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Google's dropping H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness

91 points by abraham 16y ago

antimatter15 16y ago
On page two, "Consistency Counts", the argument isn't right. "Openness" is sadly very ambiguous, but as noted earlier in the article, there's a difference between being developed openly and having patent encumbered royalties. Flash is actually an open specification, and anyone is free to develop tools that create flash content (distributed as source or binary) without paying royalties to Adobe in any part of the world. Anyone can create a flash player too without paying royalties. VP8 and Flash are not open standards, but they are royalty free. AVC was openly developed and is an ISO standard but is not royalty free.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  Flash isn't an open standard anymore. As of Flash 9 when they started shipping the DRM subsystem, free software cannot be fully compatible without rev eng.
  - knowtheory 16y ago
    Which is only a capability relevant when interacting with Adobe's flash media server. There are several alternatives media servers available, most of which are open source. The problem of FMS parity is a wholly different ball of wax, aside from (although perhaps relevant to) the behavior of the Flash VM itself.
    - Locke1689 16y ago
      What the hell? Who cares? The effect is that I can't and never will be able to watch Hulu in an open Flash implementation.
deleted 16y ago
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icarus_drowning 16y ago
Seems like a better argument would be that this is a step backward for short-term openness. The argument can still be make that this is a step forward for long-term openness. I've said this before, but I'll say it again: Flash has nothing to do with this. Flash isn't vying to be part of the <video> tag, it is merely a proprietary browser plugin that no one has to support. (As Apple has shown). H.264 is a contender to be a codec that any browser-maker must support by default in order to meet an agreed upon specification. No such requirement exists for Flash.
danbmil99 16y ago
One detail that caught my eye: > ISO and ITU do not require the members working on their various standards and specifications to give up any specific patent claims that may cover the technology that they define. Quite the contrary -- the ITU specifically had language that every contributor agreed to provide their contributions royalty-free. Unfortunately the politics got complexated when it became a joint ITU/ISO thing. Some of the biggest players made noises that they would agree to a "royalty-free baseline profile" (ie without some of the more patent-rich features, such as interlace and B-frames). At the last minute, like Lucy from Peanuts, they took their ball and went home, leaving all the smaller players who had an interest in a truly free standard high and dry. This event IMSHO left a vacuum that resulted in pent-up demand for a truly free codec, which created room for Theora and WebM. [disclaimer: I was involved]
- rajbot 16y ago
  Do you remember how Microsoft snuck a Trojan into their IPR statement for the integer transform? Something along the lines of, "We agree to the standard royalty-free terms, as long as everyone else does".. It didn't take long for everyone to adopt the "Microsoft amendment" to their IPR statements, and for one token member to object to royalty-free terms, and the whole thing came tumbling down.
  - danbmil99 16y ago
    sounds familiar. I was involved around '03, when Polycom and about 25 companies were up against the 4 or 5 biggies over the patent issue. It was like watching a bunch of school kids get beat up by teenage bullies. Very ugly. MPEG-LA are really just a bunch of thugs. They remind me of Tony Soprano: "Satisfaction guaranteed -- or double your garbage back!"
rajbot 16y ago
There are two different kinds of royalties associated with H.264. One is the fee on each encoder or decoder, and the other is a per stream royalty. Although most of us are concerned with royalties on the codec, Google is more concerned about the royalties on the streams. Although the Ars article mentions that MPEG-LA won't charge per-stream royalties for free youtube videos (for 5 more years, anyway), H.264 content from the Youtube Store are already subject to per-stream fees, starting at the beginning of this year. Also, Google TV streams may not fall under MPEG-LA's definition of royality-free "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". Furthermore, MPEG-LA hasn't yet made it clear exactly how much these fees will be! WebM (vp8), along with lower-quality FLV (vp6), is a hedge against both current and upcoming per-stream h.264 royalties.
- daniel02216 16y ago
  The MPEG-LA promised in August that they wouldn't charge per-stream for free videos ever. http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme...
  - wakeup 16y ago
    Promise my ass. Burn them, hang them, just kill em dead and then steal their stuff. Everybody be cool this is a f*in robbery!
magicalist 16y ago
when firefox 4 is released (and is rapidly adopted+), if you are a major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video, you will need to serve webm or theora or you will miss out on a quarter of the world web audience and the majority of the european web audience. if you weren't planning on doing so, you were either going to have to serve video via flash or not at all anyway. google's decision only tips the scales a little more. +edit: note that I'm not prognosticating a new firefox monopoly or anything, just that firefox 4 will rapidly replace most of the current firefox 3.*s out there, which currently make up the referenced marketshare.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video Here's the sticking point -- as the article says, no one's going to go through the pain of dealing with VP8 transcoding and storage. Flash will be for everyone except iOS, where HTML5 H264 acts as a backdrop.
