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Unsurprisingly, Apple goes for the patent-encumbered video format [1]. I'm disappointed that Firefox never really had the opportunity to "win" the browser wars
by mmastrac 9y ago
Unsurprisingly, Apple goes for the patent-encumbered video format [1]. I'm disappointed that Firefox never really had the opportunity to "win" the browser wars and push more user- and developer-friendly formats on the world.
[1] http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_pat... (the vast majority of the patents will expire by 2023, but 2027 is the last probable date that it will be encumbered)
- bpicolo 9y agoThis is to support sites like imgur, reddit that are essentially distributing GIFs as MP4s now. They didn't really determine the format that the community adopted
- finnn 9y agoimgur converts to the most widely supported formats. This is not a community issue.
- bpicolo 9y agoYeah, but mp4 saves on bandwidth and is buffered vs gifs. https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ gifv is just rebranded mp4 more or less
- always_good 9y agoActually, .gifv is an html page with a <video> with both webm and mp4 sources.
- bpicolo 9y agoRight, this let's them repurpose the same mp4 files and give iOS users a better experience
- sli 9y agoOr at least try to. Imgur's mobile experience is lacking a lot.
- gsich 9y agoDesktop too. The absolute main feature of such a site is the absolute link to the picture. That is the most important thing you need after you uploaded an image. Yet imgur tries to hide it as much as possible, forcing you to use the "show url to image" stuff in browsers.
- always_good 9y agoIt's been some time since that was the main feature of imgur. For example, imgur redirects hotlinked images to its embedded view in some cases. One of those cases is when they decide that your domain is using them as a CDN, which they forbid.
- gsich 9y agoAnd since then the main purpose of imgur is lost. I rather upload screenshots to my own site. I don't hope they go down the Imageshack road...
- Houshalter 9y agoYou also can't save the video. At least not in firefox.
- jessriedel 9y agoI've never really understood this. I previously had figured that the popularity of GIFs on reddit had been about bandwidth and load times. In that past, video would be too slow for the rapid novelty stimulus reddit offered, while GIFs were lightening. But now every "GIF" people post is a just full movie, and it loads more slowly than YouTube or other websites that are smartly structured to handle video. Why do they do this?
- bpicolo 9y agohttps://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ https://blog.imgur.com/2014/10/09/introducing-gifv/ has some of the details. It definitely makes sense technically. It should in most cases reduce file size, and also allows you to stream content in buffered so you don't need to wait for the whole thing to load for it to play. (Though I believe streaming in gifs is teeeechnically possible? I feel like I saw a demo one time that made a clock by streaming in gif frames)
- toomuchtodo 9y agohttps://hookrace.net/blog/time.gif/ https://hookrace.net/blog/time.gif/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14996715
- jessriedel 9y agoHey thanks, this is super useful! I still don't quite get it though. I understand that converting huge HD GIFs to a standard video format allows steaming and better compression, but why encourage people to upload it like this rather than just upload videos? The only explanation in the post is "the culture of the GIF now trumps the file format. With Project GIFV, Imgur is reimagining the looping GIF video with all the richness it deserves as a key piece of Internet culture." Is the idea just that people want soundless looping HD video, and they're accustomed to uploading GIFs, so Imgur is going to accommodate them by doing the conversions server-side? I guess this is an explanation, but it's a surprising one. For instance, it doesn't really fit well with the observation that people uploaded GIFs of content that was obviously native video and not connected to internet GIF culture, e.g., sports videos.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- DCKing 9y agoTo be quite fair, the only reason the community adopted these is because it's the only format that works across all browsers. If Safari and IE had supported free video codecs they would have very likely supported that. By the way, MP4 is a completely open standard (open does not equate 'free') and is free to use for videos that are also freely distributed. Of course there are also free and open source implementations of the codec. Being patent encumbered sucks but in principle there should be no practical limitation for gifs at least.
- user5994461 9y agoThis makes no sense. mp4 is not a video format. mp4 is a container. It typically contains an audio stream and a video stream. The streams are encoded and the majority of the formats are patented with license fees.
- cbhl 9y agoISOBMFF is the new TIFF -- it can contain just about anything. Heck, Apple have started using it for images, too (that's what HEIF is).
- ornitorrincos 9y agowhile not really helping the base patent issues, cisco does offer binaries for the openh264 codec with all royalties paid for
- aqme28 9y agoThere are other formats than MP4 though (like webm). Imgur supports those.
