Free Software Foundation Urges Google To Free VP8 315
jamesswift writes "The FSF have written an open letter to Google urging them to free the VP8 codec with an irrevocable royalty-free licence: '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.'"
Also from the letter: "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."
Re:Problem still remains (Score:4, Informative)
The two issues that prevented YouTube from using the Ogg Theora codec still apply.
Many hardware devices already have H.264 decoding built into the chip, ranging from set-top boxes to the iPhone. Moving away would mean losing ability to run on these target devices (or run at an unacceptable frame rate).
Yes, but going by that logic there won't be an H.265 either, because the hardware support doesn't exist in current devices.
The alternative would be to have two versions of the video stored, but they're currently already doing this for Mobile YouTube and regular YouTube, and adding a third wouldn't make much sense.
Actually there seem to be more than just two, AFAIK there's at least fmt=6, fmt=18, fmt=22...
A quick googling reveals this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Quality_and_codecs [wikipedia.org]
No one company owns H.264 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about Dirac? (Score:2, Informative)
I evaluated it for some IPTV software I was working on about 2-3 years ago and it was nowhere near good enough compared to H.264... I suppose it could have improved some since that point but I doubt its competitive.
One other thing is that anything that is competitive with H.264 almost certainly has patent issues... with MPEG patent trolls will have to cut a deal with the MPEG-LA but with a codec that doesn't have an established patent pool (e.g. theora or VP8) they can come after implementers directly.
Theora vs h264 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not a good letter. (Score:2, Informative)
Not to mention that writing that H.264 is proprietary is wrong.
It's patent-encumbered, yes, and as such non-free, but it is nonetheless a non-proprietary standard as AFAIK the full documentation is available.
BTW, the JPEG standard is also patent-encumbered, which is why only a subset of the features described in the standard are usually implemented (lossless coding, hierarchical coding, arithmetic coding are usually left out of the implementation).
VP3 is the basis for Ogg Theora... (Score:4, Informative)
"On2 Technologies' VP3 codec is the basis for Ogg Theora. In 2001, On2 open-sourced VP3 under an irrevocable free license. But in the years since, the company has continued to improve its codecs, releasing five subsequent generations."
Re:Google could do real good with this. (Score:0, Informative)
We have this already. We've had it for years. Here's how it works:
1) Install a good media player like VLC or MPlayer. They are free, open source, run everywhere Flash does (and the on many more platforms), and support just about every video format known to mankind. Plus they're real applications, not browser-embedded shit nuggets.
2) A site like YouTube, instead of embedding a shitty Flash player, just provides a direct link to the video. The protocol doesn't really matter, as VLC and MPlayer support the common ones like HTTP and RTMP.
3) A user of that site clicks on the link, it opens the video in VLC or MPlayer, and they watch it without Flash fucking up, or their browser crashes.
It's a much more enjoyable experience.
Re:Theora vs h264 (Score:1, Informative)
>Here is more realistic comparison: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~nick/theora-soccer/ [stanford.edu] which shows that Theora requires 60% more bandwidth than h264 for similar quality.
Your comparison is from June, 2009, which is an old version of Theora, it is version 1.0 or earlier.
Current version is from the Thusnelda project, which Mozilla funded at the start of 2009.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/01/mozilla-contributes-100000-to-fund-ogg-development.ars
The Thusnelda project came up with Theora version 1.1 in about October, 2009 timeframe. That version is far better than the 1.0 version, and almost as good as h264. Most people cannot tell the difference in quality for the same filesize and bitrate.
See for yourself:
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
That is the current version comparison. Imperceptible difference, virtually the same quality.
Re:x264 is warez (Score:3, Informative)
In that case, downloading a compiled x264 in the United States is still importation, and that's warez too.
And who the hell cares? Does your police really come and bust down your door and shove machine guns into your face if you download "unapproved" software?
Not a full solution, but a great help (Score:4, Informative)
This sort of campaign can never fully solve the swpat problem, but patents on media formats are probably the biggest pain, so this is very worthwhile. The H.264 Mpeg format that Google currently uses is covered by over 900 patents in 29 countries!
Here's info I've gathered about these topics:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Re:Theora vs h264 (Score:5, Informative)
Now let's see what Theora supports: http://wiki.xiph.org/Theora [xiph.org] . Oh my, not even B-frames are supported. Hello guys, 90s called and want their codec back.
Theora is dead end. No matter how much tweaking they have done in Thusnelda it simply cannot change the fact that h264 is at least generation ahead.
