6 ms·

Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube

139 points by tjr 17y ago

lmkg 17y ago
I'm given to understand that the h.264 format is encumbered by patents from a number of different companies. This makes me wonder if VP8 is similarly confuddled. Does On2 own all of the VP8 patents in the clear, or would making the format completely unencumbered require coordination with, and permission from, other companies?
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  I thought that VP8 was basically On2's secret sauce, and that they had made all of it. From their site: (http://www.on2.com/index.php?599 http://www.on2.com/index.php?599) And with no patent-pool royalty hassles, VP8 licensing terms are flexible and affordable to ensure maximum ROI potential. So, it'd seem like just them.
  - lftl 17y ago
    This definitely doesn't mean VP8 is free and clear. It just means that On2 doesn't have any patents that they were actively enforcing on VP8. It's quite likely that any number of H.264 or other random patents apply just as well to VP8, especially given the USPTO's penchant for handing out patents that cover even the most basic of ideas. This is Apple's stated reason for refusing to implement Theora. In this vein, it should also be noted that there's no guarantee that licensing H.264 actually covers you for every patent.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      Ah yes, that "submarine" thing. We really need to get this whole software patent thing taken care of.
    - zokier 17y ago
      >In this vein, it should also be noted that there's no guarantee that licensing H.264 actually covers you for every patent. I'd assume that if someone would be foolish enough to sue a h264 licensee, MPEG-LA (or it's members) would be quick to counter-sue them to oblivion.
      - steveklabnik 17y ago
        What would they counter-sue over?
        blasdel 17y ago
        They have the nuclear option -- refuse licenses of the in-pool patents to anyone licensing an out-of-pool patent. Most of the patents involved are unusable independently -- you have to license a chain of predecessors. There's a reason why patent owners just join the pool when they discover they're eligible for a nice easy income stream.
        DarkShikari 17y ago
        This, by the way, is the reason why even non-litigious companies tend to accumulate huge quantities of patents: they serve as potent weapons against anyone attempting to sue them. Equally, it's why productless patent trolls are so dangerous: since they don't make any products, such patent portfolios are useless as deterrence against them.
        danbmil99 17y ago
        MPEG-LA can't do that because the pool has a rule of non-discriminatory licensing. That's one of the (flimsy) bases for their antitrust exemption.
      - wmf 17y ago
        On what grounds? MPEG LA specifically disclaims liability for any patents they don't have in their pool.
  - wmf 17y ago
    Microsoft said the same thing about WMV and then when they opened the spec a whole bunch of companies discovered that it was infringing their patents and now there's a patent pool around VC-1. OTOH, I'm sure Google has thought about this problem and done some due diligence.
mindslight 17y ago
A similar approach would be to give a free pass to software implementations (including FPGAs), while charging royalties for ASICs. When a product designer is already willing to pay for dedicated video silicon, a royalty just slightly increases the price. If this model turned out to be profitable, it would be a good precedent for subsequent codecs seeking universal adoption while still paying for investment.
- novas0x2a 17y ago
  My understanding is this (correct me if I'm wrong...) is this is exactly the business model that has killed Vorbis. Xiph originally created a floating-point free reference implementation, and charged for the integer decoder. You pretty much have to use the integer decoder for any sort of hardware implementation, so the effect was the same. With few users and a paid barrier to entry, few hardware vendors took the leap. No hardware support means fewer people bothered to encode to Vorbis... and the spiral to the bottom continued. If you're trying to use the network effect to your advantage, you do exactly what the MPEG-LA has done: the first couple of years are free, then everyone pays. The only want to combat that is to do the same.
  - mindslight 17y ago
    Or the lack of Vorbis encoded media failed to prime the pump for widespread adoption (whereas here, everyone is counting on youtube/follower adoption to do so). Surely the forever-free aspect of the software decoder isn't what held back widespread adoption - it was lack of Vorbis users (which was due to lack of users .. etc) Still, I'll amend my above plan to include some period of royalty-free hardware. The real trouble is device manufacturers not wanting both On2 and H.264 hardware (it's unfortunate that MPEG-LA won't just step up to the plate with perpetual royalty-free software and make the whole issue moot)
    - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
      What's the story with Flash 10.1 for mobile phones? Did they just drop support for all the VP6 encoded Flash video or are they decoding it in software?
sjs 17y ago
Google uses Flash outside of Youtube. Google Translate and Analytics are two that come to mind. I'm sure there are others.
- barredo 17y ago
  Uses it for real fullscreen in Google Maps
- cmelbye 17y ago
  Also uses it for street view and Google Finance charts.
- blasdel 17y ago
  The default file uploader widget in almost all of their apps.
radley 17y ago
It's immature to expect Google/YouTube to provide two (or more?) copies of every video just to satisfy the open source community, particularly one that would only be compatible within their own browser. They're probably moving in that direction anyway and will release the codec as an open standard. It is also likely Adobe will support it in Flash to maintain maximum compatibility. The real question is whether Apple will bite...
- cracell 17y ago
  Google already maintains a large number of copies of YouTube videos, one for each quality level and now they've been adding h.264 and they may have some special ones for different devices I don't know about. Asking for one more in a codec that they own is not much to ask. And this is not related to open source but rather open web. The internet has been successful because of open technologies, meaning technologies that can be freely implemented and worked with by anyone without asking for permission from someone. Regardless of what direction Google is moving in giving them some developer feedback doesn't hurt and Flash supporting the codec would be a good thing as well (The more support the better).
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    Google already maintains a large number of copies of YouTube videos, one for each quality level and now they've been adding h.264 and they may have some special ones for different devices I don't know about. Asking for one more in a codec that they own is not much to ask. Not quite true. They have the following from what I've seen: 1) fmt=6 FLV with ffmpeg ~350kbps (legacy) 2) fmt=18 H.264 Baseline ~500kbps, now with x264 (iPhone support + current default) 3) fmt=22 720p H.264 High with x264, ~2.2mbps 4) fmt=somethingorother 1080p H.264 High with x264, ~4.5mbps Note that options 3) and 4) don't exist for the vast majority of videos, and thus likely don't cost much disk space. Option 1) is being phased out. Their primary default is 2), a single format that works in Flash, on iPods, on iPhones, and on many mobile devices. They could have saved 30-50% on bandwidth by offering an H.264 High stream for PC viewers, but they didn't because it would have required they keep around a separate stream. Any argument that Youtube should keep around a separate format for some Purpose X has to confront the fact that Google has thrown away staggering quantities of bandwidth explicitly to avoid offering a separate format.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
elpuri 17y ago
I'm nothing more than a layman what comes to things like these, but... What's there for Google? - Google, Apple and Microsoft can afford the license and the fee is peanuts to them. Most likely Flash will be history no matter what codec wins. - If Mozilla decides to stick with it's values and stay free (is anything else even an option?) while the web goes h.264, I'd say a significant part of people will migrate to other browsers. And come on who's going to migrate to IE and Safari isn't that popular on PC, so that's even better for Google and it's Chrome. How could a bigger browser market share be bad? One downside though would be that some smart people who would be really valuable employees and have strong personal values might get pissed off and not join Google. - "You owe it to the public" "if you care about free software". No matter how much it sucks, the only entities Google owes something is it's creditors and share holders. Sometimes same things benefit both the public and the share holders which is just super, but isn't it a bit naive to ask a publicly listed company not to take advantage of the situation just because it would be nice? Again though there's the possible loss of love, of which effect on the business as a whole I'm not competent to evaluate. - Mobile hardware support is important and it's going to get even more important in years to come. I might be talking out of my ass here, but isn't the world full of hardware support for h.264? If that hardware support is something really generic like doing ICT really fast and can be applied to VP8 then this might not be that important.
- halo 17y ago
