Oh, What a Lovely Standards War 400
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "You know something big must be afoot when people start to get worked up over video compression standards. Basically, the issue is whether the current de facto standard, H.264, will continue to dominate this field, and if not, what might take over."
Related, reader eihab writes "Nuanti, a company that develops Web browsing technologies, has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin. Nuanti's Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with Theora in browsers that have Silverlight. It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
It will be Ogg Theora or VP8 (Score:2, Informative)
The only video codec that every browser can use at the moment is Ogg Theora. Unlike H.264, there are no costs involved beyond implementing support for it in your browser and there are no licencing issues that prevent distribution. Firefox, Opera, and Chrome currently support Ogg Theora. It's a shame that Safari and IE won't support it by default in the near to medium term.
It will be interesting to see what Google does once they own On2 Technologies. They may choose to open source the VP8 codec so every browser can use it and make it the default codec for YouTube, possibly as VP8 in Ogg as Ogg is a pretty good container format.
Video for Everyone code hack is the solution (Score:4, Informative)
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack [roysdon.net] is the solution. Works on Firefox, Opera, and Chrome natively with Ogg Theora, and Safari natively with H.264, and Internet Explorer with Flash (loading the H.264 content).
Naturally the best solution would be that everyone implements Ogg Theora as a standard fall-back solution, and use their "better/proprietary" solution when available.
Cortado (Score:1, Informative)
You can also implement Ogg Theora support in browser using the Cortado Java applet:
http://www.theora.org/cortado/
Re:No additional software? (Score:5, Informative)
If you're assuming browsers will directly support video playback without a plugin why would they not support H.264?
Free software that decodes H.264 cannot be distributed in countries that recognize MPEG LA members' patents. Slashdot is operated and hosted in one of those countries.
Re:Can Flash be used to pull the same trick? (Score:5, Informative)
> It would be very ironic if Chrome running under proprietary Windows and OS X could play
> Theora, while Chrome on Linux would only support H.264.
Chrome supports Theora out of the box natively, so I'm not sure what you're talking about...
Re:Doublespeak (Score:5, Informative)
MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant.
Matroska (.mkv) is not a "H.264 variant". It's not a codec at all! It's a container format, which usually contains [wikipedia.org] an H.264 video stream these days, but this has varied historically, and is not in any way standardized.
Re:Video for Everyone code hack is the solution (Score:3, Informative)
So, they have to serve h.264 inside of flash to support Internet Explorer, once that concession has been made, what's the point of the rest of it?
On Windows, Flash is almost as ubiquitous as IE.
On Mac and Linux, Flash sucks.
On other platforms, it is pretty much non-existent.
So I see value in a solution that only requires Flash on Windows users who are still running IE. I'll certainly consider using it on my page, which currently requires Quicktime.
Re:Has a de facto standard ever lost? (Score:3, Informative)
By virtue of the de facto status, it seems like anything that the majority of people use will never be superceded by anything that barely matches or only slightly improves on the de facto standard. From what I've read [reddit.com] Theora is quite bare-bones compared to H.264 and hasn't been designed with hardware decoding in mind.
And if you actually read what you linked [reddit.com] you'll see it immediately debunked. Theora is up to scratch and has been designed with hardware decoding in mind. It's slightly behind H.264, but come on, we're not talking double the bit rate or anything. It never stopped MP3 being the defacto standard when better stuff was around. Universal availability trumps technical excellence always.
Re:Video for Everyone code hack is the solution (Score:4, Informative)
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution.
Your solution only solves the problem for users, not for those who wish to host video content, and can still potentially end up in a situation where they have to re-encode all their video in 2016. Any "solution" for today which can cause problems in six years is not a good solution.
A day late and a dollar short (Score:4, Informative)
Nuanti has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft's Silverlight
Hardware accelerated H.264 is in the 10.1 Flash Beta. Silverlight 4 will support Chrome. The "high performance" H.264 player will be everywhere and in everything in the next few weeks or months.
Re:Video for Everyone code hack is the solution (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla CAN'T support h264, at least not in countries with broken patent law (US, Germany, UK, Japan).
Re:What benefit does MKV have? (Score:3, Informative)
It seems to do mostly with the ability to use more audio codecs in MKV, and more subtitle formats. In theory MP4 is just as extensible there, but in practice few players understand IDs for anything but the "official" codecs - which do not include e.g. AC3.
