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Google to Open-source VP8 for HTML5 Video
- zokier 17y agoSo we have a video codec. But which container is it put in? MP4? MKV? FLV? And which audio codecs are used? Vorbis? AAC? MP3?
- cageface 17y agoKudos to Google for being smart enough to realize that an open web is a win for them in the long run and for having the guts to compete on the strength of their products and not on platform/api lock-in. Obviously it's still an uphill battle to get this adopted across the board but they're setting the right example here.
- niravs 17y agoBoth Chrome & Firefox are supporting this from the beginning. It's certainly a great start.
- cracell 17y agoI can't find any official word that Firefox is supporting it. This article simply says it expects Firefox's will because of Firefox's reason for not supporting h.264 was that it wasn't open license.
- sketerpot 17y agoGiven how much caterwauling there's been about Firefox not supporting H.264 and the problems with Theora, I'd be very surprised if Firefox doesn't support VP8 soon after it's open-sourced. Too many people want it too badly for it not to happen.
- irrelative 17y agoI agree, but it would have been a less steep uphill battle if they had done this 7 months ago.
- vetinari 17y agoThe merger was finished this February, so they weren't in position to do this 7 months ago.
- nkassis 17y agoI'm glad that their interest of reaching a wider user base to advertise too is also in sync with creating an open platform like the web. They can keep the Ad platform secret, nobody will care as long as they keep doing things like this.
- andreyf 17y agoAt launch, On2 went so far as to claim that it could provide “50 percent bandwidth savings compared to leading H.264 implementations.” Considering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic. The more viewers adopt a bandwidth-superior format, the less terabytes of data to stream, the less the cost of running YouTube. They have absolutely no benefit from any kind of "platform/api lockin" to H.264 or any other video standard, only that there are less bits to stream. I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees per year. I'd expect Microsoft to ship this instead of H.264 in the next major IE, and, if this comes with a good and open hardware interpreter, Apple to follow soon after.
- jmillikin 17y agoConsidering the amount of bandwidth Google spends on streaming YouTube content, this move is far from altruistic. Who cares? Companies are allowed to make the world a better place without having to self-flagellate themselves. Google could easily have just paid the H.264 licensing fees and told Mozilla to toss off, or even built VP8 support into Chrome and used YouTube to force-feed it to the world. They chose to cooperate, and should be praised for that. I don't see how it's an "uphill battle" to convince anyone they should use a free standard instead of paying million of dollars in licensing fees Several companies, most notably Apple, have already spent what must be millions of dollars on licensing fees and hardware. Regardless of which is a better long-term choice, it can be very difficult to reverse that much momentum. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of non-consumer multimedia equipment which is designed to use H.264. Additionally, VP8 does not have much application support yet. It'll take a while for codecs to be written, debugged, and distributed to users. There may be significant lag time before VP8 displaces Theora among F/OSS users, or H.264 on OS X.
- allyt 17y agoThey chose the path that would lead to the fastest adoption of the technology which lowers their bandwidth costs. Keeping the technology Chrome-only is against their financial interests. Apple and MS pay yearly licensing fees for H.264. As soon as they adopt VP8, they can stop.
- jxcole 17y agoIs anyone besides me worried that Steve Jobs is going to say "they tried to kill the iphone, so we will never adopt their evil standards!"? Is the animosity between google and apple enough to stifle development?
- yesbabyyes 17y agoI think YouTube is enough to drive consumer demand, whatever Steve says.
- drewcrawford 17y agoIf this was true, I would think Google would be using YouTube as a negotiating chip to get, say, Voice or Navigation on the iPhone.
- pavs 17y agoyesbabyyes is not suggesting that Google will force Apple in to adopting VP8, he is just pointing out the fact that if Apple doesn't support VP8 their users won't be able to watch YouTube videos. Google won't have to do anything, Apple consumers will pressure Apple to adopt this standard in order to be able to play YouTube videos. YouTube is bigger than Steve's perceived ego.
- joubert 17y agoYouTube runs h.264 for iPad and iPhone connections.
- jrockway 17y agoGoogle runs YouTube.
- stanleydrew 17y agoI'm not worried about that at all. Rejecting web-standards that others like Firefox and Chrome are implementing is surely a path to destruction and I don't think SJ is that crazy.
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- _pius 17y agoThis is huge. Great news for the Open Web.
- aphyr 17y agoThis is awesome news. No patent encumbrance means Firefox will support it. Terrific performance means the rest of us will actually use it. Google backing the technology means Youtube, with their unfathomably large proportion of the world's video content, will support it. Sweet.
- va_coder 17y agoIt seems these days things that benefit Google also benefit most everyone else.
