Licensing isn't the (only) issue for asics. Hardware decoders are only reasonably priced if they're being produced at scale. If I'm a device manufacturer and I have a choice between getting h.264 for free because it's on the SoC I'm using and paying multiple dollars (!) for a WebM decoder, not to mention wasting valuable board space and paying for it to be soldered on, which do you think I'll choose?
1) You aren't going to get H.264 decoder for free. There will be always at least license fees to MPEG-LA.
2) Current hardware video decoders are DSPs. You are not going to "waste valuable board space". It is a program in ROM, it is easy to change H.264 to VP8, you will probably even save some space.
Most hardware video decoders are special-purpose DSPs that the manufacturers write firmware/microcode for to decode particular formats. The instruction sets of the DSPs are well suited to operations normally performed when decoding (or encoding) video.
> If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
They are not general-purpose, but that doesn't mean they're not easily re-programmable either. Consider the example of GPUs.
I want to say some SNES games used a DSP chip, there are several known to emulator authors, including two versions that used the exact same hardware with different microcode (and therefore different abilities). So it's been done before at least.
DSP's are like processor units in GPU. Optimized for fast and parallel multiply and add computations (and some other basic signal processing stuff). One codec is not that much different from other from computation point of view.
The accelerator units are usually filters that operate over a region of memory while processor is busy computing something else. These can be made fixed function, however most of them are programmable to support multiple steps in codec processing.
Your assumption is valid only in case when you don't count smartphone makers that actually design their own complete phones and not license baseband implementation from someone :)
None. And its likely that software decoding of WebM will behave on mobile devices the same way Flash behaves. Okay in newer devices, but laughable in previous generation devices.
The Oulu team will release the first VP8 video hardware encoder IP in the first quarter of 2011. We have the IP running in an FPGA environment, and rigorous testing is underway. Once all features have been tested and implemented, the encoder will be launched as well.
No, there are hardware webm decoders. Eg:
"Broadcom Accelerates WebM Video on Mobile Phones" from
http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=s471536
And that's from eight months ago.
Broadcom is a huge maker of mobile SOCs; I haven;t checked the others, but I bet they support webm too.
The problem is that content providers have yet another option to choose from, but so far one that is supported by almost no one. Firefox will support WebM, and so will Chrome, so to reach those browsers you either need WebM, or Flash.
Flash also supports h.264 video, as do most mobile devices (Android, iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Windows Phone 7, Zune even) and game consoles (XBox, PS3, and afaik the Wii). In fact from what I can tell, the only platform that doesn't support H.264 is Firefox without Flash. Compare that to the massive amount of existing platforms and devices which don't support WebM (and have no hardware WebM decoding), and it seems like moving to WebM makes much less business sense.
I don't disagree, but Android users seem to get by more or less "ok" without hardware 264 decoding (at least the ones who have devices without hardware decoding).
Personally, I just leave my mobile devices plugged in most of the time anyway so they're always topped off, but that's just me.
Well, having a desk job does tend to make me stay in one place for the most part. If I know I'm going to be sitting there for longer than an hour -- I plug it in.
(09:50:48 PM) sjuxax: Guy on HN said this: "ffmpeg only has a working webm decoder. xvp8 (the x264-based encoder) hasn't been touched for a few months and is basically vaporware"
(09:50:50 PM) sjuxax: true?
...
(09:52:34 PM) Dark_Shikari: not quite true
(09:52:42 PM) Dark_Shikari: close, but not quite.
(09:52:58 PM) Dark_Shikari: 1) the github tree hasn't been updated
(09:53:05 PM) Dark_Shikari: there is more stuff that isn't in the tree yet
(09:53:13 PM) Dark_Shikari: 2) Ronald is dealing with his first baby boy, give him some slack
(09:53:20 PM) Dark_Shikari: 3) Google just hired him full-time for a year to work solely on xvp8
and later on...
(10:12:27 PM) Dark_Shikari: tl;dr: it's kinda vaporware, there's a bit of work done, but it will stop being vaporware in march when Ronald goes to work for Google.
