8 ms·

Ask YouTube for Ogg support

57 points by tjr 17y ago

xal 17y ago
Where can we ask Firefox for h264 support instead? The web will not support two different video formats at the same time, the whole idea is madness. Storage is expensive.
- please 17y ago
  You would have to ask MPEG-LA for royalty free licensing for encoding, decoding and any internet use of h264 and aac.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    Practically, you'd just need licensing for decoding if Mozilla wanted to distribute the binary themselves. Even they weren't shitheaded enough to remove their GIF decoder when the encoder was revealed to be patent-encumbered.
- mmastrac 17y ago
  Storage is not expensive. Even at Amazon's S3's base prices, I can store data at 0.150/GB. Bandwidth is far more of a big deal than storage these days. You can get away with significantly lower costs per GB by building and hosting your own storage.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    At YouTube's scale (petabytes), both storage and bandwidth are very expensive. Ogg would mean larger files which means lots of new hard drives, but also more money for every view. Considering they're pushing over a billion videos a day, even very small differences compound into huge figures.
    - kevingadd 17y ago
      Suggesting that OGG is in any way more expensive is utterly ridiculous. Youtube currently streams video in H264 at some given bitrate, using a Flash player. They could easily stream the same video in Theora at the exact same bitrate and thus use no additional bandwidth. They'd need new storage to keep the ogg versions alongside the H264, but the idea that they would be unwilling to do so seems ridiculous to me, given that they already store up to 3 versions of many videos (360p, 480p, 720p). You're also completely discounting the cost of H264 licensing right now (estimated by some to be over 5 million dollars a year), and the cost of future licensing once the current license terms expire. You're also discounting the cost that Google pushes off to the rest of the market - like the money other manufacturers of software and hardware pay to support H264. Adobe has to pay for the H264 license Flash uses, and without that license, Youtube wouldn't be able to use H264. Now, one could argue that since Theora isn't completely equivalent to H264 quality-wise, that Youtube wouldn't be able to provide video at the same bitrates. That's ridiculous. The typical Youtube viewer doesn't even know what a bitrate is and is unlikely to be able to identify encoding artifacts. One should also consider that Google could easily pay a small team to work on improvements to the Theora encoder for a year or two, like they're doing on Unladen Swallow. The results would pay off on a fairly regular basis, allowing Google to re-encode their Theora videos for improvements in quality and bitrate efficiency. I have no doubt that with a sustained investment of resources, Theora could be highly competitive with H264 - if not superior - for Youtube's uses. Even if they were to dedicate 10 engineers for an entire year to working on Theora, the total costs there would not approach the cost of licensing H264.
      - jonknee 17y ago
        YouTube will need to keep its h264 files for Flash (and mobile devices), so Ogg would require petabytes of new storage space. Real money. According to YouTube's engineers to get comparable quality video with Ogg the file size will have to increase. Real money. If it would be cheaper there would be no reason not to do it. Google built support for Ogg into Chrome, so they aren't scared of the format. They aren't doing it so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's not cheaper.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
travisbell 17y ago
Agreed. I think this should be re-titled, "Ask Firefox for H264 support". With YouTube and Vimeo adopting h264 and not Ogg, I'd say I have a feeling I know how this is going to end.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- JeremyBanks 17y ago
  YouTube using H264 initially may just have been because they already have their videos H264-encoded, because that's what they use for the high-res content in their Flash player. They may also be selecting it because of Chrome's support, but I think it's too early to assume for sure that they don't have plans to support Ogg at some point. Supporting H264 <video> was just a matter of writing some front-end player code (which they already had from their HTML5 demo) and feeding it the same video file they gave the Flash player. Supporting Ogg, on the other hand, would require massive transcoding.
  - slig 17y ago
    I thought that they did the encoding to H264 to make youtube iPhone-compatible.
    - quux 17y ago
      IIRC, the iPhone version is H.264, but at a lower bitrate, so they have 3-4 h.264 files per video: * 720p version for hdtv videos * 480p version for non hd web viewing * High bitrate version for iPhone streaming on wifi * Low bitrate version for iPhone streaming on 3g or edge.
- kevingadd 17y ago
  Is it going to end with Mozilla wasting millions of dollars on H264 patent licenses?
  - deleted 17y ago
elblanco 17y ago
I've never quite understood why the resistance to the various Ogg formats? I certainly falls into that "good enough" category for encoding audio and video, the same as Divx and mp3. And it appears to stream at rates a few percentage points lower than the prevalent licensed formats. My little Sansa clip player plays it quite happily and I like that I can stuff more songs onto its little 4GB memory if I reencode everything in Ogg, with really no perceptible different in sound. The few Ogg encoded videos I've seen seem perfectly fine and take up less space and use less bandwidth off of my disk to watch... I was mystified when Google and Chrome went h264. Seems like lots of expensive licenses for something that's cross platform and well supported with no real expense associated with it. seriously, why the hate?