Re:It will be Ogg Theora or VP8 (Score:5, Informative)
Not at all! H.264 continues (as it has in the past) to require license fees to be paid for _every_ encoder or decoder.
The recent news from MPEG-LA is about fees for distributing CONTENT - which they may charge for in the future, but have announced that that's remaining free for now.
Don't be deluded into thinking that this doesn't require you to pay for H.264 though - it's just that the charge is on the production and consumption ends, rather than in the middle.
Mike
Wiki is your friend (Score:1, Informative)
Comparison of container formats [wikipedia.org]
Matroska [wikipedia.org]
Chances are, if you're asking the question, then you're not missing any features provided by MKV.
Re:It will be Ogg Theora or VP8 (Score:2, Informative)
The recent MPEG-LA announcement was a *great* way of spinning "We have chosen not to increase prices on h264 this year" which somehow has everyone dancing around saying 'It's free! It's free!"
All the encoder and decoder royalties are unchanged (still high). And they are still allowed to increase them next year if they wish. Read the whole thing!
They chose not to add a new royalty on the streams themselves for now, a royalty that has never existed before but may yet exist in 2016. In short, they decided not to commit a messy public suicide by driving the whole industry out of business and the fanboys are cumming all over themselves about it.
Re:Doublespeak (Score:5, Informative)
MKV is a container. OGG is container. H.264 is a codec.
Basket vs Fruit.
Re:Rather large portion (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know about handheld but MKV files work pretty well on my Western Digital TV thing. Plays back h264/aac, h264/vorbis/vobsub, mpeg2/ac3/vobsub, all of those in MKV containers.
Other set-top devices apparently have support for mkv files too (don't have any other set top boxes to test it on, the WDTV HD works too well for me to try anything else).
Re:Open source? (Score:0, Informative)
Re:No additional software? (Score:1, Informative)
Ahaha. Oh, you. So naïve [michaelgeist.ca]!
Just line any crime, follow the money (Score:5, Informative)
The price of admission is sending people to the four times a year MPEG meetings. The chips are the patentable intellectually property. The game is to get your IP into the standard by any means possible. When you are in the standard then you get profit participation in the MPEG-LA revenue stream.
When I was involved, the Japanese had a notorious reputation for sending lots of people and stacking the meetings. They would use procedural methods to extend the meetings into late night and then after others left they would use their numbers to force through their proposals.
Of course other players had other ways of stacking the deck. Remember that big corporations can afford to employ people full time to chair committees and that gives the extra clout (MicroSoft, apple, Sun, Philips,...).
This all means that smaller independent groups, like the one I worked for, had a very difficult time making any headway. No matter how good the technology, political considerations had a lot more impact.
The trick is that while MPEG is an open international body that supports "open standards", MPEG-LA is a foul black pit full of zombies, orcs and lawyers. In fact, the orcs and zombies are at the bottom of the heap, because the lawyer are the bad asses who run the show.
How are licenses fees set? Nobody knows. How are revenues divided? Nobody knows. How much is spent on MPEG-LA costs? Nobody knows. How do they decided to engage in legal action and who do target? Nobody knows.
It is a completely independent body with no oversight by any of the international standards bodies, or any government for that matter. It is only constrained by the software copyright rules in an individual jurisdiction.
It is a closed black box that can charge as much as it wants, and because it is an "international standard", it is almost impossible to compete with it based on cost or quality, and and you can't go after it using the legal system. (This one reason is why Ogg Theodora is not looked at as a meaningful option by the big players; it is not a standard, so it gives big companies headaches. Who is responsible if there is any trouble? What happens if a key person is hit by a bus? Having access to the source does not fully address all these legal issues.)
The reason that this such a bit deal is that large amounts of money are involved. I Googled around and I couldn't get a clue about total amounts, which is suspicious in itself. Remember, from the corporate viewpoint this is "free money", because the initial investment is small; a lab with some computers, some PHDs, a travel buget and some lawyers and the cost of their shark tanks. Very high rate of return over a long period of time.
