Hello VP8, Goodbye H.264 - All Change at YouTube ?

philip2009

philip2009

philip2009

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Not really sure how much interest there will be in this but anyway ....

Now that Google have completed the purchase of On2 (same company that produced the Flash video codec), there is a great deal of suspicion that they will release the VP8 codec (compares favourably with H.264) under very attractive terms (royalty free ?). This could blow H.264 out of the water for net use (and maybe even HTML5), given that H.264 is non free for commercial use (free for non-commercial Internet streaming until 2016) and patent encumbered until 2028.

Anyway Google have spent over $100 million to purchase On2, and my bet is they are going to do something important with that technology, VP8 could be the next big thing.


Open letter to Google: free VP8, and use it on YouTube




With its purchase of the On2 video compression technology company having been completed on Wednesday February 16, 2010, Google now has the opportunity to make free video formats the standard, freeing the web from both Flash and the proprietary H.264 codec.



Dear Google,

With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec -- VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).

To sit on this technology or merely use it as a bargaining chip would be a disservice to the free world, while bringing at best limited short-term benefits to your company. To free VP8 without recommending it to YouTube users would be a wasted opportunity and damaging to free software browsers like Firefox. We all want you to do the right thing. Free VP8, and use it on YouTube!

Why this would be amazing

The world would have a new free format unencumbered by software patents. Viewers, video creators, free software developers, hardware makers -- everyone -- would have another way to distribute video without patents, fees, and restrictions. The free video format Ogg Theora was already at least as good for web video (see a comparison) as its nonfree competitor H.264, and we never did agree with your objections to using it. But since you made the decision to purchase VP8, presumably you're confident it can meet even those objections, and using it on YouTube is a no-brainer.

You have the leverage to make such free formats a global standard. YouTube is the world's largest video site, home to nearly every digital video ever made. If YouTube merely offered a free format as an option, that alone would bring support from a slew of device makers and applications.

This ability to offer a free format on YouTube, however, is only a tiny fraction of your real leverage. The real party starts when you begin to encourage users' browsers to support free formats. There are lots of ways to do this. Our favorite would be for YouTube to switch from Flash to free formats and HTML, offering users with obsolete browsers a plugin or a new browser (free software, of course). Apple has had the mettle to ditch Flash on the iPhone and the iPad -- albeit for suspect reasons and using abhorrent methods (DRM) -- and this has pushed web developers to make Flash-free alternatives of their pages. You could do the same with YouTube, for better reasons, and it would be a death-blow to Flash's dominance in web video.

But even some smaller actions would also have an impact. You could interest users with HD videos in free formats, for example, or aggressively invite users to upgrade their browsers (instead of upgrading Flash). Steps like these on YouTube would quickly push browser support for free formats to 50% and beyond, and they would slowly increase the number of people who never bother installing Flash.

If you care about free software and the free web (a movement and medium to which you owe your success) you must take bold action to replace Flash with free standards and free formats. Patented video codecs have already done untold harm to the web and its users, and this will continue until we stop it. Because patent-encumbered formats were costly to incorporate into browsers, a bloated, ill-suited piece of proprietary software (Flash) became the de facto standard for online video. Until we move to free formats, the threat of patent lawsuits and licensing fees hangs over every software developer, video creator, hardware maker, web site and corporation -- including you.

You can use your purchase of On2 merely as a bargaining chip to achieve your own private solution to the problem, but that's both a cop-out and a strategic mistake. Without making VP8 a free format, it's just another video codec. And what use is another video format with patent-limited browser support? You owe it to the public and to the medium that made you successful to solve this problem, for all of us, forever. Organizations like Xiph, Mozilla, Wikimedia, the FSF, and even On2 itself have recognized the need for free formats and fought hard to make it happen. Now it's your turn. We'll know if you do otherwise that your interest is not user freedom on the web, but Google's dominance.

We all want you to do the right thing. Free VP8, and use it on YouTube!

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/google-free-on2-vp8-for-youtube/
Click to expand...

Comparison of VP8 and H.264 here ...

:cool:
 
philip2009 said:
H.264 was going to be the future of Internet video but is non free. Google now own a good codec, VP8, which they might make available for free - if so, VP8 therefore becomes king of the Internet hill, the standard for net video.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah. There was a bunch of stuff about ogg theora and firefox folk were crying cos they can't include the non free codec in there browser etc....

Hmm 100 mill to google is chump change.
 
arknor said:
isnt h.264 just a container ?
Click to expand...

No, it's a video encoding standard. You can use free encoders like x264 to encode h.264 (mpeg4-avc) video. The patent for h.264 is owned by the mpeg group and to use the standard for commerical purposes you have to pay them a royalty.
 
I don't think it really matters.

As it stands it's a tossup between H.264 and OGG. OGG is free, H.264 is not. Yet Chrome and Safari have both opted to go with H.264, whereas Opera and Firefox are going with OGG.

Here's how I see it:

Firefox and Opera will stick with OGG regardless of VP8. The open source community (And a lot of the remaining world) already has a problem with how much power Google is gaining, and are unlikely to adopt VP8 for fear of helping them grow further.

Chrome will make the switch to VP8, obviously.

Safari I am unsure of, but I think they'll likely stick with H.264. Apple has had quite a few squabbles with Google recently and largely feel the same as the open source community, not to mention they've invested a lot into H.264 over the years, having made it one of the default codecs for the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad platform, iTunes HD content, and QuickTime.

Either way, it's irrelevant. The HTML5 video codec war will still be fought, as there still wont be unified support for one standard over another, unless the W3C/WHATWG manage to fit one of them into the official HTML5 specification. Without unified support, content providers will have to encode their videos twice (Possibly three times), and their content still doesn't have any "protection" due to a lack of provision in the spec for DRM. Obviously we don't care so much about this, but I guarantee you the providers will.

I think it's likely they'll stick to Flash for all their content serving needs, with its proven track record and 98-99% marketshare.
 
Theora doesn't matter to anyone as a codec and it doesn't look like it will. Looks like On2 did with VP8 what they did with VP6 - they basically blurred picture and applied soft deblocking filter to make it look better. And if it's anything like VP6 and VP7 it will take forever to encode, will be female dog to configure for fast moving videos, won't support multithreading and will have limit of encodes you can do (1500 per month was a standard for VP6, which is why no one bothered with it right after flash supported h264).

To be honest, for all the pain and misery of VP6 mass encoding on Sorenson and Flix and I kind of hoped On2 would share fate of other dimwit scrooges like Real Media and die together with Flash.
 
Xenoxide said:
I don't think it really matters.
Click to expand...


Just for the sake of chewing the fat ...

Don't an awful lot of people consider Theora a bit of a dog compared to modern codecs ? What happens if Adobe decide to integrate VP8 into Flash ? Surely YouTube is bound to support the new codec ?

It's all guesswork at this stage of course, but things certainly look interesting.
 
It amazes me how google has came round and offered so much stuff for free, that so many people tried before to charge for and still do.

Yet google are the ones making money from it, got to love them :)
 
By making it free it kills off the competitors - a bit like Tescos/Sainsburys/Wall-Mart vs the highstreet shops. Where's the choice?
 
That open letter comes across in a foul tone.

"You would do the world a disservice"

I'm sorry - what? Google does great things and all, but they are a business, not a charity.

My reply would be "We care about a lot of things, and we love to see things progress. Out acquisition was a business move upon which we will capitalise as we see fit. Thank you for your concern"
 
I have mixed feeling with VP8 - by tidying up the noise it makes things look a bit blurrier/chalky and you lose some definition at the same bitrate tho the image looks lessy messy.
 
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