- jonknee 17y ago
  Hardware decoding makes h264 usable on low-power devices like phones which Google sees as the future of the internet. It's technically superior and also supported out of the box by 97% of new computers. It's not a real surprise that Google built in support for h264--they have petabytes of h264 video and sell phones that play h264 with built-in hardware decoding. Oh and it looks better.
  - kevingadd 17y ago
    If one of Microsoft's video codecs like VC-1 offered even better power efficiency and technical superiority, and "looked better" than h264 (whatever THAT means), would you still be a fan of using the "best available" proprietary codec? Would you be in favor of Google and other companies paying Microsoft license fees to use the codec? Or would you be arguing for the use of the "inferior" h264?
    - jonknee 17y ago
      If it was already shipping on 97% of computers and had widespread hardware acceleration support in mobile devices, sure why not? I have no allegiance to h264.
      - 17y ago
guelo 17y ago
Does anyone have any idea when the h264 related patents expire? If you recall the big gif shitfest, the end result was that png was able to establish itself but when the patent threat expired gif and png have been able to coexist fine. I expet the same to happen here, theora uses this opportunity to establish itself and then h264 and theora are able to coexist. Btw, fuck software patents!
- blasdel 17y ago
  Except that in that case GIF was a mediocre established format, and PNG was a terrific new one. The GIF decoder was never encumbered, just the encoder. In this case Theora is both mediocre and unestablished, which is not a winning combination.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Theora is not exactly mediocre, it just isn't the best. But the "best" is expensive to license, and Theora is a reasonable substitute that is completely Free. People complain about the extra CPU power it takes to decode Theora, but if I have to choose between paying extra for a more-powerful CPU or a patent license, I would choose the former. At least I can make use of the more-powerful CPU when I'm not watching videos of cats flushing the toilet.
    - axod 17y ago
      Surely more CPU power often equates to shorter battery life. Which really is very important to most people, considering just how badly batteries still suck. So personally if it's a difference of battery life, I'd choose the one that uses less power and gives me more time.
      - jrockway 17y ago
        If you are watching video constantly, then this is a concern. If your phone is mostly sitting in your pocket waiting for the GSM signal to wake it up, then it's irrelevant. (And, I have a portable device that plays arbitrary video formats just fine on a rather-big 5" screen for a whole transatlantic flight; 7-8 hours. So the current technology is more than adequate, H.264 or not.)
mmastrac 17y ago
Before dismissing Ogg, I suggest taking a look at a somewhat recent head-to-head comparison: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html It appears that Theora could easily replace H.263 as a low-end codec and would be competitive with H.264 as a high-end codec.
- jrockway 17y ago
  No DRM support. Media companies are not interested in "freedom", they are interested in the opposite. (Google is the same; they are just another media company. If you think Google is about "openness", ask yourself why Google can crawl your site, but you can't crawl Google's site.)
moron4hire 17y ago
What value does this provide to me as a user? I'm not interested in formats for formats' sake, neither am I - as a consumer - interested in "openness"; I'm interested in "workingness".
- felixc 17y ago
  Right now, nothing. That's not why this is important. Think about the consequences of this for just one moment. How much support and developer time is Firefox going to lose if it can't play videos if/when YouTube switches over fully and doesn't use Flash? How much support and developer time is Linux going to lose if there are no browsers for it that can play internet videos, if H.264 becomes the de-facto standard (note that only Chrome works, not Chromium)? If you don't care about that at all, and are happy using IE (or Chrome, these days) on Windows for ever, then by all means move along, there is nothing for you to see here. The rest of us care.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect. Chromium supports all the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome (Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).
    - felixc 17y ago
      Thanks for that titbit -- I have to disagree that "everyone installs it this way", because I certainly hadn't! (I installed on Ubuntu from the chromium-daily launchpad ppa). That fix makes me feel a bit better, but it's still a nasty blow against the idea of open and free formats. Edit: I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get it to work. This might be a distro/version/phase of moon-specific fix?
      - blasdel 17y ago
        Yeah, install the erroneously-named [1] chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree [1] Ubuntu's default ffmpeg package has all the decoders turned on without being 'nonfree'.
drivingmenuts 17y ago
Why can't all of these browsers be format-neutral and have support done through a plug-in? Leave it up to the end-user to decide what they want to have running on their system?