  What if Google simply see a long-term strategic advantage in helping the web have a free video standard? Especially a standard where they have a significant amount of control over its codebase, tooling, and direction, as well as avoiding the prospect of unknown patent licensing fees on the distant horizon. I mean, Google likes web standards -- the fact they can easily search content allows them to exist -- and audio/video content will make the web more useful which will make their search engine more useful. If Google don't plan to open up the codecs, it certainly makes you wonder why they bought On2. People act as though the H.264 video tag is a foregone conclusion, but it really isn't - it's still a long way from being viable. Web technologies have never been about what developers want or what sites use but rather what browsers implement, and today ~88% of web-browser marketshare doesn't support the H.264 video tag (58% IE, 28% Firefox, 2% Opera). This is worse than Ogg Theora where ~68% aren't supported, while Flash is unavailable on less than 1% of browsers. Of course, this may change if Microsoft decide one way or another. Although mobile devices are going to be increasingly relevent in the coming years, it's still a rounding error and users regularly update their handsets, which means the current H.264 support isn't a particularly strong argument in its favour. I suspect that mobile devices will converge towards whatever is done by desktop browsers, as has been the historical trend.
modeless 17y ago
If they want to be taken seriously they should not make the claim that Theora is as good as H.264 when that is clearly false. Theora is better than H.263, but worse than H.264. http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html Check out the last graph on the page: when measured using PSNR, Theora tweaked to the max is roughly 50% worse than x264's default settings.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  Keep in mind that x264's defaults have quite a few psy optimizations that dramatically decrease PSNR, since by default x264 optimizes for your eyes, not the benchmarks. This now applies somewhat to Theora as well (in current SVN); they ported over a similar optimization to x264's Variance Adaptive Quantization, which dramatically increases SSIM but lowers PSNR.
  - wedesoft 17y ago
    I noticed too, that H.264 has some special threatment to improve encoding of uniform regions which frequently occur in artificial images. Regardless of what video codec you use, the rate-distortion greatly depends on the encoder software and how you use it. When you use MEncoder's x264-compression for example you can tell it to do multi-pass encoding, more accurate motion estimation, use less keyframes, more frames for pixel prediction, ... . Many people don't even use multipass encoding when they convert their videos. Update: Here's an interesting website about work on the theora encoder http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html
cdibona 17y ago
I thought open letters came after closed ones :-) Seriously, the merger just closed, we're only just starting the integration of the two companies.
troymc 17y ago
Even if Google doesn't free VP8, Theora already exists and is used by another of the world's most popular websites: Wikipedia. As more video gets added to Wikipedia, developers of web browsers will have more incentive to support Theora natively. (Note: According to an earlier comment by halo, about 32% of web browsers support Ogg Theora already.)
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? I'm all for Theora, but the (admittedly limited) anecdotal evidence that I have is that it isn't quite competitive with h.264 (with a good encoder like x264) at higher rez 720p and 1080p). I might be mistaken on that, though.
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? The encoder still has a good bit of room to improve; it still lacks proper pixel-domain RD optimization and could use some psychovisual improvements as well. It is primarily crippled by the ancient VP3 specification though. In theory it may eventually be able to eke ahead of Xvid, as while Xvid was a very good MPEG-4 ASP encoder, it never had any significant psy optimizations, so even though Theora as a video format is probably slightly worse, the encoder should be able to surpass Xvid with psy optimizations in some cases. The primary problem for adoption (not for quality) is its lack of features. For many many use-cases, one needs fine-grained control over various parameters, such as the buffer size, the maximum bitrate, the latency, and so forth. The encoder is currently very inflexible, and with no alternative encoding libraries, this leaves very little choice for many applications. For practical purposes, it only has one speed mode: "slow as hell", which makes it basically impossible to stream anything above SD.
    - MikeCapone 17y ago
      So if I'm reading this correctly, Theora could compete with Xvid, but h.264 is out of reach?