- ckocagil 9y agoNo. This is because Apple is a part of MPEG-LA. Apple has never supported any effort to give the web an open, non-patent-encumbered video codec. Find the missing tech company: http://aomedia.org/about-us/ http://aomedia.org/about-us/
- my_ghola 9y agoWell GIF was encumbered by patents for 23 years [0]. Perhaps they were trying to recreate the same "feature". [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
- 0x4a42 9y ago> Unsurprisingly, Apple goes for the patent-encumbered video format. At least this is in the continuity of the legacy GIF format.[1] </sarcasm> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Unisys_and_LZW_patent_enfo...
- Veratyr 9y agoThis I can deal with, everyone else has been supporting this for ages. The bigger question for me is whether Apple will support AV1 like the rest of the industry or skip over it like they did with VP9.
- innagadadavida 9y agoPatents help pay for research and keeps a lot of smart and hard working tech people employed. Stop bad mouthing it as though you are losing one of your God given rights. There are surely issues with greedy companies doing greedy things with it. But then there are issues with everything... like greedy Ad companies selling your profiles and collecting more data in the name of AI.
- tedmielczarek 9y agoSoftware patents are bad and should be abolished.
- ntaylor 9y ago> Patents help pay for research and keeps a lot of smart and hard working tech people employed. Maybe when used correctly. In the tech space, it seems like they hardly are, anymore.
- rhizome 9y ago"How dare you criticize X when there are starving children in the world!"
- erik_seaberg 9y agoA good patent brings us a more competitive solution to a problem than we otherwise would have had. A bad patent is a land grab, a punitive unearned tax on the entire problem, and those have been getting worse.
- ksec 9y agoNot sure why you are downvoted, ( may be because of the tone and languages used ). But people from the academics, and companies do spend a lot of money on R&D in video encoding. These patents are not those silly one click web purchase patents, there are lots of thoughts, experiment into it. I would have thought anyone who has been to Uni / College would know this, after all it is part of how University gets funding these days. The problem is price. What should these patents cost.
- epistasis 9y agoI'm curious, have people sent patches to WebKit to support this?
- niftich 9y agoInstead, Chrome "won" the browser wars and pushed a different, incompatible format -- VP8 -- which [1] they bought from a private company on the world; a format they quickly deployed across Google properties, but took years to document. Further, they claimed VP8 infringed no patents but refused to indemnify users against patent suits; the MPEG LA began forming a patent pool on behalf of companies that claimed to hold patents on the techniques in use in VP8 and the situation didn't clear up until 2013, when Google essentially paid the license fees for everyone and agreed to sublicense these out [2]. They continued evolving the bitstream with incompatible revisions, which haven't even been finalized [3]. Nonetheless, this VP9 is widely deployed in Google properties today. In the future, a consensus codec AV1 developed by a consortium of companies will be ready for public consumption; this codec descends from VP9 while incorporating significant enhancements from Cisco and Xiph.Org. The participant companies are numerous and include big chipmakers and content delivery networks, banding together to perpetuate a royalty-free video codec that mounts a competition against MPEG's efforts, whose rules don't exclude techniques that are patented. Until AV1 is ready and good, MPEG formats form a superior choice on technical merit, as well as rigor in documentation should you choose to make an independent implementation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8 [2] https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/google-and-mpeg-la-sign-licensing-agreement-covering-googles-vp8-video-codec-clearing-the-way-for-wider-adoption/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/07/google-and-mpeg-la-sign-li... [3] https://www.webmproject.org/vp9/ https://www.webmproject.org/vp9/
- reggieband 9y agoTo be fair, VP9 and WebM both may as well be considered de-facto proprietary formats. Chrome is almost certainly the majority browser and youtube is likely to be the most used video platform. Sending video from youtube to Chrome is probably the main use-case for that protocol. I'm not even aware of any commercial video platforms that offer VP9 as anything more than a novelty option (although maybe Anvato will now that they are slowly being integrated further into the Google universe). Even DASH is years away from real wide-spread adoption. IMO, video formats will live and die based on hardware support. If your mobile device doesn't come with a AV1 hardware decoder that works with the majority of players out-of-the-box than chances are streaming services won't support it. Apple's advantage with HEVC adoption will be their hardware.
- mratzloff 9y agoH.264 has hardware support and is already supported by the video tag. It was a battle during the video tag debate on WHAT-WG, but the decision was made a long time ago.