57 points by tjr 17y ago

xal 17y ago

Where can we ask Firefox for h264 support instead? The web will not support two different video formats at the same time, the whole idea is madness. Storage is expensive.

please 17y ago
You would have to ask MPEG-LA for royalty free licensing for encoding, decoding and any internet use of h264 and aac.
- blasdel 17y ago
  Practically, you'd just need licensing for decoding if Mozilla wanted to distribute the binary themselves. Even they weren't shitheaded enough to remove their GIF decoder when the encoder was revealed to be patent-encumbered.
mmastrac 17y ago
Storage is not expensive. Even at Amazon's S3's base prices, I can store data at 0.150/GB. Bandwidth is far more of a big deal than storage these days. You can get away with significantly lower costs per GB by building and hosting your own storage.
- jonknee 17y ago
  At YouTube's scale (petabytes), both storage and bandwidth are very expensive. Ogg would mean larger files which means lots of new hard drives, but also more money for every view. Considering they're pushing over a billion videos a day, even very small differences compound into huge figures.
  - kevingadd 17y ago
    Suggesting that OGG is in any way more expensive is utterly ridiculous. Youtube currently streams video in H264 at some given bitrate, using a Flash player. They could easily stream the same video in Theora at the exact same bitrate and thus use no additional bandwidth. They'd need new storage to keep the ogg versions alongside the H264, but the idea that they would be unwilling to do so seems ridiculous to me, given that they already store up to 3 versions of many videos (360p, 480p, 720p). You're also completely discounting the cost of H264 licensing right now (estimated by some to be over 5 million dollars a year), and the cost of future licensing once the current license terms expire. You're also discounting the cost that Google pushes off to the rest of the market - like the money other manufacturers of software and hardware pay to support H264. Adobe has to pay for the H264 license Flash uses, and without that license, Youtube wouldn't be able to use H264. Now, one could argue that since Theora isn't completely equivalent to H264 quality-wise, that Youtube wouldn't be able to provide video at the same bitrates. That's ridiculous. The typical Youtube viewer doesn't even know what a bitrate is and is unlikely to be able to identify encoding artifacts. One should also consider that Google could easily pay a small team to work on improvements to the Theora encoder for a year or two, like they're doing on Unladen Swallow. The results would pay off on a fairly regular basis, allowing Google to re-encode their Theora videos for improvements in quality and bitrate efficiency. I have no doubt that with a sustained investment of resources, Theora could be highly competitive with H264 - if not superior - for Youtube's uses. Even if they were to dedicate 10 engineers for an entire year to working on Theora, the total costs there would not approach the cost of licensing H264.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      YouTube will need to keep its h264 files for Flash (and mobile devices), so Ogg would require petabytes of new storage space. Real money. According to YouTube's engineers to get comparable quality video with Ogg the file size will have to increase. Real money. If it would be cheaper there would be no reason not to do it. Google built support for Ogg into Chrome, so they aren't scared of the format. They aren't doing it so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's not cheaper.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

travisbell 17y ago

Agreed. I think this should be re-titled, "Ask Firefox for H264 support". With YouTube and Vimeo adopting h264 and not Ogg, I'd say I have a feeling I know how this is going to end.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
JeremyBanks 17y ago
YouTube using H264 initially may just have been because they already have their videos H264-encoded, because that's what they use for the high-res content in their Flash player. They may also be selecting it because of Chrome's support, but I think it's too early to assume for sure that they don't have plans to support Ogg at some point. Supporting H264 <video> was just a matter of writing some front-end player code (which they already had from their HTML5 demo) and feeding it the same video file they gave the Flash player. Supporting Ogg, on the other hand, would require massive transcoding.
- slig 17y ago
  I thought that they did the encoding to H264 to make youtube iPhone-compatible.
  - quux 17y ago
    IIRC, the iPhone version is H.264, but at a lower bitrate, so they have 3-4 h.264 files per video: * 720p version for hdtv videos * 480p version for non hd web viewing * High bitrate version for iPhone streaming on wifi * Low bitrate version for iPhone streaming on 3g or edge.
kevingadd 17y ago
Is it going to end with Mozilla wasting millions of dollars on H264 patent licenses?
- deleted 17y ago

elblanco 17y ago

I've never quite understood why the resistance to the various Ogg formats? I certainly falls into that "good enough" category for encoding audio and video, the same as Divx and mp3. And it appears to stream at rates a few percentage points lower than the prevalent licensed formats. My little Sansa clip player plays it quite happily and I like that I can stuff more songs onto its little 4GB memory if I reencode everything in Ogg, with really no perceptible different in sound. The few Ogg encoded videos I've seen seem perfectly fine and take up less space and use less bandwidth off of my disk to watch... I was mystified when Google and Chrome went h264. Seems like lots of expensive licenses for something that's cross platform and well supported with no real expense associated with it. seriously, why the hate?