  - magicalist 16y ago
    that's your guess, but I'll freely admit that you may be right. however, there are increasing benefits to being first-class content in a browser, and there will be at least a few major providers (youtube, maybe (someday) people encoding to theora today) willing to transcode and distribute for you. I believe (and I recognize that this is just my opinion) that web video should first be in an encoding that is free to use in any way. The only way this is going to happen is if Mozilla (and to a lesser extent, Google) make a stand now instead of waiting for one of the many long years between now and 2028 when the last h264 patent expires.
- clark-kent 16y ago
  And according to MSDN "..IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow...
- tres 16y ago
Xuzz 16y ago
I don't think Google has affected anything with this move. By any counts out there, Firefox has double the market share of Chrome. It might reduce the use of HTML5 video versus Flash video in Chrome itself, but for the whole web, it doesn't make a difference when Firefox already took this position with twice the market share.
- nopinsight 16y ago
  This move might signify changes to be made on YouTube later, which will be significant for a large segment of Internet users. Also, Chrome is heavily used by early adopters and tech crowds, so it will influence their perception of things and this might trickle down to more average users over time.
  - eddieplan9 16y ago
    I for one, though do not use Chrome (I use Safari) myself, have put Chrome on every PC I help set up, until yesterday. Sorry, Google. I just like the fact that I can put up videos I shot with my camera on my website without transcoding and my friends would view them just fine from their browsers and phones. I don't know which side is more open - and therefore more right - in this controversy, but in addition to openness, I support industrial collaboration. And more importantly, video codecs are used beyond just web. How about looking further and see the frustration that the non-web video people would have because of this action.
- macrael 16y ago
  I would argue that none of the desktop browsers are having an effect in this area. The only thing that is really driving the adoption of html5 <video> is mobile devices and their poor or nonexistent support for flash. Many sites that serve mobile devices html5 video still serve flash to html5 capable desktop browsers.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    Mobile devices will support WebM; simply because desktops/laptops still rule and there's tremendous pressure to support desktop technologies for content-delivery that are popular. And I would argue that the majority of traffic for websites like YouTube comes from desktops / laptops.
andraz 16y ago
"Rather, the point is that in practice developers don't let royalties impede their implementations." This is simply not true, MPEG-LA would go after any commercially successful project not paying royalties.
- merijnv 16y ago
  Of course this can only happen if said project is based in a country which actually upholds software patents. In countries were software patents are void MPEG-LA's claims are also void in which case I'd like to see them try to sue the developers/projects operating there...
lopatamd 16y ago
its forward not backward.. o_O
nextparadigms 16y ago
I don't think it's a step backwards, but clearly there is a double standard here by fully supporting Flash. I knew it from the beginning that supporting Flash wasn't in alignment with their open web vision, yet they still did it to spite Apple and its iPhone. I hope they get rid of Flash within a year.
jwr 16y ago
I fully agree with the article. Google's move makes me very angry, for two reasons: 1) Google uses us as tools in its battles and wars, because it is us who will be inconvenienced for years to come if companies continue to fight over video codecs. Sure, the explanations are grandiose — "we fight for openness" and the like — but the fight is being done by our expense. 2) Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable. H.264, an ITU/ISO standard, documented, with reference implementations, with a free/oss encoder (x264) and hardware support in a bazillion devices is called "closed and proprietary". Meanwhile, Adobe Flash (which this whole fight will just strengthen) is just fine, thank you. Oh, MP3 and AAC are fine, too. I'll skip over technical details in this post, suffice it to say that I know and understand why H.264 (especially Main and High profiles) is vastly superior to On2 VP8 (now renamed WebM).
- SimonPStevens 16y ago
  x264 may be free software to download, but you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA license fees under most circumstances if you actually use the videos you encode with it.
  - jwr 16y ago
    It depends on how you use them and what you use them for. But in general, yes. So perhaps Google should start saying openly it's about the money, not about "openness" (which seems to be defined every week as something different by one company or another).
    - Tautologistics 16y ago
      Once money/licensing is involved, it does become an issue of openness. Think of it as the letter of the spec versus the spirit of the spec. If h.264 becomes the de facto standard for HTML5 video encoding, then a browser such as Firefox, or any free/open browser, will be financially unable to implement a completely standards compliant browser due to the cost of licensing. Yes, one could supply other codecs to support the video tag since no codec is specified in the spec but if the majority of content out there is focused on h.264 then the effect is the same as not supporting the video tag at all.
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
