8 ms·

The Ambiguity of Open and H.264 vs. VP8

159 points by antimatter15 16y ago

ergo98 16y ago
Fantastic article. This is one of very few entries on this debacle that is actually informed and insightful.
- zmmz 16y ago
  I agree that it's a well written article and provides a very good overview. The tables are especially helpful. However, there is one rather large oversight:H.264 is an open standard This is not necessarily correct. As a citizen of the EU, I have to disagree. One of the EU pre-requisites[1] for something being qualified as an Open Standard is: The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#European_Union_definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#European_Union_de...
  - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
    It would appear that Steve Jobs agrees too. In his "Thoughts on Flash" he mentions several times that HTML5 is an Open Standard and contrasts this favourably with Flash. But when he talks about H.264 he refers to it simply as an industry standard. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
  - hackermom 16y ago
    I'd think that H.264 isn't subject to this definition - or, at worst, it falls in a gray area of sorts - as the H.264 technology is unencumbered by license fees if it's used non-commercially. No developer of gratis software using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 tech. has ever been subjected to a legal case initiated by the MPEG-LA.
    - bzbarsky 16y ago
      > the H.264 technology is unencumbered by license fees if > it's used non-commercially That's not true, unfortunately. There may have been no lawsuits (I can't comment on that, though I'd like to see your data). But that's just because the MPEG-LA hasn't felt like suing people. If you're shipping an H.264 encoder or decoder in binary form to people and not paying the relevant licensing fees, then you're infringing on the patents. There's no exception for "non-commercial" use there last I checked. If you think there is, please cite.
      - anonymous246 16y ago
        They probably won't do it. Somebody will come up something similar to the hack/exploit that Mozilla did: set up a for-profit corporation to receive money and a non-profit foundation (which owns 100% of corp's shares) to do the development. Then they can claim that the non-profit foundation is the one that's really using the patents and hence should not have to pay royalties.
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te_chris 16y ago
Very good summary of the issue. I particularly like the point that <video> is, in and of itself, open and as such the establishment of a consistent baseline codec in VP8 could actually allow h.26x to flourish and innovate as the codec of choice for high-quality content.
sigzero 16y ago
As the end user...I only care about which one gives me the best experience period.
- barrkel 16y ago
  The trouble is that "best experience" is a vague term. The best experience today may be different from the best experience tomorrow, which in turn may not causally lead to the best experience of all potential experiences 2 or 5 years later. Figuring out how to get the best experience a few years out is difficult; it involves some measure of creating the future, and some measure of predicting the future. It's too simplistic to argue H.264 as being the best for the user, hence it should be supported. Figuring out whether it is actually best for the user depends on a lot of variables, a lot of hard work, and some measure of work.
- pyre 16y ago
  I'll expand a bit on barrkel's comment: Back in the day when IE dominated Netscape Navigator/Communicator, IE was the best end-user experience. Flash-forward a few years and IE is languishing, with practically no new development happening on it. At this time (prior to Mozilla taking off), IE is still the best end-user experience available, but not the best end-user experience possible. It to took the Mozilla Suite and it's spin-off, Firefox, to bring a better user-experience to market. The same applies now. While h.264 might provide the best experience right now, it's (possibly) at the cost of the experience in the future. What happens in the future when the MPEG-LA decides to start changing/enforcing royalties? What growing pains will the industry have to endure to change formats away from h.264 if that becomes an issue? What if h.264 is so entrenched that they can't migrate away from it? Why not just standardize on something now that won't have those problems later? To fall back on the analogy, if IE hadn't pushed Netscape out of the market, what would the web ecosystem look like now?
Herring 16y ago
>open standard >incompatible with open source Does this make sense to anyone? It seems to me the word open doesn't mean much now.
- pohl 16y ago
  The term "Open standard" predates the term "open source". The latter term was born as recently as January 1998 - around the same moment when Netscape Navigator was open sourced. The semantics that the latter term's use of "open" imply cannot be forced on the former.
  - Herring 16y ago
    I don't see that disagreeing with what I said. I can't tell if it was meant to, either.
    - pohl 16y ago
      Only inasmuch as the phrase "doesn't mean much now" suggests that it ever had a solid, singular, standardized meaning.
      - Herring 16y ago
        Fair enough.
  - sayrer 16y ago
