I'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.
> This whole debate is stupid and of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go.
This whole debate is stupid and of course WebM exclusivity is the wrong way to go.
An "of course" is a really lame way to enter a debate, because it says that everyone take the debating so far seriously are idiots, which I don't believe the rest of HN are. The other alternative is that it's much more nuanced than "of course" allows, you just haven't understood the debate.
> The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264 hardware acceleration
No, people are complaining for many other valid reasons. Like: the digital video world runs on H.264, it has deep, complicated, expensive internal toolchains to support it, legacy archives encoded in it, basically entire businesses built around it. The video production world is far larger and more complex than you're picturing it. A "script" isn't nearly enough to do what you're talking about; suggesting you just need to point ffmpeg at a hard drive of stuff has dramatically underestimated the scale of what's involved.
Or, reasons like: they want the video tag to succeed, and this decision essentially entrenches Flash for another five years at least.
In an h.264 world the video tag had the combined support of three major desktop browsers, iOS, Android, a tonne of shipping mobile and embedded hardware, a Flash fallback and crucially it was an easy implementation for all the video content producers, with no re-encoding required. That's plenty enough to give it a good beachhead and momentum away from all Flash all the time.
In a WebM world, you have the support of Firefox, Opera and Chrome. No shipping mobile support. No shipping embedded support. No shipping Flash implementation. No video producer support. No video toolchain support. And it's a small technological step backwards, to boot!
> I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.
I find underinformed freetard passive-aggression to have no place here, personally.
I've been trying to refrain from commenting, too, so that's one thing that we have... had in common.
> ...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...
First of all, including Opera in the list of those in favor of WebM is a lot like including Iceland in the Coalition of the Willing. If you live in Iceland, you probably overestimate Iceland's importance, but it undermines the intent of making a list in the first place. The flip side of this is that, while Internet Explorer probably won't support WebM unless Google indemnifies adopters, IE is almost as irrelevant as Opera in the arenas of both web video and The Future. Here's where we really are:
* Apple likes H.264 for the following reasons:
* The licensing and liability is known, and Apple can afford to pay. They don't care if web video ends up being a high stakes poker table, because they're a high roller.
* H.264-encoded video looks better than WebM video and takes up slightly less space.
* Most current graphics silicon supports hardware decoding of H.264, which allows for video playback that is both gorgeous and economical.
* Mozilla liked Theora because they can't or won't pay to license H.264, and Theora was the only open source candidate they could find to run in the election. Free is more important than good.
* Google likes WebM for the following reasons:
* They can control its development.
* It is, so far as anyone knows, unencumbered by patents, so no licensing.
I say "so far as anyone knows" because that's what Google is saying by not indemnifying WebM adopters. If you're worried about a theoretical MPEG-LA licensing gotcha, then you have to be equally worried that, if/when WebM adoption is significant, patent trolls won't show up with claims of infringement. At least with H.264, the licensing terms have been stated. YOU personally may not be worried about either scenario, but you're probably not weighing whether you should produce graphics chips that decode WebM. Does anybody on this forum want to argue whether the chipmakers who've pledged to do WebM decoding aren't nervously watching to see if more Android hardware makers get sued? By not indemnifying adopters, Google is essentially picking an open source fight in a crowded bar and then ducking out the side door.
>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.
That is a very big component to the complaining: I can't watch your idealism on my iPad for the duration of a 6-hour flight. And you're right, the world does not revolve around iOS, but the video world does revolve around H.264 right now. If you're not shooting with actual film, then your video workflow literally starts and ends with H.264.
And maybe more to the point web video does revolve around iOS devices, because iOS users watch orders of magnitude more video than anybody else.
> WebM provides roughly equivalent features and quality
If by "features" you're excluding fast, economical encoding and decoding and by "quality" you're excluding picture quality. "Roughly equivalent" is just weaseling around admitting H.264 looks and works better. Someday... who knows? Someday GM might make a better car than Toyota, but for now, GM is stuck saying things like "[our] quality can't be beat by Toyota."
> I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.
And the hipster-fanboys doing the pointless whining harbor deep suspicions that people who are willing to trade their audio and video playback quality today for the open source promise of adequate video someday don't really care much about audio or video.
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).
Ignoring the cost in ignoring the revenue from millions of iOS users, let me focus instead of the looming legal question of WebM. If Google were to indemnify WebM users (sites who encode in WebM, developers who release decoders, OEMs who release hardware decoders), I would be much more willing to embrace WebM. As is, there is a very cogent argument to be made that the MPEG-LA group has already suggested that some of their patents may be encapsulated in WebM and users could be opening themselves up to lawsuits as co-defendants with Google. H.264 isn't free, but it's a known cost and licensing from MPEG-LA indemnifies you from any legal costs that might be associated with patent trolls popping up to sue you to death.