139 points by tjr 17y ago

lmkg 17y ago

I'm given to understand that the h.264 format is encumbered by patents from a number of different companies. This makes me wonder if VP8 is similarly confuddled. Does On2 own all of the VP8 patents in the clear, or would making the format completely unencumbered require coordination with, and permission from, other companies?

steveklabnik 17y ago
I thought that VP8 was basically On2's secret sauce, and that they had made all of it. From their site: (http://www.on2.com/index.php?599 http://www.on2.com/index.php?599) And with no patent-pool royalty hassles, VP8 licensing terms are flexible and affordable to ensure maximum ROI potential. So, it'd seem like just them.
- lftl 17y ago
  This definitely doesn't mean VP8 is free and clear. It just means that On2 doesn't have any patents that they were actively enforcing on VP8. It's quite likely that any number of H.264 or other random patents apply just as well to VP8, especially given the USPTO's penchant for handing out patents that cover even the most basic of ideas. This is Apple's stated reason for refusing to implement Theora. In this vein, it should also be noted that there's no guarantee that licensing H.264 actually covers you for every patent.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    Ah yes, that "submarine" thing. We really need to get this whole software patent thing taken care of.
  - zokier 17y ago
    >In this vein, it should also be noted that there's no guarantee that licensing H.264 actually covers you for every patent. I'd assume that if someone would be foolish enough to sue a h264 licensee, MPEG-LA (or it's members) would be quick to counter-sue them to oblivion.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      What would they counter-sue over?
      - blasdel 17y ago
        They have the nuclear option -- refuse licenses of the in-pool patents to anyone licensing an out-of-pool patent. Most of the patents involved are unusable independently -- you have to license a chain of predecessors. There's a reason why patent owners just join the pool when they discover they're eligible for a nice easy income stream.
        DarkShikari 17y ago
        This, by the way, is the reason why even non-litigious companies tend to accumulate huge quantities of patents: they serve as potent weapons against anyone attempting to sue them. Equally, it's why productless patent trolls are so dangerous: since they don't make any products, such patent portfolios are useless as deterrence against them.
        danbmil99 17y ago
        MPEG-LA can't do that because the pool has a rule of non-discriminatory licensing. That's one of the (flimsy) bases for their antitrust exemption.
    - wmf 17y ago
      On what grounds? MPEG LA specifically disclaims liability for any patents they don't have in their pool.
- wmf 17y ago
  Microsoft said the same thing about WMV and then when they opened the spec a whole bunch of companies discovered that it was infringing their patents and now there's a patent pool around VC-1. OTOH, I'm sure Google has thought about this problem and done some due diligence.

mindslight 17y ago

A similar approach would be to give a free pass to software implementations (including FPGAs), while charging royalties for ASICs. When a product designer is already willing to pay for dedicated video silicon, a royalty just slightly increases the price. If this model turned out to be profitable, it would be a good precedent for subsequent codecs seeking universal adoption while still paying for investment.

novas0x2a 17y ago
My understanding is this (correct me if I'm wrong...) is this is exactly the business model that has killed Vorbis. Xiph originally created a floating-point free reference implementation, and charged for the integer decoder. You pretty much have to use the integer decoder for any sort of hardware implementation, so the effect was the same. With few users and a paid barrier to entry, few hardware vendors took the leap. No hardware support means fewer people bothered to encode to Vorbis... and the spiral to the bottom continued. If you're trying to use the network effect to your advantage, you do exactly what the MPEG-LA has done: the first couple of years are free, then everyone pays. The only want to combat that is to do the same.
- mindslight 17y ago
  Or the lack of Vorbis encoded media failed to prime the pump for widespread adoption (whereas here, everyone is counting on youtube/follower adoption to do so). Surely the forever-free aspect of the software decoder isn't what held back widespread adoption - it was lack of Vorbis users (which was due to lack of users .. etc) Still, I'll amend my above plan to include some period of royalty-free hardware. The real trouble is device manufacturers not wanting both On2 and H.264 hardware (it's unfortunate that MPEG-LA won't just step up to the plate with perpetual royalty-free software and make the whole issue moot)
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    What's the story with Flash 10.1 for mobile phones? Did they just drop support for all the VP6 encoded Flash video or are they decoding it in software?