I'm continually amazed at the erosion of the term "Open Standard". There's a whole segment here that reads like someone arguing "It's not about Free Software, after all Internet Explorer is free", or "It is Open Source because you can just look at the python code they provide". If someone comes up with a catchy slogan for their concept whether it's "Free Market" or "Fair Trade" it's simple politeness to engage with that and make a substantive point rather than making up your own definitions to suit and play semantic games.
- robinhouston 16y ago
  That is a rather anachronistic complaint. The term “open standard” was a term of art for standards such as H.264 long before the term “open source” was coined.
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    No it wasn't. "Open Standard" was coined and defined precisely to indicate an affinity with "Open Source" If you read the ITU reaction to the attempt to define "Open Standards" this is obvious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#ITU-T_definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#ITU-T_definition Any limited use of "open standard" before that point was as meaningful as someone referring to "free software" or "open source" before those terms were defined.
    - robinhouston 16y ago
      Sorry, but that's wildly anachronistic too. The term "open standard" was in widespread use long before "open source" was coined in 1998, and certainly before the ITU-T definition in 2005: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&year_start=1975&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3 http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&#38... A term does not need to have a formal definition in order to have a meaning.
    - trotsky 16y ago
      Open standard had a very distinct and widely used definition well before the term "open source" was invented.
yanw 16y ago
Much of the debate is centered around the quasi-ubiquity of h264 and accepting the royalties involved and it's proprietary nature as a compromise that we are willing to make, which is very short sighted and dangerous. Also the typical patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might violate patents without naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's motives. I keep hearing the Flash analogy, which is nonsense, flash doesn't just do video playback, the technology is ubiquitously used in a variety of ways and is not comparable to a video codec, and does not have any of the patent licencing issues h264 has. This move is a step forward towards openness as it will force publishers and users to consider the non-proprietary alternative.
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  >Also the typical patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might violate patents without naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's motives. Stating that Webm might turn into a patent minefield is FUD now? What happened to journalistic freedom and rational discourse?
  - bryanlarsen 16y ago
    The two biggest possibilities are: 1) WebM infringes on h264 patents AND h264 infringes on VP3 patents. Remember VP3 is the predecessor to WebM and came out before h264. or 2) neither infringes on the patents. So the 3rd unlikely possibility is FUD, yes.
  - tomlin 16y ago
    The author has and had the freedom to publish. No one stopped him from publishing the article. The HN crowd don't really respect a conjecture without evidence. That's kinda why I come here.
  - sorbus 16y ago
    If I say "with additional research, it may be discovered that there's a correlation between eating corn and various degenerative diseases, and therefor you should not eat corn" with no evidence to support that assertion, it is FUD. Similarly, if I say "with additional research, it may be discovered that WebM infringes on patents, and therefor you should not use it" with no evidence to support that assertion, it is FUD. If a claim is unsupported but used as a criticism of something - especially a reason not to use a product - then it is FUD.
zecg 16y ago
I don't believe I'm reading such reactionary scaremongering FUD from Ars. Google supporting (and helping develop) an open codec with no royalties attached is construed as a BAD THING?
Apreche 16y ago
Every browser should just support every codec in the universe. I don't care if it's illegal or patent infringing. Do it anyway. VLC, Mplayer, and ffmpeg are all open source, all work, and are all still around. This goes for image formats and audio codecs as well. Let's just make forks of Chromium and Firefox that include built-in support for as many codecs and file formats as possible. Someone wants to use a psd in an img tag? Sure! Someone wants to use a flac in an audio tag? Go for it! Want to use a bink video in a video tag? Be my guest. Even if it's illegal, who cares. You can do it the same way that Windows Media Player and Ubuntu handle it. Every time the user comes across a video they can't play, a popup asks them to click a few times, and then voila! They have the codec. Web developer are always going to have a crappy time of it. We will never ever be able to simply make one site one way and have it work nicely on all devices with web browsers. Give up on that dream. But the dream of making things good for the users, is achievable. Aim for that first.
- bobds 16y ago
  I understand where you are coming from with this but let's consider the security implications of embedding just anything in the browser. A prime example is embedding custom fonts with CSS. The code that handles them wasn't built with arbitrary fonts downloaded from untrusted sources in mind (I think the guy that wrote the code said that's insecure and a bad idea).
extension 16y ago
If it's going remove features for poorly-articulated ideological reasons, it would surely make sense to apply that ideology consistently No, that doesn't particularly make sense. Choose your battles. They are endless in number. Nobody has time to fight them all. Fight the ones that matter most. All else aside, there is nothing hypocritical per se about taking a stand on one issue and not another.