Assuming you're sjuxax, thank you for the research! I think a lot of us sometimes forget how simple it is to go to the primary sources in cases like this.
As much as google can seem pretty sinister these days, it's reassuring that their strategy for implementing a video decoder is "hire the dev on the leading open source project for a year."
Google as always wants us to use their beta software. This thread has generated much debates. I'm always suspicious when big corporation touts ideology as their cause. Don't fall into the pray. Just asked the question "Where is the money?" and you can guess the real reason for their move. Google seems to think that they have the clouts to influence all area of humanity, in this case the audio/visual entertainment industry that includes set top boxes, chip and hardware makers etc. They are fighter all wars (MS Office, iPhone, Bing, Facebook) by spreading themselves thinly. I believe these few years will see the start of decline of Google as a company.
IE8 is at 33% share now. IE7 is about 7%. I expect most on IE6 are still on XP. So I'd expect that we'll see similar uptake rates for IE9, if not more given the HTML5 benefit (IE8 doesn't have much clear benefit over IE7 from what I can tell).
So I'd say expect IE9 to be closer to 27% in 3 years.
Of course this ignores two big questions:
1) Is IE still hemorraging market share?
2) Does IE9 actually reverse the trend of people using Chrome?
And why will that happen? Because people like to pay license fees so much they will be all too eager to pay the fees for both h.264 encoding and flash?
Yes, businesses that already use h.264 and flash will probably continue using them. But the bootstrapped websites and startups will opt for the free stuff at least initially, and of all those bootstrapped startups some will be successful enough to make some noise. And then some of the established companies will have cost cutting rounds and will look at those license fees and think about whether they really need to pay them when some of their brand new competitors aren't paying them. At this point the iPhone will start looking bad for not supporting the newest and coolest video startups that are supported on android and Jobs will eventually cave too and add WebM support to the iPhone.
Everything in the web thus far has gone towards the lowest cost and easiest alternative that is still effective, and this will not be different.
You're dreaming if you think Apple is going to add WebM hardware decoding support to iPhones. That would basically mean that all previously sold iPhones would be marginalized, it would increase the hardware costs and space/power requirements, and there is no market advantage to supporting the WebM format as there's no WebM-exclusive content.
I believe lukeschlather provided a good response, but I would like to add something more about the hardware side. It is a mistake to believe that one needs an entirely newly designed hardware chip to handle the WebM standard. Those hardware accelerators are not pure hardware. They are like little computers, with their own processors, and their own instruction memories, and their own software (or firmware). The processors are designed to efficiently compute the most commonly used math operations of the standard (which are usually Fourier transforms, matrix operations, etc.). The firmware causes the processor to apply the mathematical operations properly to the data to decode the video.
The thing is that all of those video standards use more or less the same basic math operations, just in a different way. This means that a WebM hardware accelerator would look very similar hardware wise to a h.264 one but would have different firmware.
In practice, I am sure that the hardware companies will make one hardware accelerator that can handle both h.264 and webm through different firmware programs. So you wont need much additional silicon or power to handle WebM. It might cost more, if the hardware companies decide to charge extra for WebM support, but that surcharge will not be much, because (i) they do not need to pay license fees, and (ii) there is a lot of competition in that field.
Or another way to view it is that if you factor in Flash support for H.264, the only clients that can't view H.264 content are Firefox, Opera, and IE 8-or-earlier installs without Flash installed.
I'm not sure what percentage of the market that is, but I'm pretty sure it's pretty small.
In comparison, all mobile devices, game consoles, and Blu-Ray players support H.264, as do all Flash installations (including the one bundled with Chrome that users can't remove), and all installations of Safari and IE9 (when it arrives).
Maybe that is somehow what Google wants? It has cozied up to Adobe to the point of including flash in Chrome itself. And YouTube apparently can't be bothered to make html5 video work reliably.
I can't think of why anyone would want to promote flash, though.