- sketerpot 17y agoNow if only they can get Apple and Microsoft to support it....
- sachinag 17y agoAre there any chips out there that do hardware decoding of VP8? That's a critical path item to get Apple on board - they've learned from Nintendo; battery life is too precious to sacrifice for a mere codec.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoYes there are chips for VP8 decode and they're very popular. They're called ARM. VP8 was specifically designed by On2 (in collaboration with ARM) to be decoded easily on low powered ARM chips. They take advantage of various ARM features such as NEON acceleration and are intended to work well even on lowly ARM9, and the codec has built in scalability that lets low-powered devices show the same video file that everyone else gets with less quality and power if needed. The hardware argument was basically an excuse for Apple to not have to do something they didn't want to when talking about Theora. It's been shown to be irrelevant, or even a benefit to Theora when sending video to people who don't have state of the art laptops. To apply it to VP8 is just ridiculous.
- plorkyeran 17y agoVP8 support is currently mostly nonexistent. It's currently just a minor proprietary codec that almost no one cares about or uses. Of course, Google certainly has the money and resources to fix this relatively quickly if they really want to.
- jon_dahl 17y agoApple's a big backer of H.264, and they're invested in the codec. Hopefully they'll support VP8 in Safari, but I wouldn't look for the iPhone to change to VP8.
- joezydeco 17y agoA chip like an OMAP2 or OMAP3 has a built-in DSP used to assist and accelerate video decoding. They've already added H.264 decoding to the IVA for some devices (hi, Dell) so adding new bridge code for VP8 is certainly possible.
- eklitzke 17y agoOn2 has press claiming that VP8 is "40% less complex" than H.264, which presumably means that it can be decoded more efficiently than H.264 by some benchmark or another. There's probably some sort of marketing spin to this, but if it's true that VP8 is as efficient or more so than H.264, then Google opening up the IP to write VP8 decodes would probably mean that a lot of hardware vendors would start writing support for it.
- glhaynes 17y agoIs it possible for existing H.264 hardware decoder chips to be used to (even partially) help decode VP8? Or will we see a new generation of chips that does H.264 and VP8?
- wmf 17y agoPotentially. Theora activists keep repeating that "there's no such thing as a hardware decoder; they're all programmable DSPs", but in addition to programmable hardware you also need the desire and resources to actually implement VP8 decoding firmware for all these different chips.
- zhyder 17y ago(Odd, in all the HTML5 video debates on HN, I hadn't heard that argument from Theora supporters before.) Most of the hardware decoders in smartphones are programmable DSPs; e.g. TI's OMAP3 family. But there still are plenty of chips out there that use fixed-function h.264 decoders, e.g. TI's DaVinci family. The fixed-function ones are smaller, cheaper, and probably lower power.
- ZeroGravitas 17y agoTI's DaVinci family includes programmable DSP and ARM based solutions and you can buy various 3rd party software implementations of codecs such as H.264 to run on them. http://focus.ti.com/dsp/docs/dspfindtoolswresults.tsp?sectionId=3&tabId=1620&familyId=1300&toolTypeId=65 http://focus.ti.com/dsp/docs/dspfindtoolswresults.tsp?sectio...
- ErrantX 17y agoOk I am going to say it: I think this finally secures a big big future for Chrome. It will now be the only browser to support all three of the main codecs - and Google will control one of the two open source / royalty free ones (indeed it's arguable that status may be more secure that Ogg Theora because, simply, Google are likely to aggressively defend any submarine attacks). All told - great news.
- stanleydrew 17y agoI think Chrome already had a big future, but you are still very right that this is a huge win for the browser.
- bad_user 17y agoAnd don't forget that Chrome was the first to come up with one process per tab, and they also ignited a cut-throat JS performance race. Also clean design with native widgets on supported platforms and overall crazy fast (when I boot my computer, Chrome is the first app the starts). Mozilla should be worried.
- Kilimanjaro 17y agoWhat is this mozilla you speak of? (Being an early adopter since phoenix, already moved to chrome and never looked back)
- papachito 17y agoI'm not seing any confirmation from Google for now or any other sources. This is probably going to happen anyway, but for now I won't take it as a sure thing.
- pak 17y agoIt's kind of funny how having false publicity for it now has probably amped up expectations enough that Google would look bad if they didn't follow through.
- krschultz 17y agoAs the article points out, the big wildcard is Microsoft. I don't see what logical reason Microsoft has for skipping VP8 other than the anti-Google animosity, but that has led to illogical decisions on their part before.
- sketerpot 17y agoBy now I tend to just assume that Internet Explorer is going to always do the bare minimum needed to maintain its dominant position, while holding back support for whatever people want. I hate it when I develop a cool web app and it works perfectly on everything except IE, where it's broken in new and excitingly different ways on each of the major versions.