elwin 16y ago
All of the articles, particularly this one, seem to be missing the point. They attribute Google's actions to abstract ideas of openness or competition between codecs. But there is a concrete issue involved: under MPEG-LA's licensing terms, Google should be paying $6.5 million a year to distribute a H.264 decoder. Under that license, the end users only get the rights to use the software "for personal and consumer purposes": they couldn't fork Chrome, redistribute it, etc. The Ars article mentions this, but immediately moves on. It's possible Google expects MPEG-LA to try to enforce the patents, and that's why they're dropping H.264 support. After all, Google is the only browser vendor not in MPEG-LA worth trying to get money from. The yearly licensing amount just went up by $1.5 million, which might have influenced the timing of the announcement. Comparisons with Flash are irrelevant: it may be less open than H.264, but not in the way that matters to Google.
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  $6.5 million is chump change for Google. And $1.5 million would be lying in the seat cushions of Google executive.
DjDarkman 16y ago
Google dropping a highly patented codec from Chrome is a step backwards for openness Even the title doesn't make sense. They could say "step backwards for easy of use" or "step backwards for MPEG LA", but saying "step backwards for openness" is ridiculous. If it's encumbered with patents, it's not open, no matter how many free software implementations it has. Open means, open to anyone, not only open to those who pay for it.
- alanh 16y ago
  It is apparent you did not read the article. Please go read it, or at least this quote: > This explanation is lacking, to say the least. It appears to be a conflation of several issues: openness, royalty-freedom, and source code availability, among others. In the traditional sense, H.264 is an open standard. That is to say, it was a standard designed by a range of domain experts from across the industry, working to the remit of a standards organization. In fact, two standards organizations were involved: ISO and ITU. The specification was devised collaboratively, with its final ratification dependent on the agreement of the individuals, corporations, and national standards bodies that variously make up ISO and ITU. This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs. H.264 is unambiguously open. > In contrast, neither WebM's VP8 nor Theora were assembled by a standards body such as ISO. VP8 was developed independently and entirely in secret by the company On2, prior to the company's purchase last year by Google. Theora was created by a group of open-source developers…
spiffworks 16y ago
Can we all please collectively stop abusing 'Openness'? Google is the guiltiest of them all- shoe-horning open source, open standards, royalty-free, patent-unencumbered and god knows what else into the same overly-generic term complicates the debate. In fact, its clearly harmful- look at the way Gruber has hijacked the debate and refocused everything on Google's 'hypocrisy' for bundling Flash with Chrome. For the love of God, stop saying 'Openness'
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format. Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.
  - spiffworks 16y ago
    Yeah, Google really screwed themselves with that blogpost. To quote from a ZDNet article "Out of 250 words, open was mentioned 8 times." I don't know why they feel the necessity to paint everything that they do as open. This move itself could have been explained in one line like so: "We believe that the de facto codec for HTML5 video should be royalty-free, and to that end cannot continue supporting H.264 in our browser any longer." That much would have sufficed, and avoided a lot of the pointless bickering.
davidjhamp 16y ago
Getting rid of flash is more difficult then getting rid of x264 since its obviously used all over the web. Dropping support for x264 now will prevent a similar issue in the future. Its a great first step. Having a company like Mozilla pay a royalty on each user would cripple Firefox and any new browsers that may come along.
agent86 16y ago
Maybe I'm just a moron, but couldn't a lot of this problem be solved by making the decoder free to use in all circumstances? They already allow free Internet broadcast at no royalty, and have other free parts of their licensing now, so they're clearly open to the concept at least. If I understand things correctly, for people shipping decoders the royalty amount is capped at $6.5 million a year. So they're making $6.5 million from Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. All in all, probably a few hundred million over everyone? Would it not be more advantageous to leave that money on the table, completely entrench your format EVERYWHERE, and then pick it up on the professional/encoder side of things? CNN, CNET, Fox, whoever, probably wouldn't mind paying a little more and getting a single universal format for everything everywhere and home users/hobbyists can play for free since they'll never hit the thresholds. Startups can get going by working in the free zones (< 100k paid subs, free un-paid use).
martythemaniak 16y ago
A rebuke from Opera: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/01/13/openness http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/01/13/openness
alanfalcon 16y ago
While this is clearly an opinion piece arguing for inclusion of H.264 in Chrome, I feel like this article actually does a great job of actually portraying most of the facts that affect both side of the argument. Certainly it feels like the most informative article I've read on the subject (again, despite its bias.)