    (disclosure: I work for Mozilla) I've never found the argument you're making very compelling. It's "open" in the same way that golf course with a $500 greens fee is open. What it really constitutes is a way for existing market players to collude, and thereby exclude future participants. Some of those future participants might be quite disruptive, and benefit consumers. It's really pretty funny that some terribly corrupt standards organizations arrived at a totally unsatisfactory definition of "open", and then tried to claim that better definitons of "open" somehow infringed(!) on their early, bad definition.
crab 16y ago
If Firefox, Chrome and Opera used the OS’s media frameworks, we would be set back into the dark ages when people used every video codec imaginable and nobody would be happy. Dubious. The incentive to publish in a format viewable by the widest audience applies regardless of what format that happens to be. It's true that some publisher targeting a niche audience might use a narrowly-available codec, but 1) that's not a bad thing, and 2) there is nothing stopping anybody from doing that with a plugin instead, no matter what stupid limitations you cripple your <video> implementation with. In the general case, though, web video publishers want their content to be viewable by the broadest audience. If the freetard assertion that we need a mandatory codec that everybody can use is accurate, why on earth would the free market (video publishers) not arrive at the same conclusion? Moreover, how did it not already arrive at that conclusion? Why do we use JPG/GIF/PNG/MP3? How can the case of Flash becoming the ubiquitous form of video playback (ca. 2004-2010) not be taken as evidence that the web can converge on a format without interference from supposed supporters of freedom and openness? Why is there this meme that <video> would be total anarchy if not for paternalistic browser vendors when we have concrete and recent examples of just the opposite?
Athtar 16y ago
>H.264 is an open standard. It was developed by a committee, standardized, reviewed by many engineers and developers for multiple companies and has been standardized for use with a multitude of containers and devices. >VP8 is not a standard. It was developed secretly by a single company, and until recently, had only a single working implementation. The public wasn’t open to collaboration on the specification until the bitstream spec was frozen, including the bugs that existed within. This is an interesting point. One I had never even realized.
- mikeryan 16y ago
  There's almost very little point to opening up the VP8 standards process. It seems pretty much designed to challenge H.264 but avoid its patents (how well? TBD). Its severely bound in what it can be by trying to avoid H.264's existing patents.
  - pyre 16y ago
    > Its severely bound in what it can be by trying to avoid > H.264's existing patents. Doesn't that describe anything that isn't h.264? Might as well say that h.264 got there and patented everything good, so they must have won. We should just pack up and go home, they get to have a monopoly on video codecs for the next 14+ years.
    - mikeryan 16y ago
      Doesn't that describe anything that isn't h.264 Yeah probably - ask the Theora guys how hard its been ;-) The upside is that it could very much, out of necessity, drive some considerable advancement in video compression algorithms.
      - sitmack 16y ago
        h.264 doesn't have a patent cliff. The move from mpeg1->2->4 has been one of gradual refinement. Like the move from 1 pixel to .5 pixel motion estimation. We should be using a layered codec so those ridiculous patents can be folded in as they expire.
mryall 16y ago
This is a great post and clarified quite a few confusing points of the discussion for me. One area that unfortunately it didn't really cover was the impact of widely available hardware and GPU-accelerated decoding for H.264. Surely the millions of non-PC devices being sold with H.264 support (even baseline) will have some effect on the outcome of the new video format war.
- vetinari 16y ago
  Not really. The upcoming generation of mobile devices will have hardware support for VP8 and the users upgrade these devices very often.
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    Why would a hardware vendor add VP8 Support? I can think of two reasons not to: o They run the risk of patent infringement o H.264 is already playable everywhere, universally, either natively (and with hardware support) or with Flash.
    - spiffworks 16y ago
      Well, the tegra2, which is the reference platform for Honeycomb, has vp8 support in hardware. Texas Instruments announced full support for vp8 in all their future DSPs and media processors and Imagination Technologies, the people who make the GPUs on the iPhone have committed to vp8 support in their next generation GPUs. It is very likely that for the iPhone6, apple will be able to add webm support at little extra cost to itself, and no patent threat, since they are already MPEG-LA licensees. Same goes for all the other manufacturers- they are already MPEG-LA licensees and safe from the vast majority of patent threats. Other than that, I would love to see a patent troll try and go after TI or Nvidia.
      - eddieplan9 16y ago
        That's very good point. Same goes for all the other manufacturers- they are already MPEG-LA licensees and safe from the vast majority of patent threats. So all those implementing WebM still needs to license H.264 to be safe from patent threat, and all those implementing WebM almost all have implemented H.264. WebM is only an addition to H.264. So the question for Google is always why dropping H.264 and never why adding WebM (since it is always there).
TechNewb 16y ago
