Oh, What a Lovely Standards War 400
Posted
by
timothy
from the enhance-enhance-compress dept.
from the enhance-enhance-compress dept.
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."
Has a de facto standard ever lost? (Score:3, Interesting)
By virtue of the de facto status, it seems like anything that the majority of people use will never be superceded by anything that barely matches or only slightly improves on the de facto standard.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.
Can Flash be used to pull the same trick? (Score:3, Interesting)
On a more technical side, I found this bit in TFA interesting:
We'll be releasing a high-performance decoder for Theora video/Ogg Vorbis audio streams that plugs into the Silverlight 3 streaming media abstraction ...
I know little about Silverlight, only the most general look and feel, and capabilities. Does this mean that it actually has extensible codec framework, that can be extended from managed code (since any SL code has to be managed, so that it can be properly sandboxed - same as Java applets which cannot e.g. use JNI)?
If so, the next logical question is - can the same thing be done with Flash, architecturally?
As a side note, this also means that Silverlight CLR JIT produces code that's fast (not just "fast enough", but actually "high-performance", at least if the claims are true) for a video codec, which is quite impressive. I'm not sure you could reach the same levels with ActionScript, due to its inherently dynamic nature, even with Adobe's JIT. But perhaps I'm underestimating the ability of modern JS JIT compilers to do static type inference, and consequent optimization based on that type information?
Either way, pragmatically, this means that any browser running on Windows will be able to play Theora after installing Silverlight - which, by the way, pops up in "recommended updates" list in Windows Update as soon as you install Windows. While Silverlight plugin is only officially supported on Windows in IE and Firefox, IIRC, I haven't had any problems using it in Opera regularly, and I've seen it work in Chrome, so it does seem to be mostly browser-agnostic.
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.
But somehow, I don't think that will matter. Ultimately, Google is the 800-pound gorilla here because of YouTube, and most likely whichever they will go with (and they have already said they want H.264) will become the de facto standard. Apple could probably steal the day, but they stand by H.264 as well...
Re:Video for Everyone code hack is the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Since all solutions require a browser, there is no such thing as a an "out of the box" solution anyway. Certainly the ability to have a solution that works on all major platforms is important, but it has nothing to do with packaging.
Re:Why doesn't Adobe just open-source Flash? (Score:2, Interesting)
Funny device list... (Score:4, Interesting)
Theora can be decoded on the cpus of all the devices you listed, at the applicable screen resolutions, in real time. Heck, the arm optimized version of theora can decode HD at a significant multiple of real time on a CPU slower than the one in the 3gs.
All of this craze and expectation of hardware acceleration comes from H.264 being an utter pig. They overestimated how much faster cpus and memory would become by now, and we're only coping by using lesser profiles or adding hardware acceleration.
Re:Open source? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes, in this case, +1 for MS. (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason they want to H.264 to win out is because all of their embedded products (iPod Touch, iPhone, and soon iPad) have hardware specifically for H.264 decoding.
Actually, they have hardware decoders for H.264 because Apple evaluated all of the alternatives, and decided that H.264 was the best way to go. This decision was made before any Apple products had any hardware support for it.
-jcr
Re:Doublespeak (Score:4, Interesting)
h.264 video outnumbers Theora video on the web by many orders of magnitude. Perhaps you missed the memo, but YouTube, Apple and Hulu all use h.264 extensively. Asserting that h.264 has somehow lost is delusional.
As it stands, h.264 is the dominant web format for new video, only possibly outnumbered by legacy videos (which are very much *not* encoded with Theora).
Claiming that 1/4 of the desktops on the web can't view h.264 is rather amusing given that the vast majority of Firefox installs play h.264 just fine, as they almost universally have the Flash plug-in.
Re:It will be Ogg Theora or VP8 (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me put it this way: Would you want the Web to be a place with BMPs and GIFs for image formats?
Of course not. But it's not specified. <img> supports pretty much anything, and it's up to the browsers and site authors to agree what to use. It's settled mostly on PNG, GIF, and JPEG, but you can still find BMPs out there, and they still work.
I'd rather have a Web which embraces the robustness principle of, "be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept" -- I don't want the Web to be dominated by h.264. However, if I've got an h.264 video, from whatever source -- pirate bay, camera, Blu-Ray rip, whatever -- I'd rather not have to castrate the quality by converting it to another format just to make the browser happy. If I have to transcode anyway to downgrade the quality, sure, I'll use whatever format makes sense, but I'd like the original format to be supported.
Let me put it as simply as I can: How would you like a VLC which only supported Theora? Maybe that will help you understand my disgust with a Firefox that only supports Theora.
Re:Can Flash be used to pull the same trick? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Video for Everyone code hack is the solution (Score:3, Interesting)
US, Germany and Japan I've heard about. I didn't realise patents had been enabled in the UK more than other EU countries. AFAIK in EU software patents are unenforceable but still granted in the hope that they will one day be enforceable
1. Germany is another EU country.
2. Software patentability in the EU is a murky area, full of contradictory case law. The latest cases suggest that some software patents are considered acceptable. The legislation states that "programs for computers" aren't patentable, but courts have interpreted this to mean that just because something is a computer program doesn't mean it is automatically patentable, and the patent holder has to show that there is an invention that stands apart from mere implementation of an algorithm using a computer. That means you can't patent stuff like "a computer program to do [some thing that has been done before without computers]" and shit like that. But a completely new compression algorithm might just pass.
There aren't many UK cases where software patents have been considered, but it's worth noting that in RIM v Inpro, concerning RIM's patent on a proxying server that simplifies web pages before sending them to a mobile device, the patent was held to be invalid not because the subject matter of the patent wan't patentable, but because the supposed invention was held to be obvious to an expert in the art.
Nah... java applets, trust me, it will WORK (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah... java applets, trust me, it will WORK! This time...
Reminds me of a comment on a dutch tech site, remarked how much smarter a dutch tv station was, for choosing silverlight over flash, because it was more widely supported, except that particular function just happens to only be available for windows.
Silverlight may or may not be good, but after ActiveX and COM and such, why do people keep building their business model on an MS product? You know that sooner or later they will pull a move that screws you.
It would be like putting a bet on Apple announcing a sensible, non-sexy, non-drool inducing, cheap and essential item. Or IBM doing anything interesting in the consumer market. I don't know about leopards, but I do know companies never change their spots.
Re:Funny device list... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's about battery life, not performance (although hw acceleration certainly helps to make the system more responsive). Typically the application processor will load up the buffers on the DSP and then sleep for a large amount of time while audio & video are being controlled directly by the HW with no interaction from the main CPU.
Wrong XVID / DiVX is the way (Score:1, Interesting)