91 points by abraham 16y ago

On page two, "Consistency Counts", the argument isn't right. "Openness" is sadly very ambiguous, but as noted earlier in the article, there's a difference between being developed openly and having patent encumbered royalties. Flash is actually an open specification, and anyone is free to develop tools that create flash content (distributed as source or binary) without paying royalties to Adobe in any part of the world. Anyone can create a flash player too without paying royalties. VP8 and Flash are not open standards, but they are royalty free. AVC was openly developed and is an ISO standard but is not royalty free.

Locke1689 16y ago
Flash isn't an open standard anymore. As of Flash 9 when they started shipping the DRM subsystem, free software cannot be fully compatible without rev eng.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  Which is only a capability relevant when interacting with Adobe's flash media server. There are several alternatives media servers available, most of which are open source. The problem of FMS parity is a wholly different ball of wax, aside from (although perhaps relevant to) the behavior of the Flash VM itself.
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    What the hell? Who cares? The effect is that I can't and never will be able to watch Hulu in an open Flash implementation.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

icarus_drowning 16y ago

Seems like a better argument would be that this is a step backward for short-term openness. The argument can still be make that this is a step forward for long-term openness. I've said this before, but I'll say it again: Flash has nothing to do with this. Flash isn't vying to be part of the <video> tag, it is merely a proprietary browser plugin that no one has to support. (As Apple has shown). H.264 is a contender to be a codec that any browser-maker must support by default in order to meet an agreed upon specification. No such requirement exists for Flash.

danbmil99 16y ago

One detail that caught my eye: > ISO and ITU do not require the members working on their various standards and specifications to give up any specific patent claims that may cover the technology that they define. Quite the contrary -- the ITU specifically had language that every contributor agreed to provide their contributions royalty-free. Unfortunately the politics got complexated when it became a joint ITU/ISO thing. Some of the biggest players made noises that they would agree to a "royalty-free baseline profile" (ie without some of the more patent-rich features, such as interlace and B-frames). At the last minute, like Lucy from Peanuts, they took their ball and went home, leaving all the smaller players who had an interest in a truly free standard high and dry. This event IMSHO left a vacuum that resulted in pent-up demand for a truly free codec, which created room for Theora and WebM. [disclaimer: I was involved]

rajbot 16y ago
Do you remember how Microsoft snuck a Trojan into their IPR statement for the integer transform? Something along the lines of, "We agree to the standard royalty-free terms, as long as everyone else does".. It didn't take long for everyone to adopt the "Microsoft amendment" to their IPR statements, and for one token member to object to royalty-free terms, and the whole thing came tumbling down.
- danbmil99 16y ago
  sounds familiar. I was involved around '03, when Polycom and about 25 companies were up against the 4 or 5 biggies over the patent issue. It was like watching a bunch of school kids get beat up by teenage bullies. Very ugly. MPEG-LA are really just a bunch of thugs. They remind me of Tony Soprano: "Satisfaction guaranteed -- or double your garbage back!"

rajbot 16y ago

There are two different kinds of royalties associated with H.264. One is the fee on each encoder or decoder, and the other is a per stream royalty. Although most of us are concerned with royalties on the codec, Google is more concerned about the royalties on the streams. Although the Ars article mentions that MPEG-LA won't charge per-stream royalties for free youtube videos (for 5 more years, anyway), H.264 content from the Youtube Store are already subject to per-stream fees, starting at the beginning of this year. Also, Google TV streams may not fall under MPEG-LA's definition of royality-free "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". Furthermore, MPEG-LA hasn't yet made it clear exactly how much these fees will be! WebM (vp8), along with lower-quality FLV (vp6), is a hedge against both current and upcoming per-stream h.264 royalties.

daniel02216 16y ago
The MPEG-LA promised in August that they wouldn't charge per-stream for free videos ever. http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme...
- wakeup 16y ago
  Promise my ass. Burn them, hang them, just kill em dead and then steal their stuff. Everybody be cool this is a f*in robbery!

magicalist 16y ago

when firefox 4 is released (and is rapidly adopted+), if you are a major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video, you will need to serve webm or theora or you will miss out on a quarter of the world web audience and the majority of the european web audience. if you weren't planning on doing so, you were either going to have to serve video via flash or not at all anyway. google's decision only tips the scales a little more. +edit: note that I'm not prognosticating a new firefox monopoly or anything, just that firefox 4 will rapidly replace most of the current firefox 3.*s out there, which currently make up the referenced marketshare.

Locke1689 16y ago
major video provider on the web and you want to use html5 video Here's the sticking point -- as the article says, no one's going to go through the pain of dealing with VP8 transcoding and storage. Flash will be for everyone except iOS, where HTML5 H264 acts as a backdrop.
- magicalist 16y ago
  that's your guess, but I'll freely admit that you may be right. however, there are increasing benefits to being first-class content in a browser, and there will be at least a few major providers (youtube, maybe (someday) people encoding to theora today) willing to transcode and distribute for you. I believe (and I recognize that this is just my opinion) that web video should first be in an encoding that is free to use in any way. The only way this is going to happen is if Mozilla (and to a lesser extent, Google) make a stand now instead of waiting for one of the many long years between now and 2028 when the last h264 patent expires.
clark-kent 16y ago
And according to MSDN "..IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/05/19/another-follow...
tres 16y ago