The biggest part of the 'rage' towards Google over the drop of Chrome's native ability to use H.264 in the <video> tag, is that Google is trying to spin as its for the benefit of innovation. Which is not the case. Flash has been great, but it's not needed for the distribution of video content, and the fact that WebM is a lawsuit waiting to happen does not help either. Great article though!
- zaphar 16y ago
  H.264 could also be considered a lawsuit waiting to happen. Who knows who out there has a patent it infringes? Maybe the webm folks have a few patents it violates?
  - mikeryan 16y ago
    H.264 could also be considered a lawsuit waiting to happen It could be and its been challenged at least once in the past (however Qualcomm lost that challenge), but though its not free, its patent restrictions are pretty clear and tested. It is 7 years old. While stranger things have happened, its very unlikely that as a licensee of H.264 you are going to be sued. WebM's status is not as clear, sometimes you choose the devil you know.
- TechNewb 16y ago
  YouTube in HTML5 is an amazing experience through the YouTube5 Safari extension from Connor McKay. H.264, through YouTube, on Safari. For the low low price of free: http://www.verticalforest.com/2010/10/27/youtube5-version-2/ http://www.verticalforest.com/2010/10/27/youtube5-version-2/ Best YouTube user experience ever, auto loads the highest quality every time, and downloads faster. This is the way YouTube should be!
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  Has HTML5 been used to deliver any valuable content on desktop machines? And by "valuable" I mean terrible Hollywoood movies or trashy TV Shows. I was under the impression that they all used Flash and Silverlight because then they could implement DRM. They don't need to do that on iOS devices, because the whole platform is DRM'd. For example BBC iPlayer is HTML5 to iOS, but Flash to Mac OS X. They've announced that all the other mobile devices will be served via Flash. People that want to post videos of their cat dancing or a backyard physics experiment on the other hand, have totally different needs, like the ability to post it in their subscriber only cat physics forum without worrying about licence fees.
wallflower 16y ago
> MPEG LA has a royalty cap so that companies selling high-volume products know beforehand the maximum amount of royalties they'll have to pay to MPEG LA in a given year. The current $5 million cap really isn't much for a big player possibly generating many billions of annual revenues with products that include an AVC/H.264 encoder and/or decoder. http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-licensing-terms.html http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-lic...
- magicalist 16y ago
  leaving google aside, I think it's pretty obvious that the "royalty-free codec" that entities like Mozilla are looking for is pretty incompatible with "but there's a cap on the royalties." hence the <video> situation we were in even before last week and google's blog post.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- alanfalcon 16y ago
  The cap is $6.5 million for the next five years and then there is no limit on how much it could be raised after that. The royalties can't be raised more than 10% every five year period, but the cap isn't under that restriction.
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  I would suggest the reason they have a cap is because a) it is anti-competitive towards smaller firms moving into the market to challenge the incumbents who make up MPEG-LA b) it would make economic sense for a bunch of big companies to get together and produce a competitive codec and compete with H.264 if they didn't structure their fees in this way. They are after all a government sanctioned cartel. You don't get away with this kind of anti-competitive price discrimination otherwise. Which is why it always confuses me that people talk about what an excellent codec it is. How do you know it's excellent when the legal structures are set up specifically to exclude competition, and therefore comparison?
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shuri 16y ago
Could this be a move to get the H.264 patent holders to release their patent hold on the standard?
- danbmil99 16y ago
  It's definitely putting pressure on them to provide a royalty-free version, which might include some of the less performant profiles. This was in the mix originally when H.264 was being developed, but major patent holders refused to go along with a 'royalty-free baseline' profile.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  No way that could happen. It would have be unanimous to be of any use at all.
bradleyland 16y ago
Why is it necessary for HTML5 to specify a codec for the <video> and <audio> tag when no format is specified for <img>? (I'm not being rhetorical)
- othermaciej 16y ago
  It's not really necessary, and so far the HTML5 spec hasn't done so. However, it would be useful if all browsers had at least one codec in common. GIF and JPEG became de facto standard image formats because all browsers supported them, even though there was no de jure requirement.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
hackermom 16y ago
I believe this is to date the sanest article related to the H.264/WebM debacle; it clearly, and with detail, brings out the fact that H.264 is open. However, it fails to clarify a very important detail to this discussion, surrounding the royalty issue: H.264 coding/decoding is free-of-charge to implement, distribute and use in non-commercial contexts. Google's, Mozilla's and Opera's actions and careless, uninformed (or possibly intentionally slanderous) responses in this discussion clearly show that their issue with H.264 isn't that H.264 isn't open enough, but rather that it isn't gratis enough.