- jerf 17y agoI haven't tried this in IE for a while, but can't we do something like push down an ActiveX control or plugin to render this video with IE pretty trivially? It would simply become part of the magic incantation web developers would use to embed video. Flash did not obtain its dominance by coming installed with IE. Unless Microsoft actively moves to block it, I don't know that Microsoft's explicit support is actually that interesting.
- WildUtah 17y ago/Flash did not obtain its dominance by coming installed with IE./ That's exactly how Flash won its dominance. It was installed by the PC manufacturers (HP, Apple, Dell, &c) into IE5 and IE6 until it had overwhelming market presence. Adding video support later on cemented the position, but it was strippers and steaks (for HP, Dell, Apple, &c execs) that won Flash its position.
- ssp 17y agoIf they can make sure H.264 become the standard, then that's a big problem for firefox, which is good for Microsoft, so it wouldn't be totally illogical for them to skip VP8.
- randall 17y agoThis is basically a done deal, fwiw. Other folks who I've talked to in a nda-ish sort of manner have been expecting to not support OGG long term, and instead support VP8 as the "open standard." It's an open secret in industry circles, and this I think confirms it. Can't wait till next week.
- spatulon 17y agoSurely making the codec open source isn't in itself that interesting, considering that x264 and FFmpeg form a high quality, open source codec for H.264? It's not the code, but the spec that matters in spreading adoption of VP8. (Of course, publishing the code would create a de facto spec). More interesting still is the patent issue. VP8 is still effectively irrelevant unless Google announces they've performed a patent search and found VP8 to have no known patents covering its methods (or at least any that might incur licensing fees). After all, it was the patent issue with H.264 that bothered Mozilla.
- jon_dahl 17y agox264 is a codec implementation, not a codec standard. The x264 source code is free, but what it produces isn't (at least in the US). Rumors are VP8 will be free on both counts. As for the patent issue, Google has no doubt done this during its ~9 months of due diligence while buying On2. Not saying that issues won't come up, but Google apparently felt comfortable with the situation.
- jaustin 17y agoI am confused as to why more people aren't asking this. If On2 were licensing any patents (for example, from one or more of the MPEGLA partners) in order to make VP8 possible, it's not important that Google has open sourced it unless they also somehow provide a free license to all the patents involved. I don't know enough about the industry to be able to predict whether On2 could have a technology in VP8 that they, and only they, have patents on. In that case, the ball is in Google's court. Otherwise, whoever owns the patents that On2 was licensing (or infringing?) still as a right to get royalties, right? Experts?
- modeless 17y agoThis may not solve the problem, as companies like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, etc need to get on board as well. They are likely to continue the same arguments they raised against Theora; most importantly that VP8 is still vulnerable to patent extortion despite being independently developed. It's probably too much to ask for Google to provide indemnification from patent lawsuits, but hopefully they've at least done some work to help assuage these concerns.
- vetinari 17y agoAdobe is already shipping VP6 as a part of Flash Player, so VP8 should not be a problem. Maybe that is what Google will get for integrating Flash into Chrome, that made news few weeks ago. MS, Apple and Nokia will be harder nut to crack, because all three of them are patent owners in H.264 portfolio. Nokia may cave when Youtube switches, maybe even MS, but Apple users will have life slightly more difficult for a while.
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- MikeCapone 17y agoCan VLC decode VP8? Is there a sample video anywhere that I could download?
- buster 17y agoThere is a sample video of On2 on this page: http://video.golem.de/audio-video/2857/on2-vergleich-h.264-und-vp8.html http://video.golem.de/audio-video/2857/on2-vergleich-h.264-u... Text basically says that those are crops of FullHD movies.. keep in mind that this movie is from On2, so its validity is at least questionable ;)
- MikeCapone 17y agoIt does look much better, but I'd love to see the same done by an independent source.
- aufreak3 17y agoThis is INCREDIBLY great news and something I've been waiting for to hear for ages. Well done Google!
- aufreak3 17y ago.. or rather "well going-to-do Google"!
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- lenni 17y agoThis is pure speculation but maybe Google uses VP8 in order to negiotiate a better licensing fee once h.264 isn't free anymore. MPEG-LA would think twice about loosing Youtube as a customer. This would go against Google's "Don't be evil" but getting the world to accept yet another video codec will be an uphill struggle, even for Google.
- jaustin 17y agoHow does this relate to Google's funding of ogg/theora for mobile codecs? http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/04/interesting-times-for-video-on-web.html http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/04/interesting-ti... Given that theora is based on On2's VP3, could there be enough similarity in the codecs that the theora DSP code is useful for quickly getting VP8 going?