Xuzz 16y ago

I don't think Google has affected anything with this move. By any counts out there, Firefox has double the market share of Chrome. It might reduce the use of HTML5 video versus Flash video in Chrome itself, but for the whole web, it doesn't make a difference when Firefox already took this position with twice the market share.

nopinsight 16y ago
This move might signify changes to be made on YouTube later, which will be significant for a large segment of Internet users. Also, Chrome is heavily used by early adopters and tech crowds, so it will influence their perception of things and this might trickle down to more average users over time.
- eddieplan9 16y ago
  I for one, though do not use Chrome (I use Safari) myself, have put Chrome on every PC I help set up, until yesterday. Sorry, Google. I just like the fact that I can put up videos I shot with my camera on my website without transcoding and my friends would view them just fine from their browsers and phones. I don't know which side is more open - and therefore more right - in this controversy, but in addition to openness, I support industrial collaboration. And more importantly, video codecs are used beyond just web. How about looking further and see the frustration that the non-web video people would have because of this action.
macrael 16y ago
I would argue that none of the desktop browsers are having an effect in this area. The only thing that is really driving the adoption of html5 <video> is mobile devices and their poor or nonexistent support for flash. Many sites that serve mobile devices html5 video still serve flash to html5 capable desktop browsers.
- bad_user 16y ago
  Mobile devices will support WebM; simply because desktops/laptops still rule and there's tremendous pressure to support desktop technologies for content-delivery that are popular. And I would argue that the majority of traffic for websites like YouTube comes from desktops / laptops.

andraz 16y ago

"Rather, the point is that in practice developers don't let royalties impede their implementations." This is simply not true, MPEG-LA would go after any commercially successful project not paying royalties.

merijnv 16y ago
Of course this can only happen if said project is based in a country which actually upholds software patents. In countries were software patents are void MPEG-LA's claims are also void in which case I'd like to see them try to sue the developers/projects operating there...

lopatamd 16y ago

its forward not backward.. o_O

nextparadigms 16y ago

I don't think it's a step backwards, but clearly there is a double standard here by fully supporting Flash. I knew it from the beginning that supporting Flash wasn't in alignment with their open web vision, yet they still did it to spite Apple and its iPhone. I hope they get rid of Flash within a year.

jwr 16y ago

I fully agree with the article. Google's move makes me very angry, for two reasons: 1) Google uses us as tools in its battles and wars, because it is us who will be inconvenienced for years to come if companies continue to fight over video codecs. Sure, the explanations are grandiose — "we fight for openness" and the like — but the fight is being done by our expense. 2) Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable. H.264, an ITU/ISO standard, documented, with reference implementations, with a free/oss encoder (x264) and hardware support in a bazillion devices is called "closed and proprietary". Meanwhile, Adobe Flash (which this whole fight will just strengthen) is just fine, thank you. Oh, MP3 and AAC are fine, too. I'll skip over technical details in this post, suffice it to say that I know and understand why H.264 (especially Main and High profiles) is vastly superior to On2 VP8 (now renamed WebM).

SimonPStevens 16y ago
x264 may be free software to download, but you are still obliged to pay MPEGLA license fees under most circumstances if you actually use the videos you encode with it.
- jwr 16y ago
  It depends on how you use them and what you use them for. But in general, yes. So perhaps Google should start saying openly it's about the money, not about "openness" (which seems to be defined every week as something different by one company or another).
  - Tautologistics 16y ago
    Once money/licensing is involved, it does become an issue of openness. Think of it as the letter of the spec versus the spirit of the spec. If h.264 becomes the de facto standard for HTML5 video encoding, then a browser such as Firefox, or any free/open browser, will be financially unable to implement a completely standards compliant browser due to the cost of licensing. Yes, one could supply other codecs to support the video tag since no codec is specified in the spec but if the majority of content out there is focused on h.264 then the effect is the same as not supporting the video tag at all.