159 points by antimatter15 16y ago

ergo98 16y ago

Fantastic article. This is one of very few entries on this debacle that is actually informed and insightful.

zmmz 16y ago
I agree that it's a well written article and provides a very good overview. The tables are especially helpful. However, there is one rather large oversight:H.264 is an open standard This is not necessarily correct. As a citizen of the EU, I have to disagree. One of the EU pre-requisites[1] for something being qualified as an Open Standard is: The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#European_Union_definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard#European_Union_de...
- ZeroGravitas 16y ago
  It would appear that Steve Jobs agrees too. In his "Thoughts on Flash" he mentions several times that HTML5 is an Open Standard and contrasts this favourably with Flash. But when he talks about H.264 he refers to it simply as an industry standard. http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
- hackermom 16y ago
  I'd think that H.264 isn't subject to this definition - or, at worst, it falls in a gray area of sorts - as the H.264 technology is unencumbered by license fees if it's used non-commercially. No developer of gratis software using MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 tech. has ever been subjected to a legal case initiated by the MPEG-LA.
  - bzbarsky 16y ago
    > the H.264 technology is unencumbered by license fees if > it's used non-commercially That's not true, unfortunately. There may have been no lawsuits (I can't comment on that, though I'd like to see your data). But that's just because the MPEG-LA hasn't felt like suing people. If you're shipping an H.264 encoder or decoder in binary form to people and not paying the relevant licensing fees, then you're infringing on the patents. There's no exception for "non-commercial" use there last I checked. If you think there is, please cite.
    - anonymous246 16y ago
      They probably won't do it. Somebody will come up something similar to the hack/exploit that Mozilla did: set up a for-profit corporation to receive money and a non-profit foundation (which owns 100% of corp's shares) to do the development. Then they can claim that the non-profit foundation is the one that's really using the patents and hence should not have to pay royalties.

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te_chris 16y ago

Very good summary of the issue. I particularly like the point that <video> is, in and of itself, open and as such the establishment of a consistent baseline codec in VP8 could actually allow h.26x to flourish and innovate as the codec of choice for high-quality content.

sigzero 16y ago

As the end user...I only care about which one gives me the best experience period.

barrkel 16y ago
The trouble is that "best experience" is a vague term. The best experience today may be different from the best experience tomorrow, which in turn may not causally lead to the best experience of all potential experiences 2 or 5 years later. Figuring out how to get the best experience a few years out is difficult; it involves some measure of creating the future, and some measure of predicting the future. It's too simplistic to argue H.264 as being the best for the user, hence it should be supported. Figuring out whether it is actually best for the user depends on a lot of variables, a lot of hard work, and some measure of work.
pyre 16y ago
I'll expand a bit on barrkel's comment: Back in the day when IE dominated Netscape Navigator/Communicator, IE was the best end-user experience. Flash-forward a few years and IE is languishing, with practically no new development happening on it. At this time (prior to Mozilla taking off), IE is still the best end-user experience available, but not the best end-user experience possible. It to took the Mozilla Suite and it's spin-off, Firefox, to bring a better user-experience to market. The same applies now. While h.264 might provide the best experience right now, it's (possibly) at the cost of the experience in the future. What happens in the future when the MPEG-LA decides to start changing/enforcing royalties? What growing pains will the industry have to endure to change formats away from h.264 if that becomes an issue? What if h.264 is so entrenched that they can't migrate away from it? Why not just standardize on something now that won't have those problems later? To fall back on the analogy, if IE hadn't pushed Netscape out of the market, what would the web ecosystem look like now?

Herring 16y ago

>open standard >incompatible with open source Does this make sense to anyone? It seems to me the word open doesn't mean much now.

pohl 16y ago
The term "Open standard" predates the term "open source". The latter term was born as recently as January 1998 - around the same moment when Netscape Navigator was open sourced. The semantics that the latter term's use of "open" imply cannot be forced on the former.
- Herring 16y ago
  I don't see that disagreeing with what I said. I can't tell if it was meant to, either.
  - pohl 16y ago
    Only inasmuch as the phrase "doesn't mean much now" suggests that it ever had a solid, singular, standardized meaning.
    - Herring 16y ago
      Fair enough.
- sayrer 16y ago
  (disclosure: I work for Mozilla) I've never found the argument you're making very compelling. It's "open" in the same way that golf course with a $500 greens fee is open. What it really constitutes is a way for existing market players to collude, and thereby exclude future participants. Some of those future participants might be quite disruptive, and benefit consumers. It's really pretty funny that some terribly corrupt standards organizations arrived at a totally unsatisfactory definition of "open", and then tried to claim that better definitons of "open" somehow infringed(!) on their early, bad definition.