jonknee 17y ago
Hardware decoding makes h264 usable on low-power devices like phones which Google sees as the future of the internet. It's technically superior and also supported out of the box by 97% of new computers. It's not a real surprise that Google built in support for h264--they have petabytes of h264 video and sell phones that play h264 with built-in hardware decoding. Oh and it looks better.
- kevingadd 17y ago
  If one of Microsoft's video codecs like VC-1 offered even better power efficiency and technical superiority, and "looked better" than h264 (whatever THAT means), would you still be a fan of using the "best available" proprietary codec? Would you be in favor of Google and other companies paying Microsoft license fees to use the codec? Or would you be arguing for the use of the "inferior" h264?
  - jonknee 17y ago
    If it was already shipping on 97% of computers and had widespread hardware acceleration support in mobile devices, sure why not? I have no allegiance to h264.
    - 17y ago

guelo 17y ago

Does anyone have any idea when the h264 related patents expire? If you recall the big gif shitfest, the end result was that png was able to establish itself but when the patent threat expired gif and png have been able to coexist fine. I expet the same to happen here, theora uses this opportunity to establish itself and then h264 and theora are able to coexist. Btw, fuck software patents!

blasdel 17y ago
Except that in that case GIF was a mediocre established format, and PNG was a terrific new one. The GIF decoder was never encumbered, just the encoder. In this case Theora is both mediocre and unestablished, which is not a winning combination.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Theora is not exactly mediocre, it just isn't the best. But the "best" is expensive to license, and Theora is a reasonable substitute that is completely Free. People complain about the extra CPU power it takes to decode Theora, but if I have to choose between paying extra for a more-powerful CPU or a patent license, I would choose the former. At least I can make use of the more-powerful CPU when I'm not watching videos of cats flushing the toilet.
  - axod 17y ago
    Surely more CPU power often equates to shorter battery life. Which really is very important to most people, considering just how badly batteries still suck. So personally if it's a difference of battery life, I'd choose the one that uses less power and gives me more time.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      If you are watching video constantly, then this is a concern. If your phone is mostly sitting in your pocket waiting for the GSM signal to wake it up, then it's irrelevant. (And, I have a portable device that plays arbitrary video formats just fine on a rather-big 5" screen for a whole transatlantic flight; 7-8 hours. So the current technology is more than adequate, H.264 or not.)

mmastrac 17y ago

Before dismissing Ogg, I suggest taking a look at a somewhat recent head-to-head comparison: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html It appears that Theora could easily replace H.263 as a low-end codec and would be competitive with H.264 as a high-end codec.

jrockway 17y ago
No DRM support. Media companies are not interested in "freedom", they are interested in the opposite. (Google is the same; they are just another media company. If you think Google is about "openness", ask yourself why Google can crawl your site, but you can't crawl Google's site.)

moron4hire 17y ago

What value does this provide to me as a user? I'm not interested in formats for formats' sake, neither am I - as a consumer - interested in "openness"; I'm interested in "workingness".

felixc 17y ago
Right now, nothing. That's not why this is important. Think about the consequences of this for just one moment. How much support and developer time is Firefox going to lose if it can't play videos if/when YouTube switches over fully and doesn't use Flash? How much support and developer time is Linux going to lose if there are no browsers for it that can play internet videos, if H.264 becomes the de-facto standard (note that only Chrome works, not Chromium)? If you don't care about that at all, and are happy using IE (or Chrome, these days) on Windows for ever, then by all means move along, there is nothing for you to see here. The rest of us care.
- blasdel 17y ago
  That's not true at all: the patent coverage has no practical effect. Chromium supports all the codecs your local ffmpeg install supports, if you put symlinks to the libraries in /usr/lib/chromium-browser/. Everyone installs it this way, and it actually supports way more codecs than the official Chrome (Google didn't buy licenses for MPEG2, Xvid, etc.).
  - felixc 17y ago
    Thanks for that titbit -- I have to disagree that "everyone installs it this way", because I certainly hadn't! (I installed on Ubuntu from the chromium-daily launchpad ppa). That fix makes me feel a bit better, but it's still a nasty blow against the idea of open and free formats. Edit: I must be doing something wrong, because I can't get it to work. This might be a distro/version/phase of moon-specific fix?
    - blasdel 17y ago
      Yeah, install the erroneously-named [1] chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree [1] Ubuntu's default ffmpeg package has all the decoders turned on without being 'nonfree'.

drivingmenuts 17y ago

Why can't all of these browsers be format-neutral and have support done through a plug-in? Leave it up to the end-user to decide what they want to have running on their system?