sjs 17y ago

Google uses Flash outside of Youtube. Google Translate and Analytics are two that come to mind. I'm sure there are others.

barredo 17y ago
Uses it for real fullscreen in Google Maps
cmelbye 17y ago
Also uses it for street view and Google Finance charts.
blasdel 17y ago
The default file uploader widget in almost all of their apps.

radley 17y ago

It's immature to expect Google/YouTube to provide two (or more?) copies of every video just to satisfy the open source community, particularly one that would only be compatible within their own browser. They're probably moving in that direction anyway and will release the codec as an open standard. It is also likely Adobe will support it in Flash to maintain maximum compatibility. The real question is whether Apple will bite...

cracell 17y ago
Google already maintains a large number of copies of YouTube videos, one for each quality level and now they've been adding h.264 and they may have some special ones for different devices I don't know about. Asking for one more in a codec that they own is not much to ask. And this is not related to open source but rather open web. The internet has been successful because of open technologies, meaning technologies that can be freely implemented and worked with by anyone without asking for permission from someone. Regardless of what direction Google is moving in giving them some developer feedback doesn't hurt and Flash supporting the codec would be a good thing as well (The more support the better).
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  Google already maintains a large number of copies of YouTube videos, one for each quality level and now they've been adding h.264 and they may have some special ones for different devices I don't know about. Asking for one more in a codec that they own is not much to ask. Not quite true. They have the following from what I've seen: 1) fmt=6 FLV with ffmpeg ~350kbps (legacy) 2) fmt=18 H.264 Baseline ~500kbps, now with x264 (iPhone support + current default) 3) fmt=22 720p H.264 High with x264, ~2.2mbps 4) fmt=somethingorother 1080p H.264 High with x264, ~4.5mbps Note that options 3) and 4) don't exist for the vast majority of videos, and thus likely don't cost much disk space. Option 1) is being phased out. Their primary default is 2), a single format that works in Flash, on iPods, on iPhones, and on many mobile devices. They could have saved 30-50% on bandwidth by offering an H.264 High stream for PC viewers, but they didn't because it would have required they keep around a separate stream. Any argument that Youtube should keep around a separate format for some Purpose X has to confront the fact that Google has thrown away staggering quantities of bandwidth explicitly to avoid offering a separate format.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

elpuri 17y ago

I'm nothing more than a layman what comes to things like these, but... What's there for Google? - Google, Apple and Microsoft can afford the license and the fee is peanuts to them. Most likely Flash will be history no matter what codec wins. - If Mozilla decides to stick with it's values and stay free (is anything else even an option?) while the web goes h.264, I'd say a significant part of people will migrate to other browsers. And come on who's going to migrate to IE and Safari isn't that popular on PC, so that's even better for Google and it's Chrome. How could a bigger browser market share be bad? One downside though would be that some smart people who would be really valuable employees and have strong personal values might get pissed off and not join Google. - "You owe it to the public" "if you care about free software". No matter how much it sucks, the only entities Google owes something is it's creditors and share holders. Sometimes same things benefit both the public and the share holders which is just super, but isn't it a bit naive to ask a publicly listed company not to take advantage of the situation just because it would be nice? Again though there's the possible loss of love, of which effect on the business as a whole I'm not competent to evaluate. - Mobile hardware support is important and it's going to get even more important in years to come. I might be talking out of my ass here, but isn't the world full of hardware support for h.264? If that hardware support is something really generic like doing ICT really fast and can be applied to VP8 then this might not be that important.