Re:It's the "about" that kills (Score:4, Informative)
Neither is the US a free country, since you aren't free to pick up a machete and go on a killing spree.
Most people accept some restrictions on "free" if they benefit society (and hence benefit you indirectly - I assume you don't have to dodge machete wielding morons when you walk down the street)
Re:N.264/MPEG-4 is no more proprietary than MPEG2 (Score:5, Informative)
You know that people are going to have to start paying for licenses for h.264 once the current grace period ends right?
Re:Well thats the FSF for you (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Theora vs h264 (Score:3, Informative)
You are right, and there is also the fact that Youtube used a really bad H.264 encoder back then. They have recently switched to x264, so while the SD clips are still encoded in baseline profile that should give them a little boost in quality.
All in all that comparison linked in the summary probably done more to hurt Theora than to help it, because it has given the codec a bad name in the video encoding community. One of the main developers of x264 recently posted about the comparison [doom10.org] and Theora in general.
The part concerning Theora having the same quality as H.264:
On the other hand, the Theora devs themselves are strongly against any such claims. gmaxwell asked me to "bonk on the head" anyone who claimed that Theora was nearly as good, as good, or better than H.264, because such claims not only create unreasonable expectations that the devs cannot possibly live up to, but also create the impression that "Theora supporters are liars", which is obviously rather counterproductive to what they are trying to do.
That a free codec like Theora exists is good, and it is estimated that Theora can be competitive with or even a bit better than XviD (MPEG4 ASP) when it is more developed and adaptive quantization (in version 1.2) and other psy optimizations are implemented, but currently the encoder has some problems that need to be addressed. The current Theora encoder is relatively slow. It should be much faster than x264 because of the simpler format, but it currently only has a rather small speed advantage (using the defaults on both encoders; same bitrate) on a single core CPU and it doesn't support multithreading while x264 scales almost linearly with the number of cores. Then there is the fact that the current Theora encoder is dropping frames [multimedia.cx] in 1-pass and 2-pass mode which is unfortunate considering how long the format has been in development.
There are a couple of comparisons between x264 and Theora 1.1 and currently it looks like an up to date x264 revision can give better quality than Theora at half the bitrate with slightly slower (single core CPU) or much faster (multi core CPU) encoding speed using the default settings in both encoders.
Videos [live.com]; current Theora and old x264 (pre MB-Tree)
Metrics [multimedia.cx] ; on animated content
Screenshots [doom9.org]; TV capture and video game footage
Way too late to displace H.264 (Score:5, Informative)
Could you replace the CD with something else in 1995? That was when the CD was as old and entrenched as H.264 is now. It's way too late. You should be lobbying MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free after 2016 (like Apple does) not lobbying Google to get a Blu-Ray/HD-DVD thing started. (BTW Blu-Ray is H.264.) Content publishers are even warier of multiple formats than users because it kills media buying.
Further, it's only PC's that have a choice of software codec, and even there it comes at the expense of battery life, decoding a non-standard codec on your CPU instead of H.264 on your GPU with more efficiency. On mobiles you have a built-in H.264 decoder only, that's it. The PC as the center of the digital universe is as passé as the CD. Video is what plays on iPods (H.264) and smartphones (H.264) and set-tops (H.264). It is actually pathetic to think that the Web is going to come late to the video game and rewrite history when you consider how Microsoft does not even support the video tag yet.
Start thinking about the successor to H.264, and better yet, start building it, write some code.
Google is firmly behind H.264 because in YouTube they have a video business. YouTube is H.264 in the back end. There's no alternative to ISO standard H.264 if you want people to actually see your content, same as in 1995 there was no alternative to CD.
Re:Oh God, please no! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a good letter. (Score:4, Informative)
By that standard wouldn't a lot of GPLd software be proprietary, since the copyright on the code is owned by the licensing party? Only public-domain source code would meet a "non-proprietary" standard in this case.
Re:Oh God, please no! (Score:4, Informative)
Probably a naive question, but--If we have so much hardware support for decoding, then why are Linux / BSD playback such a problem?
Well, my understanding of technologies like VDPAU is that they accelerate specific parts of the decoding pipeline that are otherwise expensive to do on a general purpose CPU. As such, you still have to implement large parts of the decoder... you just get to use hardware to accelerate the hard parts (IIRC, in the past, this included things like the motion compensation and IDCT operations).
