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Chromium Blog: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change
- drivebyacct2 16y agoJust when I thought there was a chance that this topic would get a break on HN. I guess I appreciate the link, if Google hadn't tweeted about it (I'm assuming they will) I probably wouldn't have seen this link. Their answers are right, but it's the answers that aren't present, that are more telling. They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms. In my opinion, those are the only questions worth asking. Their answers about H.264 having little adoption with the <video> tag and about having to dually encode with the current HTML5 video scene anyway is spot on. WebM gets you native playback in every major browser but IE, with Flash fallback working in IE. There actually is a day, very soon that, Flash assisted, anything will play WebM. Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post.
- othermaciej 16y agoAre you saying Safari doesn't count as a "major browser"?
- andybak 16y agoDon't most statistics put it at about 5%? I don't know if it's "major" but it's probably worthy of consideration.
- othermaciej 16y ago~6% worldwide, ~8% Europe, ~13% US according to to http://www.netmarketshare.com/ http://www.netmarketshare.com/ I would canonically count IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera as "major browsers".
- Kylekramer 16y agoGiven that that it has 5-6% of market share, I think it is fair to leave it out of the major browsers. Not ignorable, but hardly major. It is iffy to even place Chrome as one, even though it seems like it will be in the future.
- drivebyacct2 16y agoSorta (I didn't realize how much higher their share was than Opera's). If they choose not to implement a free, open source, easily available codec because they're Apple... then they can get lumped in with Internet Explorer and enjoy the fallback to Flash. I know Jobs is a big fan.
- kenjackson 16y agoAnd lets be clear Safari on the desktop isn't the interesting one. Its the iOS devices. The iOS devices won't have Flash to fallback on either. So basically every iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch won't be able to watch your WebM videos AT ALL. There is no fallback, unless you encode to H264. Now maybe you can say that in this new HTML5 web world mobile Apple devices are irrelevant. I personally think you'd be wrong. H264 is the only codec that will generally be supported on every device, either directly or by Flash. From Chrome to Firefox to iOS to IE.
- redthrowaway 16y agoIf Youtube goes WebM/flash only, iOS will support WebM, period. Not being able to watch youtube videos would be like the Flash noise of a year ago, but worse, as there's no reason not to support WebM.
- kenjackson 16y agoApple and Jobs aren't shy about saying, "Nope, not doing it". Especially with those they view as enemies and trust me, Google is their arch enemy now, much moreso than Microsoft. A big reason they may not do it is backwards compat on HW accleration. They have a working solution on all devices today (H264). They're not likely to want to screw their old customers over a codec they aren't particularly fond of that was rammed down their throat by Google. Here's what I'd do if I were Apple, host my own video service, that serves H264 or Flash. MS and Apple throw their marketing weight and services around that (their various products auto upload to this new service). Now all iOS devices can play this video AND so can everyone else. YouTube dies a MySpace like death. If YouTube tries that I really think they may be sealing their own fate. To put it another way, people are NOT going to give up their iOS devices. But they will use a different video service.
- rmc 16y agoIf YouTube and all online video is WebM, then iOS will have no way to play 99% of videos (no flash remember). Apple can't afford for ipad to be "the device that doesn't play videos"
- rmc 16y agoYes. Safari is a minor browser. Tiny market share.
- drgath 16y ago"or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms" Are you referring to other devices running Android? I don't think Google's stance is anti-h.264, it's anti anything that isn't royalty-free (forever) in the web stack. And I agree with that.
- drivebyacct2 16y agoAndroid, YouTube, etc. I suppose the distinction of it being the "web stack" is one thing, but doesn't it seem that YouTube should fall in line with their WebM-friendly stance? I can certainly get behind it, and despite my cynicism in regards to timing, etc, I'm behind the 1000lb gorilla using their weight to bring attention and popularity to freedom.
- yanw 16y agoEvidently more of YouTube's videos are being encoded in WebM, previously it was just 720p videos uploaded after the WebM announcement in May 2010: http://imgur.com/rWIIf http://imgur.com/rWIIf
- cpearce 16y ago"Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post." This has been discussed on the WebM blog: "The WebM/VP8 hardware decoder implementation has already been licensed to over twenty partners and is proven in silicon. We expect the first commercial chips to integrate our VP8 decoder IP to be available in the first quarter of 2011." http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8... "They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms." Incidentally, months ago they've also blogged about why they'll keep YouTube using Flash, rather than HTML5: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html
- drivebyacct2 16y agoOh I saw that, I meant more that there are millions of mobile (and non-mobile) devices that have hardware decoding that won't be able to play WebM video anywhere near as well as H.264.
- weixiyen 16y agoI think people change phones pretty often, especially in the smartphone market, so the mobile devices should be the quickest to support WebM.