This is a standard negotiating tactic. Google will back down once they prove that WebM is a real threat to MPEG-LA's business model. They'll do this because you'll find Google getting an exclusive sweet deal from MPEG-LA for streaming h.264 on YouTube (which is what they really care about). Once that happens, h.264 will be back in play on Chrome, leaving FireFox and Opera as the odd browsers out. Which, incidentally, is great for Google because users of those browsers will just switch over to Chrome.
The other thing that bothers me is that people are screaming blue murder as if they had no alternative choice of browser. If you don't like Chrome's decision (or Firefox's, or Opera's), use another browser. You can still choose to use Safari or IE.
What 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 :-)
There 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.
If 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.
This "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.
Exactly. Removing support for h.264 + the VIDEO tag from Chrome will accomplish nothing more than what Firefox accomplished a year ago when they said that they wouldn't support h.264 in the first place. A year later and no one is serving Theora over the VIDEO tag - instead there are just a lot of Firefox users viewing h.264 in FLV containers in Flash. Chrome's stand against h.264 will convince precisely 0 (ZERO) video websites to double their CPU budget by double-encoding to h.264 AND VP8.
It's what Google does with Youtube that could really change something. If they stop serving h.264 from Youtube, then we'll all be switching to WebM/VP8.
Not 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?
H.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.
This 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.
>The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the dawn of the web.
IE's historically poor support for PNG is probably the main reason so many sites still use GIFs where PNGs would be better. (Edit: And for that matter, as others have pointed out here, PNG was invented because the owners of the GIF patents threatened to sue the entire Internet.) Browser support for TIFF is an inconsistent mess.
In the case of the img tag, the most common browsers all supported two common formats pretty well (JPEG and GIF), so those two formats became the de-facto baseline image formats organically.
I think the situation with video is similar. If Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (the influential browsers used mainly by the early-adopter, techie crowd) all support one specific codec for HTML5 video, that will become the de-facto baseline video format organically.
The img element has baseline formats. GIF/JPEG pretty much from the start and now also PNG. If these formats were not there the img element would never have worked.
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.
The "if you don't fight every battle at once, you have no morals to fight any battle" angle is bullshit. It's agenda-driven juvenile sophistry, and the real world doesn't work like that.
And while I find the WebM initiative questionable (h264 is technically superior and widely supported already), I find it unbelievably boring (and predictable) how it has become a proxy for the iPhone/Android fight. I doubt the Android team had any bearing whatsoever in this decision, and every Android handset out there is just as screwed by the lack of hardware decoding.
Suddenly boring zealots like Gruber and Siegler are experts on web standards and video codecs. What a depressing day. Seriously.
That'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.
I'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.
I 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.
Never. 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.
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.)
Just 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.
"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.
"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."
WebM 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.
let'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.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marbletiles|15 years ago|reply
This whole debate is stupid and of course WebM exclusivity is the wrong way to go.
An "of course" is a really lame way to enter a debate, because it says that everyone take the debating so far seriously are idiots, which I don't believe the rest of HN are. The other alternative is that it's much more nuanced than "of course" allows, you just haven't understood the debate.
> The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264 hardware acceleration
No, people are complaining for many other valid reasons. Like: the digital video world runs on H.264, it has deep, complicated, expensive internal toolchains to support it, legacy archives encoded in it, basically entire businesses built around it. The video production world is far larger and more complex than you're picturing it. A "script" isn't nearly enough to do what you're talking about; suggesting you just need to point ffmpeg at a hard drive of stuff has dramatically underestimated the scale of what's involved.
Or, reasons like: they want the video tag to succeed, and this decision essentially entrenches Flash for another five years at least.
In an h.264 world the video tag had the combined support of three major desktop browsers, iOS, Android, a tonne of shipping mobile and embedded hardware, a Flash fallback and crucially it was an easy implementation for all the video content producers, with no re-encoding required. That's plenty enough to give it a good beachhead and momentum away from all Flash all the time.
In a WebM world, you have the support of Firefox, Opera and Chrome. No shipping mobile support. No shipping embedded support. No shipping Flash implementation. No video producer support. No video toolchain support. And it's a small technological step backwards, to boot!
> I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.
I find underinformed freetard passive-aggression to have no place here, personally.
[+] [-] toddheasley|15 years ago|reply
> ...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...
