H.264 and VP8 Compared 337
TheReal_sabret00the writes with a snippet from StreamingMedia.com: "VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn't substandard, so that's not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself."
Re:Bunk test (Score:4, Funny)
And by that you mean, the only friend you have, you, records everything with something sophisticated? You know they all hate you, right?
Re:Bunk test (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Surely this is a moot point? (Score:2, Funny)
How do you know that some of the differences (lacking certain block sizes, for example) are precisely to avoid certain patents?
Technically, the H.264 format has zero patents. The patents are all related to working on it and ways to generate it. That, however, is a non-trivial problem and reinventing the wheel is so costly and technically difficult even without infringing, that it's not really an option. If you start by the time the standard is adopted you won't have a product until it's obsolete. So the practical method is to simply license what you need and build on existing work. The $100k or whatever the licensing will cost doesn't buy a whole lot of engineering effort. Startups burn through $10-$20M in this field, for a team of 10-15 to work for a couple of years, usually on a limited production or consumption side component to fit in the chain. TO the rest, cost of licensing is really not a significant problem to anyone out there -- other than open source projects, obviously.