halo 17y ago
What if Google simply see a long-term strategic advantage in helping the web have a free video standard? Especially a standard where they have a significant amount of control over its codebase, tooling, and direction, as well as avoiding the prospect of unknown patent licensing fees on the distant horizon. I mean, Google likes web standards -- the fact they can easily search content allows them to exist -- and audio/video content will make the web more useful which will make their search engine more useful. If Google don't plan to open up the codecs, it certainly makes you wonder why they bought On2. People act as though the H.264 video tag is a foregone conclusion, but it really isn't - it's still a long way from being viable. Web technologies have never been about what developers want or what sites use but rather what browsers implement, and today ~88% of web-browser marketshare doesn't support the H.264 video tag (58% IE, 28% Firefox, 2% Opera). This is worse than Ogg Theora where ~68% aren't supported, while Flash is unavailable on less than 1% of browsers. Of course, this may change if Microsoft decide one way or another. Although mobile devices are going to be increasingly relevent in the coming years, it's still a rounding error and users regularly update their handsets, which means the current H.264 support isn't a particularly strong argument in its favour. I suspect that mobile devices will converge towards whatever is done by desktop browsers, as has been the historical trend.

modeless 17y ago

If they want to be taken seriously they should not make the claim that Theora is as good as H.264 when that is clearly false. Theora is better than H.263, but worse than H.264. http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo7.html Check out the last graph on the page: when measured using PSNR, Theora tweaked to the max is roughly 50% worse than x264's default settings.

DarkShikari 17y ago
Keep in mind that x264's defaults have quite a few psy optimizations that dramatically decrease PSNR, since by default x264 optimizes for your eyes, not the benchmarks. This now applies somewhat to Theora as well (in current SVN); they ported over a similar optimization to x264's Variance Adaptive Quantization, which dramatically increases SSIM but lowers PSNR.
- wedesoft 17y ago
  I noticed too, that H.264 has some special threatment to improve encoding of uniform regions which frequently occur in artificial images. Regardless of what video codec you use, the rate-distortion greatly depends on the encoder software and how you use it. When you use MEncoder's x264-compression for example you can tell it to do multi-pass encoding, more accurate motion estimation, use less keyframes, more frames for pixel prediction, ... . Many people don't even use multipass encoding when they convert their videos. Update: Here's an interesting website about work on the theora encoder http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo8.html

cdibona 17y ago

I thought open letters came after closed ones :-) Seriously, the merger just closed, we're only just starting the integration of the two companies.

troymc 17y ago

Even if Google doesn't free VP8, Theora already exists and is used by another of the world's most popular websites: Wikipedia. As more video gets added to Wikipedia, developers of web browsers will have more incentive to support Theora natively. (Note: According to an earlier comment by halo, about 32% of web browsers support Ogg Theora already.)

MikeCapone 17y ago
Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? I'm all for Theora, but the (admittedly limited) anecdotal evidence that I have is that it isn't quite competitive with h.264 (with a good encoder like x264) at higher rez 720p and 1080p). I might be mistaken on that, though.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  Q?: Is Theory still improving much? Is it possible to improve it a lot without breaking backward compatibility, or would that require breaking legacy support? The encoder still has a good bit of room to improve; it still lacks proper pixel-domain RD optimization and could use some psychovisual improvements as well. It is primarily crippled by the ancient VP3 specification though. In theory it may eventually be able to eke ahead of Xvid, as while Xvid was a very good MPEG-4 ASP encoder, it never had any significant psy optimizations, so even though Theora as a video format is probably slightly worse, the encoder should be able to surpass Xvid with psy optimizations in some cases. The primary problem for adoption (not for quality) is its lack of features. For many many use-cases, one needs fine-grained control over various parameters, such as the buffer size, the maximum bitrate, the latency, and so forth. The encoder is currently very inflexible, and with no alternative encoding libraries, this leaves very little choice for many applications. For practical purposes, it only has one speed mode: "slow as hell", which makes it basically impossible to stream anything above SD.
  - MikeCapone 17y ago
    So if I'm reading this correctly, Theora could compete with Xvid, but h.264 is out of reach?