YouTube depends on Flash for its most profitable enterprises, which are advertisements before the video you're trying to watch, rental, and so forth. I don't know why they can't implement pre-show ads in HTML5, but rentals, etc., can't be done in HTML5 because they require DRM.
There was a big post a while back about all the things YouTube needs to do in Flash instead of HTML5. The fact of the matter is that HTML5 video puts several of YouTube's main money-makers out of order, at least temporarily while the logic is re-implemented.
Really? You must be much, much luckier than I. I just headed over to YouTube, disabled the (excellent) YouTube5 Safari extension, and tried 20 random videos. Only two worked (but fullscreen is still broken).
Completely agree bonaldi. What a stupid move by Google. In order to promote their own technology they are setting back HTML5 video another year or 2 so they can fluff around and whine about which video codec is better.
I could understand other companies not implementing WebM because it was a new codec developed by Google with no existing community or anything around it.
But such a widely used codec (all my videos are H.264), I don't understand.
Can't they just all support each others codec's, get this stupid war over with and start a large scale push of HTML5.
Yeah. There is no way Google of all people could launch a Cell Phone OS based on a Java variant and beat Apple by the end of 2010. Stupidest idea ever. I'm still laughing.
This seems like kind of an odd comment. How did Android 'beat' Apple? What's the game they're playing? Google is displaying a lot of ads (their goal). Apple is making a shitload of money (their goal). How did Apple 'lose' or Android 'win'?
Also, not to nitpick, but 'Java variant' seems inaccurate. Code is written in actual Java (not a variant, as far as I'm aware), and compiled to bytecode to run on the Dalvik VM (not a JVM variant).
The issue is not whether it's a game changer. Apple's game is to build devices, software, and a highly consistent and polished user experience, irresistable to buyers and app developers, all in an effort to capture maximum profit share. Google's game is to build a similar OS that is irresistible to device makers, all in an effort to maximize market share and the advertising revenues boiling off the free app ecosystem.
With Apple, the product is the device and you are the buyer. With Google, the product is you and the advertiser is the buyer. They are each winning their respective games. Superficially they are competitors, but if there is a winner, then there's a loser. How can you look at either company and consider it the loser?
Putting aside the metaphors, Google's growth is not coming at the expense of Apple's profits. Nor are Apple's seemingly perpetual revenue and profit gains coming at Google's expense. They are attacking different problems from very different angles.
With only three or four percent of the market, Apple swallows up more profit share than the largest three phone makers combined (in the neighborhood of 40 percent). That's an astounding number, and it doesn't even include non-phone devices. At the same time, Android had tremendous growth in 2010, inevitably passing Apple in unit sales rate. It's a bit glib to simply say Google therefore beats Apple in 2010. There is nuance, and either company can be painted in the foreground.
They won't change it for openness reasons, but they will change it if 80% of their visitors support WebM and not h264. It happened before. How longer were people forced to design web pages for ie6 due to its market share.
Content providers already have to support browsers that don't include h.264, and Chrome users are now in the same boat as Firefox users -- which content providers certainly won't ignore.
For sites which only produce h.264, Chrome includes Flash which can play h.264. And every video site is going to support a Flash playback path for older browsers.
The real impact here is pretty small, other than legitimizing a free and open codec. Chrome has just moved from one must-support category to another one. Most people will never notice the difference. How is that a loss?
These changes will occur in the next couple months
By then flash will gain WebM playback support. This move is a good one and it does make sense, I don't think there is room for compromise in regards to the open internet and non-proprietary standards.
Considering how long it took Flash to gain hardware acceleration on platforms aside from Windows, I wouldn't hold my breathe. MobileFlash on Android still ranges from "Sucks" to "it's fine".
I haven't tried Flash video on my android tablet (it has a YouTube app) yet, but I've also rooted it and flashed the firmware to remove a software underclock so my experience may not be representative of any stock devices.
What will actually happen: Chrome will get served h.264 wrapped in Flash.
Lose all round, then.