First of all, including Opera in the list of those in favor of WebM is a lot like including Iceland in the Coalition of the Willing. If you live in Iceland, you probably overestimate Iceland's importance, but it undermines the intent of making a list in the first place. The flip side of this is that, while Internet Explorer probably won't support WebM unless Google indemnifies adopters, IE is almost as irrelevant as Opera in the arenas of both web video and The Future. Here's where we really are:
* Apple likes H.264 for the following reasons: * The licensing and liability is known, and Apple can afford to pay. They don't care if web video ends up being a high stakes poker table, because they're a high roller. * H.264-encoded video looks better than WebM video and takes up slightly less space. * Most current graphics silicon supports hardware decoding of H.264, which allows for video playback that is both gorgeous and economical. * Mozilla liked Theora because they can't or won't pay to license H.264, and Theora was the only open source candidate they could find to run in the election. Free is more important than good. * Google likes WebM for the following reasons: * They can control its development. * It is, so far as anyone knows, unencumbered by patents, so no licensing.
I say "so far as anyone knows" because that's what Google is saying by not indemnifying WebM adopters. If you're worried about a theoretical MPEG-LA licensing gotcha, then you have to be equally worried that, if/when WebM adoption is significant, patent trolls won't show up with claims of infringement. At least with H.264, the licensing terms have been stated. YOU personally may not be worried about either scenario, but you're probably not weighing whether you should produce graphics chips that decode WebM. Does anybody on this forum want to argue whether the chipmakers who've pledged to do WebM decoding aren't nervously watching to see if more Android hardware makers get sued? By not indemnifying adopters, Google is essentially picking an open source fight in a crowded bar and then ducking out the side door.
>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.
That is a very big component to the complaining: I can't watch your idealism on my iPad for the duration of a 6-hour flight. And you're right, the world does not revolve around iOS, but the video world does revolve around H.264 right now. If you're not shooting with actual film, then your video workflow literally starts and ends with H.264.
And maybe more to the point web video does revolve around iOS devices, because iOS users watch orders of magnitude more video than anybody else.
> WebM provides roughly equivalent features and quality
If by "features" you're excluding fast, economical encoding and decoding and by "quality" you're excluding picture quality. "Roughly equivalent" is just weaseling around admitting H.264 looks and works better. Someday... who knows? Someday GM might make a better car than Toyota, but for now, GM is stuck saying things like "[our] quality can't be beat by Toyota."
> I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.
And the hipster-fanboys doing the pointless whining harbor deep suspicions that people who are willing to trade their audio and video playback quality today for the open source promise of adequate video someday don't really care much about audio or video.
[+] [-] mikeryan|15 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] VengefulCynic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9oliYQjP|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abdulla|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|15 years ago|reply
If font-family can designate a non-free/open font then video can designate a non-free/open codec.
[+] [-] crab|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pilif|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
Google doesn't have RMS's consistency on the matter. They balance practicality with idealism.
[+] [-] TomOfTTB|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] CountSessine|15 years ago|reply
It's what Google does with Youtube that could really change something. If they stop serving h.264 from Youtube, then we'll all be switching to WebM/VP8.
[+] [-] yanw|15 years ago|reply
The WebM Project team will soon release plugins that enable WebM support in Safari and IE9
[+] [-] weixiyen|15 years ago|reply
- 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?
[+] [-] extension|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mikeryan|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|15 years ago|reply
IE's historically poor support for PNG is probably the main reason so many sites still use GIFs where PNGs would be better. (Edit: And for that matter, as others have pointed out here, PNG was invented because the owners of the GIF patents threatened to sue the entire Internet.) Browser support for TIFF is an inconsistent mess.
In the case of the img tag, the most common browsers all supported two common formats pretty well (JPEG and GIF), so those two formats became the de-facto baseline image formats organically.
I think the situation with video is similar. If Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (the influential browsers used mainly by the early-adopter, techie crowd) all support one specific codec for HTML5 video, that will become the de-facto baseline video format organically.
[+] [-] lukeschlather|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annevk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ergo98|15 years ago|reply
The "if you don't fight every battle at once, you have no morals to fight any battle" angle is bullshit. It's agenda-driven juvenile sophistry, and the real world doesn't work like that.
And while I find the WebM initiative questionable (h264 is technically superior and widely supported already), I find it unbelievably boring (and predictable) how it has become a proxy for the iPhone/Android fight. I doubt the Android team had any bearing whatsoever in this decision, and every Android handset out there is just as screwed by the lack of hardware decoding.
Suddenly boring zealots like Gruber and Siegler are experts on web standards and video codecs. What a depressing day. Seriously.
[+] [-] yanw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Luecke|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slackgentoo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtrunck|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrubeck|15 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] drivebyacct2|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drgath|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cpearce|15 years ago|reply
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...
"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
[+] [-] clark-kent|15 years ago|reply
The problem is getting it on iOS devices.
[+] [-] othermaciej|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benreesman|15 years ago|reply
sent from my iPhone.