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>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 standar

by 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.
    - gorog 16y ago
      We already have wavelet codecs like Dirac, which are quite exotic compared to MPEG4 / VP8 / Theora.
kenjackson 16y ago
This is an important point not just for ideological reasons, but it is one reason why the FUD argument is not symmetric. Since H264 was implemented in the open with open and large membership to the body, it is more difficult for some company to come out of the woodwork and say, "Hey, we have a patent that H264 rides on, but we didn't know it until now" Note, QCOM tried this with H264 several years ago and got their butt handed to them by the courts (http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=1037466 http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=1037466). People have had 10 years to examine this open specification. I think its reasonable to say that one would have found a violation by now. And almost all the majors are already either licensees or licensors. There's a slim chance that there's a patent floating around in some patent troll portfolio that hasn't been examined, but that's the only real vector I can see of a legitimate surprise H264 patent violation. Whereas with WebM its been in the public domain less than a year. It could feasibly take a few years for it to be reaonable that anyone who would have done due diligence to have done so. It's completely reasonable that in a year from now Siemans comes out and says, "WebM infringes these three patents we have". A court is not likely to throw it out saying they've been sitting on them.
- etherealG 16y ago
  While what you're saying is true, the royalties side of things has been locked down by Google's legal team very effectively. If said patent holder makes a patent claim against WebM they automatically destroy all free royalty rights for themselves on the same codec (if I understand correctly). This means that while they could try to hold Google (or any other user of the codec) to some kind of patent royalties, Google could retaliate for any use that company or individual makes of the same codec (with as much leeway to set a price as the patent gives the original individual or company. This is the true genious of the WebM license. It means even if this does happen in the future, Google can destroy whoever has this patent through a massive counter. It also means that any challenge would have to be made extremely carefully. edited for spelling :)
  - cornedpig 16y ago
    Doesn't matter if the patent holder is a troll with no viable products of its own.

by Athtar 16y ago

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.
  - gorog 16y ago
    We already have wavelet codecs like Dirac, which are quite exotic compared to MPEG4 / VP8 / Theora.

kenjackson 16y ago

This is an important point not just for ideological reasons, but it is one reason why the FUD argument is not symmetric. Since H264 was implemented in the open with open and large membership to the body, it is more difficult for some company to come out of the woodwork and say, "Hey, we have a patent that H264 rides on, but we didn't know it until now" Note, QCOM tried this with H264 several years ago and got their butt handed to them by the courts (http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=1037466 http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=1037466). People have had 10 years to examine this open specification. I think its reasonable to say that one would have found a violation by now. And almost all the majors are already either licensees or licensors. There's a slim chance that there's a patent floating around in some patent troll portfolio that hasn't been examined, but that's the only real vector I can see of a legitimate surprise H264 patent violation. Whereas with WebM its been in the public domain less than a year. It could feasibly take a few years for it to be reaonable that anyone who would have done due diligence to have done so. It's completely reasonable that in a year from now Siemans comes out and says, "WebM infringes these three patents we have". A court is not likely to throw it out saying they've been sitting on them.

etherealG 16y ago
While what you're saying is true, the royalties side of things has been locked down by Google's legal team very effectively. If said patent holder makes a patent claim against WebM they automatically destroy all free royalty rights for themselves on the same codec (if I understand correctly). This means that while they could try to hold Google (or any other user of the codec) to some kind of patent royalties, Google could retaliate for any use that company or individual makes of the same codec (with as much leeway to set a price as the patent gives the original individual or company. This is the true genious of the WebM license. It means even if this does happen in the future, Google can destroy whoever has this patent through a massive counter. It also means that any challenge would have to be made extremely carefully. edited for spelling :)
- cornedpig 16y ago
  Doesn't matter if the patent holder is a troll with no viable products of its own.