crab 16y ago

If Firefox, Chrome and Opera used the OS’s media frameworks, we would be set back into the dark ages when people used every video codec imaginable and nobody would be happy. Dubious. The incentive to publish in a format viewable by the widest audience applies regardless of what format that happens to be. It's true that some publisher targeting a niche audience might use a narrowly-available codec, but 1) that's not a bad thing, and 2) there is nothing stopping anybody from doing that with a plugin instead, no matter what stupid limitations you cripple your <video> implementation with. In the general case, though, web video publishers want their content to be viewable by the broadest audience. If the freetard assertion that we need a mandatory codec that everybody can use is accurate, why on earth would the free market (video publishers) not arrive at the same conclusion? Moreover, how did it not already arrive at that conclusion? Why do we use JPG/GIF/PNG/MP3? How can the case of Flash becoming the ubiquitous form of video playback (ca. 2004-2010) not be taken as evidence that the web can converge on a format without interference from supposed supporters of freedom and openness? Why is there this meme that <video> would be total anarchy if not for paternalistic browser vendors when we have concrete and recent examples of just the opposite?

Athtar 16y ago

>H.264 is an open standard. It was developed by a committee, standardized, reviewed by many engineers and developers for multiple companies and has been standardized for use with a multitude of containers and devices. >VP8 is not a standard. It was developed secretly by a single company, and until recently, had only a single working implementation. The public wasn’t open to collaboration on the specification until the bitstream spec was frozen, including the bugs that existed within. This is an interesting point. One I had never even realized.

mikeryan 16y ago
There's almost very little point to opening up the VP8 standards process. It seems pretty much designed to challenge H.264 but avoid its patents (how well? TBD). Its severely bound in what it can be by trying to avoid H.264's existing patents.
- pyre 16y ago
  > Its severely bound in what it can be by trying to avoid > H.264's existing patents. Doesn't that describe anything that isn't h.264? Might as well say that h.264 got there and patented everything good, so they must have won. We should just pack up and go home, they get to have a monopoly on video codecs for the next 14+ years.
  - mikeryan 16y ago
    Doesn't that describe anything that isn't h.264 Yeah probably - ask the Theora guys how hard its been ;-) The upside is that it could very much, out of necessity, drive some considerable advancement in video compression algorithms.
    - sitmack 16y ago
      h.264 doesn't have a patent cliff. The move from mpeg1->2->4 has been one of gradual refinement. Like the move from 1 pixel to .5 pixel motion estimation. We should be using a layered codec so those ridiculous patents can be folded in as they expire.

mryall 16y ago

This is a great post and clarified quite a few confusing points of the discussion for me. One area that unfortunately it didn't really cover was the impact of widely available hardware and GPU-accelerated decoding for H.264. Surely the millions of non-PC devices being sold with H.264 support (even baseline) will have some effect on the outcome of the new video format war.

vetinari 16y ago
Not really. The upcoming generation of mobile devices will have hardware support for VP8 and the users upgrade these devices very often.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Why would a hardware vendor add VP8 Support? I can think of two reasons not to: o They run the risk of patent infringement o H.264 is already playable everywhere, universally, either natively (and with hardware support) or with Flash.
  - spiffworks 16y ago
    Well, the tegra2, which is the reference platform for Honeycomb, has vp8 support in hardware. Texas Instruments announced full support for vp8 in all their future DSPs and media processors and Imagination Technologies, the people who make the GPUs on the iPhone have committed to vp8 support in their next generation GPUs. It is very likely that for the iPhone6, apple will be able to add webm support at little extra cost to itself, and no patent threat, since they are already MPEG-LA licensees. Same goes for all the other manufacturers- they are already MPEG-LA licensees and safe from the vast majority of patent threats. Other than that, I would love to see a patent troll try and go after TI or Nvidia.
    - eddieplan9 16y ago
      That's very good point. Same goes for all the other manufacturers- they are already MPEG-LA licensees and safe from the vast majority of patent threats. So all those implementing WebM still needs to license H.264 to be safe from patent threat, and all those implementing WebM almost all have implemented H.264. WebM is only an addition to H.264. So the question for Google is always why dropping H.264 and never why adding WebM (since it is always there).