And a shout out to all you libertarian morons out there: THIS IS A TAX!!! It is a tax collected by corrupt self serving insiders who have subverted the legal system. It restrains trade and stifles innovation. It is not subject to competition. Those who are taxed have no say in the matter. It is arbitrary, and you cannot escape it by taking your business elsewhere. It is all the things you claim to hate about government. How come you this behavior is good when done by business for greed and bad when done by governments, which are more accountable to the people?
Oh you mean how Vorbis has taken over MP3? (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously... Vorbis has not even taken over MP3, despite it being far superior.
And you expect Theora to beat H.246??
The fact is, that apart from us few experts, nobody cares what format it is, as long as it works, and has the best quality for its size.
Look at what movies are used on BitTorrent nowadays. It’s mostly H.264, since the quality is simply superior. And XviD, since that’s what most pre-bluray standalone players can play.
Even though I’m a supporter of open formats, I support H.246 right now. Because there are two groups of sources I have:
1. Commercial video streams (YouTube, Daily Show, South Park, etc), who can handle the legal rights, and usually have a license anyway to distribute physical media etc.
2. P2P-shared movies, that don’t care for laws anyway.
(Bonus question: Guess how I would release my work? ^^)
But: Offer me something that has all features of H.246, plus only one single tiny superior property, and I’ll be the strongest supporter of that format, that you will be able to find.
Until then, it’s no war. Because one side has no teeth at all. (Sadly.)
Re:Open source? (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome is not open source. Chromium doesn't have H.264. It's you, who is "not even remotely accurate".
Re:Can Flash be used to pull the same trick? (Score:4, Informative)
As for Mozilla, the stated reason for not using gstreamer/quicktime/directplay is the potential for security exploits in those frameworks
Not really. They made that argument specifically for DirectShow, but it remains a very weak one. Meanwhile, they've added GStreamer support to Fennec [mozilla.org], but still refuse to add it to the desktop version, and the reason explicitly given [arstechnica.com] for this is purely political in nature:
A solution that seems logical on the surface is to simply expose each platform's underlying media playback engine through the HTML 5 video element—DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux, and QTKit on Mac OS X. This would make it possible for the browser to play any video formats that are supported natively on the user's computer.
From a purely technical perspective, this is not an impossible problem to solve as there are already existing libraries that do this and provide a cohesive abstraction layer on top. One prominent option is Nokia's Phonon library. It could also possibly be done by using the Quicktime and DirectShow plugins for GStreamer.
Mozilla strongly opposes this approach because it would heighten the risk of fragmentation. Allowing content providers to use any codec that is available on the user's computer might undermine the advantages of the HTML 5 media element because there would be no consistency guarantee and content would not be able to work everywhere. That is, however, arguably the situation that already exists as a result of the impasse in the codec debate.
Re:Has a de facto standard ever lost? (Score:1, Informative)
Sorry, but we are talking double the bitrate. I encode video all the time. I know for a fact that at web video bitrates (300-1000 kbps), Theora is comparable to MPEG-4 ASP (DivX/XVID). With H.264 you need half the bitrate of ASP or Theora for the same resolution and quality. And please don't quote Greg Maxwell's totally flawed comparison of his own optimized Theora encode with some crappy Youtube H.264 encode. I'm still waiting for a methodically decent codec shootout, the way they used to be. Until then I'll rely on my own experience. Denial doesn't equal debunking.
Re:H.264 is ISO/IEC 14496-10, not a de facto stand (Score:4, Informative)
Do we have to play words? We both know that, at the very least, a considerable proportion (I dare say, a majority) of Linux users prefer FOSS over non-FOSS, and at the very least, open standards unencumbered by patents (and associated fees) to closed ones. The fact that many of them still use proprietary software (and hardware with such) - NVidia drivers, Android etc - does not change that. It just means that sometimes, pragmatism outweighs purism. It's not black & white, after all.
It doesn't mean that they like that state of affairs, however. Back when GIF was patented, I haven't heard of anyone disabling that code in their browsers - but there was, nonetheless, a big campaign in support of a switch to PNG.
Re:Oh you mean how Vorbis has taken over MP3? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm looking at you, Mozilla: I paid for a license to decode h.264 - why won't you let me use it to decode HTML5 videos in the video tag?
They don't want to enable you to use H.264 [arstechnica.com] in any way, directly or indirectly, for political reasons.
Re:Open source? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:At least you can see the dangling sword (Score:3, Informative)
Except for those of course who can claim to hold patents on AVC and aren't in the MPEG-LA.