- ZeroGravitas 16y agoThe smartphone market is also growing quickly itself, which is why Android managed to equal the installed base of iPhones only a few months after the marketshare (i.e. current sales) rose above Apple's.
- clark-kent 16y agoWebM will work on all major browsers, IE9 by downloading and installing the VP8 codec on Windows, Safari by installing the codec for quicktime. Of course it will work on Opera, Firefox 4, and Chrome. The problem is getting it on iOS devices.
- pilif 16y agoWhat I find funny is that half the Internet was complaining when Google announced to support H.264 in the first place when, clearly, supporting nothing but open formats was the right way to go (see Mozilla's decision to only support theora) And now that Google is removing H.264 support again, half the Internet is, again, up in arms about the decision, using the same arguments as before. Well, I guess this time it's the half of the Internet that wasnt complaining last time :-)
- pornel 16y agoThere was no WebM back then. The only alternative was Ogg Theora (even before 1.1 improvements IIRC), which Google didn't consider as suitable alternative. Google doesn't have RMS's consistency on the matter. They balance practicality with idealism.
- TomOfTTB 16y agoIf Google really wants to force WebM adoption they need to go "all-in". Set a deadline for pulling all h.264 videos from YouTube and force Apple and Microsoft to support the WebM standard. I know that sounds worse than what they're doing but hear me out. Right now they're creating an environment where everyone will have to do twice the work to support HTML5. That's not good for anyone. So if they're insistent on making WebM the standard they need to pull out the big guns and force Apple and Microsoft to capitulate. It'll be bitter and nasty but at the end we'll get a standard out of it and not a fragmented mess.
- cracell 16y agoThis "twice the work" argument was clearly addressed by the post. Firefox has a much larger market share than Chrome and has already clearly stated they will not support h.264. If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was Firefox and Google has just decided to support them in it. And using their position as owner of YouTube to force h.264 out before WebM is ready would just hurt YouTube and make everyone with a mobile device made prior to WebM decoders being included (assuming that gains momentum) unable to watch YouTube videos.
- kenjackson 16y agoThe twice the work wasn't really addressed. No one really cares about the desktop. You can get whatever codec you need whenever. It's mobile that people care about. That's where HTML5 will really make a difference. Firefox is nowhere in Mobile. If this was just about the desktop I'd say just randomly encode every video. I'm going to have every codec installed anyways. But that's not the discussion.
- pornel 16y ago> No one really cares about the desktop. Last time I checked desktop usage was still is 90-99% range, 3G bandwidth — even with H.264 — allowed only low-quality video streaming, and operators were tightening limits on their "Unlimited†" tariffs. If you really care about mobiles today, you're encoding special mobile-only (low-res baseline profile) version anyway. Codec war on desktop doesn't really affect that yet.
- slackgentoo 16y agoFYI, the person in charge (Mike Jazayeri) previously worked at Microsoft. I am not suggesting anything, just find it is quite interesting.
- jrockway 16y agoIt's almost like employment is some sort of contract instead of some sort of religion.
- slackgentoo 16y agoI think it is interesting to think how a person's past (work) experience may influence the person's current thinking and judgement. Nothing else.
- Luecke 16y agoWhen are they going to remove MP3 support from the audio tag?
- cookiecaper 16y agoNever. Google is not actively attempting to promote Vorbis or non-MP3 technologies at the moment. It'd be silly to waste resources doing that as MP3 patents are nearing their end-of-life. MP3 is already a lost battle and the patents have so little life left in them that it's not worth trying to squeeze what can be gotten out of that.
- mikeryan 16y agoThis seems to work under a bit of a hazy assumption that there needs to be a "baseline" video codec. The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the dawn of the web. If using a baseline format was their real argument they wouldn't be supporting a patent encumbered MP3 format for the audio tag, same as Firefox.
- yanw 16y agoThat's just petty nitpicking, the h264 patent threat in much more immediate and substantial so an alternative is needed specially since we are at the beginning of this shift and setting open standards now will save a lot of heartache in the future.
- mikeryan 16y agoIts not petty nitpicking, its their entire argument. Including H.264 doesn't in any way prevent WebM from becoming the more mainstream standard. Except for the fact that likely more people would choose to use H.264 over WebM so they don't have to re-encode their video catalog using inferior tools in an inferior codec. The "Video Startups" he's defending aren't being stifled under H.264's licensing fees. The fees exist but they're pretty much negligible to a video provider compared to any other cost they are incurring. If they are really concerned for the poor video startup give them options to use the best tools for their need.
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- lukeschlather 16y agoWere you there at the dawn of the web? I wasn't, but it's my understanding that GIF caused a ton of legal problems.