ZeroGravitas 16y ago

I'm continually amazed at the erosion of the term "Open Standard". There's a whole segment here that reads like someone arguing "It's not about Free Software, after all Internet Explorer is free", or "It is Open Source because you can just look at the python code they provide". If someone comes up with a catchy slogan for their concept whether it's "Free Market" or "Fair Trade" it's simple politeness to engage with that and make a substantive point rather than making up your own definitions to suit and play semantic games.

robinhouston 16y ago
That is a rather anachronistic complaint. The term “open standard” was a term of art for standards such as H.264 long before the term “open source” was coined.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  No it wasn't. "Open Standard" was coined and defined precisely to indicate an affinity with "Open Source" If you read the ITU reaction to the attempt to define "Open Standards" this is obvious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#ITU-T_definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#ITU-T_definition Any limited use of "open standard" before that point was as meaningful as someone referring to "free software" or "open source" before those terms were defined.
  - robinhouston 16y ago
    Sorry, but that's wildly anachronistic too. The term "open standard" was in widespread use long before "open source" was coined in 1998, and certainly before the ITU-T definition in 2005: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&year_start=1975&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3 http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=open+standard&#38... A term does not need to have a formal definition in order to have a meaning.
  - trotsky 16y ago
    Open standard had a very distinct and widely used definition well before the term "open source" was invented.

yanw 16y ago

Much of the debate is centered around the quasi-ubiquity of h264 and accepting the royalties involved and it's proprietary nature as a compromise that we are willing to make, which is very short sighted and dangerous. Also the typical patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might violate patents without naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's motives. I keep hearing the Flash analogy, which is nonsense, flash doesn't just do video playback, the technology is ubiquitously used in a variety of ways and is not comparable to a video codec, and does not have any of the patent licencing issues h264 has. This move is a step forward towards openness as it will force publishers and users to consider the non-proprietary alternative.

recoiledsnake 16y ago
>Also the typical patent FUD in this article suggesting that WebM might violate patents without naming them is somewhat indicative of the author's motives. Stating that Webm might turn into a patent minefield is FUD now? What happened to journalistic freedom and rational discourse?
- bryanlarsen 16y ago
  The two biggest possibilities are: 1) WebM infringes on h264 patents AND h264 infringes on VP3 patents. Remember VP3 is the predecessor to WebM and came out before h264. or 2) neither infringes on the patents. So the 3rd unlikely possibility is FUD, yes.
- tomlin 16y ago
  The author has and had the freedom to publish. No one stopped him from publishing the article. The HN crowd don't really respect a conjecture without evidence. That's kinda why I come here.
- sorbus 16y ago
  If I say "with additional research, it may be discovered that there's a correlation between eating corn and various degenerative diseases, and therefor you should not eat corn" with no evidence to support that assertion, it is FUD. Similarly, if I say "with additional research, it may be discovered that WebM infringes on patents, and therefor you should not use it" with no evidence to support that assertion, it is FUD. If a claim is unsupported but used as a criticism of something - especially a reason not to use a product - then it is FUD.

zecg 16y ago

I don't believe I'm reading such reactionary scaremongering FUD from Ars. Google supporting (and helping develop) an open codec with no royalties attached is construed as a BAD THING?

Apreche 16y ago

Every browser should just support every codec in the universe. I don't care if it's illegal or patent infringing. Do it anyway. VLC, Mplayer, and ffmpeg are all open source, all work, and are all still around. This goes for image formats and audio codecs as well. Let's just make forks of Chromium and Firefox that include built-in support for as many codecs and file formats as possible. Someone wants to use a psd in an img tag? Sure! Someone wants to use a flac in an audio tag? Go for it! Want to use a bink video in a video tag? Be my guest. Even if it's illegal, who cares. You can do it the same way that Windows Media Player and Ubuntu handle it. Every time the user comes across a video they can't play, a popup asks them to click a few times, and then voila! They have the codec. Web developer are always going to have a crappy time of it. We will never ever be able to simply make one site one way and have it work nicely on all devices with web browsers. Give up on that dream. But the dream of making things good for the users, is achievable. Aim for that first.

bobds 16y ago
I understand where you are coming from with this but let's consider the security implications of embedding just anything in the browser. A prime example is embedding custom fonts with CSS. The code that handles them wasn't built with arbitrary fonts downloaded from untrusted sources in mind (I think the guy that wrote the code said that's insecure and a bad idea).

extension 16y ago

If it's going remove features for poorly-articulated ideological reasons, it would surely make sense to apply that ideology consistently No, that doesn't particularly make sense. Choose your battles. They are endless in number. Nobody has time to fight them all. Fight the ones that matter most. All else aside, there is nothing hypocritical per se about taking a stand on one issue and not another.

elwin 16y ago

All of the articles, particularly this one, seem to be missing the point. They attribute Google's actions to abstract ideas of openness or competition between codecs. But there is a concrete issue involved: under MPEG-LA's licensing terms, Google should be paying $6.5 million a year to distribute a H.264 decoder. Under that license, the end users only get the rights to use the software "for personal and consumer purposes": they couldn't fork Chrome, redistribute it, etc. The Ars article mentions this, but immediately moves on. It's possible Google expects MPEG-LA to try to enforce the patents, and that's why they're dropping H.264 support. After all, Google is the only browser vendor not in MPEG-LA worth trying to get money from. The yearly licensing amount just went up by $1.5 million, which might have influenced the timing of the announcement. Comparisons with Flash are irrelevant: it may be less open than H.264, but not in the way that matters to Google.

recoiledsnake 16y ago
$6.5 million is chump change for Google. And $1.5 million would be lying in the seat cushions of Google executive.