Re:It's the "about" that kills (Score:2, Informative)
It's useful to think of freedom as "freedom from force." As long as you're not forcing anyone to suffer the consequences of your actions, you're free to do whatever you like. So saying that freedom means hacking your neighbor with a machete is incorrect with this definition, since freedom that allows you to kill is really anarchy.
But I agree with you that the US is not a completely free country, especially considering the topic on hand regarding patents for intellectual property.
Re:N.264/MPEG-4 is no more proprietary than MPEG2 (Score:1, Informative)
No, but the terms for the licensing period starting 2011 were announced last month and they are the same as the current terms.
Re:What about Dirac? (Score:3, Informative)
Regular Dirac (versus Dirac Pro) seems to be pretty comparable to H.264, though it's current implementations are very slow, and still pretty experimenty. Dirac is open AND royalty-free, at least from the BBC's perspective. They did not file any patents on it.
It's not certain to be free of patent encumberance, though, particularly in countries, unlike the UK, where software patents reign supreme. Dirac is based on wavelets, like JPEG 2000 or the commercial CineForm CODEC. There's some claims that it will offer a higher coding efficiency at the same apparent video quality as H.264, others that claim twice the coding efficiency of MPEG-2 for HD, which puts it in the same general ballpark as H.264 (typically 2x-3x), VC-1, Theora, and other modern DCT-based CODECs.
The big problem with Dirac right now is speed.. you need a decent dual-core CPU to get smooth 720/30p playback. Being non-DCT, it's not going to get any help from the typical hardware acceleration on device, but might benefit from some of the low-level graphics card accelerations, or maybe something using OpenCL. And probably just more software optimizations. I've played around with it a bit, but then encoder was slow enough that I didn't get much joy out of it (this was using the dirac-research encoder, which is higher quality than the Schrödinger version, but also known to be slow). Quality looked great. I'm kind of partial to wavelet encoders these days, too. Maybe it's from 20+ years of staring at DCT encoded video, but it just seems to me that, even where there are artifacts, they tend to be more "organic", so you notice them less.
And this is especially profound given how well one's brain adapts... your brain learns to filter out the bad stuff in video you watch repeatedly. When I first got into digital video... ok, it still sucked, back in the 80s. And into the 90s. But after awhile, I could certainly still see DCT blocking (when you run an overly aggressive low-pass filter after DCT conversion, you start to see block boundaries when you uncompress. Try pretty much any VideoCD for examples of this, and it's still visible on DVD and HD sources, particularly HD from satellite or Comcast). But my brain did adapt... both ways. When I occasionally went back to analog, I was amazed... "how did I ever live with this crap" was the usual thought. Of course, if I spent a year watching nothing but old SVHS and Hi8 tapes, I'd start liking it ok again, and then be horrified at my DVDs. Well, ok, horrified by my TiVo Series 1. Anyway, if you look at new basic technology, like wavelet vs. DCT, and it doesn't have big visual issues, that's a very good sign you're onto something good.
Dirac Pro is being poised as a open CODEC for professional work, probably in competition with CineForm, Apple Intermediate CODEC, AVC Intra, and other professionally suited, intra-frame only CODECs. The specs are finalized, and this has been accepted by SMPTE as the VC-2 CODEC. This is not of interest for web video. I use CineForm sometimes for video editing... you need about 50GB/hour for 1440x1080/60i video in Cineform, or about 120GB/hour for 1920x1080/60p video in Cineform. I was actually looking into Dirac Pro as a replacement for Cineform (another is SMPTE VC-3, which is also called Adobe DNxHD, also intended for professional use).
Re:Theora vs h264 (Score:3, Informative)
Not true at all. Every credible codec developer has come down on Theora like a ton of bricks. I used to believe in a lighter touch, but with the hard-core propaganda coming out of Xiph, Wikipedia, and Stallman/FSF, I'm not inclined to be so polite... Everyone who knows anything about video codecs calls it out as a piece of junk. The claims that H.261 is just as good were panned as biased, but aren't far off the evaluations given from every other technical source.
Let's try x264 developer Dark Shikari, who first said Theora might be able to compete with MPEG-4 ASP, but then looked into the details, and came back trashing the technical capabilities of the codec:
The problems with the VP3 format are fundamental and can't be optimized out. The lousy deblocker that makes things worse, the lack of B-frames, etc, etc. (no time to get into much detail here...) Let's give Mike Melanson the last word here:
That's...an incredible under-statement on your part!