TechNewb 16y ago

The biggest part of the 'rage' towards Google over the drop of Chrome's native ability to use H.264 in the <video> tag, is that Google is trying to spin as its for the benefit of innovation. Which is not the case. Flash has been great, but it's not needed for the distribution of video content, and the fact that WebM is a lawsuit waiting to happen does not help either. Great article though!

zaphar 16y ago
H.264 could also be considered a lawsuit waiting to happen. Who knows who out there has a patent it infringes? Maybe the webm folks have a few patents it violates?
- mikeryan 16y ago
  H.264 could also be considered a lawsuit waiting to happen It could be and its been challenged at least once in the past (however Qualcomm lost that challenge), but though its not free, its patent restrictions are pretty clear and tested. It is 7 years old. While stranger things have happened, its very unlikely that as a licensee of H.264 you are going to be sued. WebM's status is not as clear, sometimes you choose the devil you know.
TechNewb 16y ago
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ZeroGravitas 16y ago
Has HTML5 been used to deliver any valuable content on desktop machines? And by "valuable" I mean terrible Hollywoood movies or trashy TV Shows. I was under the impression that they all used Flash and Silverlight because then they could implement DRM. They don't need to do that on iOS devices, because the whole platform is DRM'd. For example BBC iPlayer is HTML5 to iOS, but Flash to Mac OS X. They've announced that all the other mobile devices will be served via Flash. People that want to post videos of their cat dancing or a backyard physics experiment on the other hand, have totally different needs, like the ability to post it in their subscriber only cat physics forum without worrying about licence fees.

wallflower 16y ago

> MPEG LA has a royalty cap so that companies selling high-volume products know beforehand the maximum amount of royalties they'll have to pay to MPEG LA in a given year. The current $5 million cap really isn't much for a big player possibly generating many billions of annual revenues with products that include an AVC/H.264 encoder and/or decoder. http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-licensing-terms.html http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-lic...

magicalist 16y ago
leaving google aside, I think it's pretty obvious that the "royalty-free codec" that entities like Mozilla are looking for is pretty incompatible with "but there's a cap on the royalties." hence the <video> situation we were in even before last week and google's blog post.
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alanfalcon 16y ago
The cap is $6.5 million for the next five years and then there is no limit on how much it could be raised after that. The royalties can't be raised more than 10% every five year period, but the cap isn't under that restriction.
ZeroGravitas 16y ago
I would suggest the reason they have a cap is because a) it is anti-competitive towards smaller firms moving into the market to challenge the incumbents who make up MPEG-LA b) it would make economic sense for a bunch of big companies to get together and produce a competitive codec and compete with H.264 if they didn't structure their fees in this way. They are after all a government sanctioned cartel. You don't get away with this kind of anti-competitive price discrimination otherwise. Which is why it always confuses me that people talk about what an excellent codec it is. How do you know it's excellent when the legal structures are set up specifically to exclude competition, and therefore comparison?

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shuri 16y ago

Could this be a move to get the H.264 patent holders to release their patent hold on the standard?

danbmil99 16y ago
It's definitely putting pressure on them to provide a royalty-free version, which might include some of the less performant profiles. This was in the mix originally when H.264 was being developed, but major patent holders refused to go along with a 'royalty-free baseline' profile.
CamperBob 16y ago
No way that could happen. It would have be unanimous to be of any use at all.

bradleyland 16y ago

Why is it necessary for HTML5 to specify a codec for the <video> and <audio> tag when no format is specified for <img>? (I'm not being rhetorical)

othermaciej 16y ago
It's not really necessary, and so far the HTML5 spec hasn't done so. However, it would be useful if all browsers had at least one codec in common. GIF and JPEG became de facto standard image formats because all browsers supported them, even though there was no de jure requirement.
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hackermom 16y ago

I believe this is to date the sanest article related to the H.264/WebM debacle; it clearly, and with detail, brings out the fact that H.264 is open. However, it fails to clarify a very important detail to this discussion, surrounding the royalty issue: H.264 coding/decoding is free-of-charge to implement, distribute and use in non-commercial contexts. Google's, Mozilla's and Opera's actions and careless, uninformed (or possibly intentionally slanderous) responses in this discussion clearly show that their issue with H.264 isn't that H.264 isn't open enough, but rather that it isn't gratis enough.