Paying off MPEG-LA only protects you from MPEG-LA. Submarine patents can still surface from anyone not in that organization.
Re:Why doesn't Adobe just open-source Flash? (Score:5, Informative)
Replying to myself, but holy crap.
FORTY SEVEN PAGES JUST TO LIST THE PATENTS. [mpegla.com]
Yeah, you're gonna need an army of lawyers for the "work around the H.264 patents" technique.
Re:ACTA is a copyright/trademark law, not patents! (Score:2, Informative)
How can you possibly know what is contained in the ACTA treaty? While the actual contents remain secret (and they're likely to remain so until passed into law in the signatory countries) we have nothing to go on but leaked documents. Documents leaked already suggest the treaty aims to go well beyond simply protecting copyrights and trademarks. But of course all the countries involved in the negotiations already have laws to protect copyrights and trademarks so if the treaty didn't go beyond that there would be no reason for it to exist.
Executive summary (Score:3, Informative)
1) The main point really is that you can now relatively easily deploy Web video in Theora without sacrificing much potential user base. (Cortado can fill in some gaps in native browser support already, but Java applet support is dwindling.)
1a) It might not yet be default(?), but MS is actively pushing Silverlight for Windows users, so the installed base is already fairly large and growing.
1b) Apple I hear has some at least semi-official Moonlight-based support, but this I know less of. Comments?
1c) Though not the best in quality per bit, you can make the quality of any codec better with more bits. Bits are only going to get cheaper. H.264 can potentially get much more expensive.
2) No, H.264 won't die a gruesome death now.
2a) Yes yes, we all know it's better technically, it doesn't matter, it still can't be a baseline Web codec.
2b) Yes, some players, especially those with vested interest in the MPEG-LA racket and excluding smaller competitors, will almost certainly use H.264 on the web for a long time to come.
2c) Isn't it nice though that a widely deployable option exists that probably has already played a hand in how much money the MPEG-LA can squeeze from you if you _do_ decide to go with H.264 anyway?
3) Using H.264 for everything won't be as unified as you think.
3a) Much of the material on the web incidentally doesn't use the very advanced features of H.264, because many decoders are limited in what profile or subset of H.264 they support (thus also reducing the quality advantage to Theora, but I make no claim of its elimination)
3b) Some material (like pirated stuff that doesn't care for copyrights or patents alike) will use all the bells and whistles, but then you may well still be stuck with having to transcode for different devices even if everything does "H.264".
3c) Such conversions can be relatively well automated when needed while keeping the original not to incur generation loss; I don't really see some need for transcoding persisting as a huge deal, except of course to the extent that anything you do with a patented format might be illegal depending on jurisdiction and circumstance.
4) Yep, no "hardware" (DSP) decoders for Theora abound.
4a) Mobile devices have enough oomph to decode it anyway in relevant resolutions (Theora is lighter than H.264, too)
4b) Yes, battery life will probably suffer somewhat, doesn't make it useless.
4c) Some DSP work has already been done on Theora decoding as already previously commented, though even when ready, deploying it would probably require user intervention and sufficient access unless shipped by the OS itself. ("Install this to improve your battery life with this site.")
Hope this summary will clarify things somewhat.
Re:Oh you mean how Vorbis has taken over MP3? (Score:3, Informative)
It's html, they have to make it work in the browser, the flash plugin is something that adobe makes.
Re:other way around (Score:3, Informative)
We call them Shaders, and this can be done in regular old GLSL. The GPU's are already plenty programmable by design.
Re:It will be Ogg Theora or VP8 (Score:3, Informative)
PNG only became popular well after the GIF patents were over. It needed proper support (i.e. alpha support) from the most popular browser (Internet Explorer) before people could use it.
The fact that Adobe programs add bloat to the file size of PNG files didn't help matters, not to mention the whole gamma correction problems between what Adobe added to the files and what the browsers supported.
If you use Mac OS X, ImageOptim [pornel.net] is a great PNG tool for both reducing file size and removing gamma correction metadata.
H.264, on the other hand, is already used everywhere and has hardware decode support in a lot of devices. Those same devices probably wouldn't be able to decode Theora in software and even if they could their battery life would be so much shorter that people wouldn't even bother with Theora anyway.