DjDarkman 16y ago

Google dropping a highly patented codec from Chrome is a step backwards for openness Even the title doesn't make sense. They could say "step backwards for easy of use" or "step backwards for MPEG LA", but saying "step backwards for openness" is ridiculous. If it's encumbered with patents, it's not open, no matter how many free software implementations it has. Open means, open to anyone, not only open to those who pay for it.

alanh 16y ago
It is apparent you did not read the article. Please go read it, or at least this quote: > This explanation is lacking, to say the least. It appears to be a conflation of several issues: openness, royalty-freedom, and source code availability, among others. In the traditional sense, H.264 is an open standard. That is to say, it was a standard designed by a range of domain experts from across the industry, working to the remit of a standards organization. In fact, two standards organizations were involved: ISO and ITU. The specification was devised collaboratively, with its final ratification dependent on the agreement of the individuals, corporations, and national standards bodies that variously make up ISO and ITU. This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs. H.264 is unambiguously open. > In contrast, neither WebM's VP8 nor Theora were assembled by a standards body such as ISO. VP8 was developed independently and entirely in secret by the company On2, prior to the company's purchase last year by Google. Theora was created by a group of open-source developers…

spiffworks 16y ago

Can we all please collectively stop abusing 'Openness'? Google is the guiltiest of them all- shoe-horning open source, open standards, royalty-free, patent-unencumbered and god knows what else into the same overly-generic term complicates the debate. In fact, its clearly harmful- look at the way Gruber has hijacked the debate and refocused everything on Google's 'hypocrisy' for bundling Flash with Chrome. For the love of God, stop saying 'Openness'

jokermatt999 16y ago
That's actually a good point. From the reaction of Gruber/Ars Technica, Google may have been better off without using the word "open" at all. They were already speaking to mostly technical people anyway, so it's not like they're going to lose their audience when they speak about wanting a "patent and fee unencumbered format" and what that means rather than a vague "open" format. Edit: I think it's harder to argue against those points than it is to point to their hypocrisy in using both open and Flash (although I think that argument ignores the fact that they have to pick their battles, and Flash would not be one they could win). The "patent unencumbered" part seems to only be answered with vague accusations about possible patent infringement. The only real analysis on that is one blog post by a codec engineer, and as people here have pointed out, it makes more sense to trust that Google's patent lawyers looked at a multimillion dollar acquisition a lot harder than that analysis. The fee part was answered pretty weakly in the Ars article. Fees would cripple open source projects, and they just tried to gloss over that by pointing to Google.
- spiffworks 16y ago
  Yeah, Google really screwed themselves with that blogpost. To quote from a ZDNet article "Out of 250 words, open was mentioned 8 times." I don't know why they feel the necessity to paint everything that they do as open. This move itself could have been explained in one line like so: "We believe that the de facto codec for HTML5 video should be royalty-free, and to that end cannot continue supporting H.264 in our browser any longer." That much would have sufficed, and avoided a lot of the pointless bickering.

davidjhamp 16y ago

Getting rid of flash is more difficult then getting rid of x264 since its obviously used all over the web. Dropping support for x264 now will prevent a similar issue in the future. Its a great first step. Having a company like Mozilla pay a royalty on each user would cripple Firefox and any new browsers that may come along.

agent86 16y ago

Maybe I'm just a moron, but couldn't a lot of this problem be solved by making the decoder free to use in all circumstances? They already allow free Internet broadcast at no royalty, and have other free parts of their licensing now, so they're clearly open to the concept at least. If I understand things correctly, for people shipping decoders the royalty amount is capped at $6.5 million a year. So they're making $6.5 million from Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. All in all, probably a few hundred million over everyone? Would it not be more advantageous to leave that money on the table, completely entrench your format EVERYWHERE, and then pick it up on the professional/encoder side of things? CNN, CNET, Fox, whoever, probably wouldn't mind paying a little more and getting a single universal format for everything everywhere and home users/hobbyists can play for free since they'll never hit the thresholds. Startups can get going by working in the free zones (< 100k paid subs, free un-paid use).

martythemaniak 16y ago

A rebuke from Opera: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/01/13/openness http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/01/13/openness

alanfalcon 16y ago

While this is clearly an opinion piece arguing for inclusion of H.264 in Chrome, I feel like this article actually does a great job of actually portraying most of the facts that affect both side of the argument. Certainly it feels like the most informative article I've read on the subject (again, despite its bias.)