doing with On2?
Why would they get into the proprietary codec business, when H.264 seems to be
winning out in most places in the market, and they've already bought all the
licenses, encoded most of YouTube in H.264, and so on? Of course, those
questions also apply to an open codec, but Google has been a big proponent of
open, freely implementable standards, so at least that route makes some amount
of sense.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Yes, why would MPEG patent holders Apple and Nokia refuse to implement a
competing video codec? It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

But I fully believe them when they say it's patent risk. Just like I believed
Nokia when they said it was because Theora was "proprietary" and that it was
impossible to implement DRM with Theora.

<http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/Nokia.pdf>

In that position paper you can see that Nokia is really keen to push MPEG
towards patent-free licencing, but their big strategy to achieve this is to
lock themselves into MPEG. Not very smart, but maybe Google can get some
momentum going in that direction.

(Related fact: Nokia also argued _for_ Software Patents in Europe.)

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blasdel
Didn't the Gnash folks set themselves up for epic freetard failure by refusing
contributions from anyone who's ever installed Flash?:
<http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula>

~~~
bad_user
That's because working on Gnash is forbidden by Flash's EULA.

~~~
blasdel
Just because it's written in legalese doesn't mean it's remotely enforceable,
even within the US.

~~~
nitrogen
Winning or losing in court isn't what matters -- the cost of defending oneself
in court is enough to "enforce" any bogus contract or license provision
against a significantly smaller opponent, such as a lone open source
developer.

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felixmar
_Adobe’s H.264 encoder in Flash Media Encoder is so utterly awful that it is
far worse than ffmpeg’s H.263 or Theora; they’re practically assuming users
will go use x264 instead._

Why is x264 GPL licensed instead of LGPL like FFmpeg? It would make x264 the
de facto H.264 encoder.

~~~
DarkShikari
It already is the de facto for many situations--but for the reason you
mentioned--primarily only on server-side apps.

The GPL is used for historical reasons; relicensing would be hard, obviously,
because we have to contact everyone who ever wrote a line of code. Ironically
we _are_ doing that right now, but for a dual-license scheme
(GPL/Proprietary).

The reason we didn't choose LGPL for the relicense is because one of the main
devs (not me) refused; he saw releasing the source as LGPL to be effectively
throwing away any chance to ever make any money off of his work, while keeping
the code as GPL would at least reserve that option for the future. The dual
license is a good compromise IMO; commercial applications can support
development through license fees while free software gets to use it for no
cost.

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ZeroGravitas
Slightly amused by the engineer worldview evident in the last line.

 _"psy optimizations are the single most critical feature ... they're the
reason that Vorbis beat MP3 for audio"_

So in other words, they're not the most critical feature since Vorbis quality
and freedom didn't budge MP3 and so, if we imagine a parallel world where x264
does not exist and Google's VP8 was actually noticeably better than the best
H.264 (like Vorbis vs MP3 or on par like Vorbis vs AAC) we would find that
anti-competitive patent pools would still be forcing us to use their choice of
codec.

The best we can reasonably hope for, as we saw with Vorbis, is for a strong
competitor to prevent crazy licence fees. And maybe in time for H.265 the EU
or China will have enough political clout and common-sense to demand that
international video standards must be royalty free.

------
est
Even if Flash video dies, SVG/canvas won't replace Flash.