- annevk 16y ago
- cookiecaper 16y agoI've been trying to refrain from commenting on these stories the last few days, but oh well. This whole debate is stupid and of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go. Mozilla supports it, Chrome supports it, Opera supports it, Flash will be supporting it in the near future, meaning any of the other desktop browsers will support it. The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264 hardware acceleration. Well, dude, you'll just have to deal with software decode for some videos. The world does not revolve around iOS, no matter how much you want it to. There is no good reason to support H.264 -- WebM provides roughly equivalent features and quality and MPEG-LA will be out for blood ever more as the clock ticks down on H.264 patents. Everyone knows that there is no valid argument here for supporting H.264 other than "but... that'll decrease the battery life on my iPad or iPhone! :(". That's life, man; technology moves forward and old things get obsoleted, even mind-blowingly shiny things made by Apple. I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.
- mikeryan 16y agoThere is no good reason to support H.264 What? Except for the fact that as a video site, all of my existing video is already in H.264. All of my encoding tools support H.264. Every other device I need to stream that video content too including mobile devices, tablets, Connected TV's, Blu-Ray players and Over the Top boxes (Roku, Boxee) support H.264 (generally at the hardware level).
- cookiecaper 16y agoThe same argument applies to video sites. We shouldn't be held back and stuck on a proprietary format just because you don't want to write a script to go through and re-encode everything to WebM. H.264 heretofore has been "the standard", so of course most existing devices will have better support for H.264 video than for the not-even-one-year-old WebM. Google and Mozilla are attempting to change that to avoid a repeat of GIF or even MP3. The argument boils down to "I don't want to put in the effort to switch to the new stuff, and my old stuff likes the old stuff better anyway, so Google is a jerk for trying to make the old stuff less common." And that's just a silly argument that could easily be applied to any number of things in technology, which is a very fast moving field. Things change a lot in this space and it's just one of those things you have to accept. Google has not obliterated or disabled your H.264 decoders. You are welcome to keep H.264 video around all you want (according, of course, to your license terms with the MPEG-LA). Removing native support from Chrom(e|ium) does not mean that all H.264 video is now magically broken or unplayable. If you are happy with H.264, you are free to continue to use it.
- weixiyen 16y agoNot sure why Google is getting so much hate. I would direct it at the following instead: - MPEG-LA - Firefox - Opera I'm not sure what everyone expected here. There was no way that h.264 would be the standard format for the video tag. This is one of many moves to push WebM forward as the undisputed standard. It's been less than 1 year since public announcement of WebM, and Google IO is around the corner in May '11. Expect more positive news on the WebM front. There are 3 major arguments left standing against WebM 1) h.264 is better than vp8 2) prevalent hardware support for WebM 3) iOS Would anyone really be that surprised if 2 of the 3 are addressed within the year?
- jsz0 16y agoI'm not sure what Google's motivations are but they are taking a huge risk here. If WebM gets a strong patent challenge, or isn't widely adopted/supported for other reasons, then Google is going to demonstrate their ability to pick the wrong horse in a very high profile way. It will be interesting to see what type of fallout that creates. Imagine a new world where Google, with all of its power, cannot influence the future of the web? I think that would have some major ramifications.
- rtrunck 16y agoHas Google donated the patents they hold encompassing WebM to the public domain?
- mbrubeck 16y agoNo, but the WebM license includes a perpetual, royalty-free patent license: http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/ http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/ The patent license is irrevocable unless you file a suit against VP8 users claiming that VP8 violates your own patents. (This is a common clause for open-source patent grants; basically it means that Google can still use its patents "defensively" as a deterrent against other patent suits, but it can't use them in an "offensive" first-strike.)
- benreesman 16y agolet's all acknowledge this controversy for what it is: an apple vs. google popularity contest. and with that said: suck it apple. suck it long, and suck it hard. sent from my iPhone.
- protomyth 16y agoI just don't get why my reaction should be different for WebM than it was from OpenXML. A "standard" controlled my one company is not something I think I can trust.
- extension 16y agoH.264 is just not going to work for web video, even as a defacto standard. Firefox will never support it and it prevents any small time player from entering the browser game down the road. It's also a serious risk for big corps who don't have a license. Keep that in mind when you criticize Google. You're asking them to expose themselves to liability (or pay huge license fees). If we're going to the trouble of phasing in a <video> tag that will take years to become viable, we might as well throw in a properly unencumbered codec that will also take years to become viable. Why bother with <video> if it's just going to go rotten as soon as it gains critical mass and the patent trolls pounce? Nothing critical is breaking today, we're just going to have to wait a bit longer to play with the shiny new video tag, which is well worth it to have it done properly. Just be glad that one of the tech megacorps is pushing for standards and freedom as part of their business plan. Usually it's the other way around.