Breaking Open the Video Frontier, Despite MPEG-LA 66
JimLynch writes "Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved? According to Chris 'Monty' Montgomery, nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format. Which means that every software video decoder has to have MPEG-licensed technology in order to process/edit video."
An interesting snippet: "But there's hope on the horizon. Besides the codecs and formats from the Xiph.Org Foundation, the new WebM format announced by Google in May will ideally provide consumers and developers with another alternative. Montgomery has thrown Xiph.Org support behind WebM, because Google's financial muscle (not to mention their free license) will have a real chance to break the hold MPEG-LA has on the market."
Not nearly every... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Nearly every consumer device outputs video in MPEG format" - not really, since there's a LOT of devices outputting in MJPEG. At least "still" - since this way of saving video seems to be, for some time now, on its way out in newer ones.
Not saying that the situation isn't suboptimal anyway, of course. And TBH I'm not sure if WebM can change much - Microsoft (yes, them out of all companies...) VC-1 codec was probably also meant to bypass MPEG-LA; didn't really work well.
WebM is not the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Many people in the Free Software press seem to be putting a lot of faith behind WebM. There seems to be this belief that Google can come in and magically make the entire video codec situation go away. WebM might be able to find a home in a few niche markets, but the hopes that it will displace H.264? It's laughable.
I love Free Software, and generally strive to run as near to 100% Free as I can on my own systems. Yet even I can recognize that the video codec war is not one that will be winnable by fiat and propaganda. The critical-mass of users are those that are buying cameras that output H.264 today, and possibly various managers, that are going to be arguing "nobody got fired for using MPEG".
The video codec war is not winnable right now, but the container and codec implementation wars might be. Striving to replace Flash with x264/ffmpeg implementations in the browser is a huge win, and one that can be realistically accomplished. Sure, it'd be great if people used a free codec like Theora/WebM (make it a prominent option! advertise it!), but not supporting H.264 at all will have one effect, and it's not the one we Free Software advocates will like: people will see the player as broken, and move to alternatives that are "not broken". Your parents, boss, and other non-technical people don't care about the alphabet soup of codecs; they just care about "software that works".
So dodge the problem and make codecs an external, OS-level issue like they always have been, and win the battles that actually can be won.
Oh, and if you really want to make a political stand, here's an idea: instead of fighting stupid technical issues about what falls under the various MPEG patents with things that may or may not be infringing (WebM), fight the patent system itself. This whole stupid issue only exists because we stupidly allow software patents. That fight is way more important, and applies to a wide variety of topics, not just video.
Re:WebM is not the solution (Score:2, Insightful)
The Snowball's Chance In Hell. (Score:2, Insightful)
Montgomery has thrown Xiph.Org support behind WebM, because Google's financial muscle (not to mention their free license) will have a real chance to break the hold MPEG-LA has on the market.
H.264 licensees include the manufacturers of damn near every piece of video hardware sold on this planet.
The full spectrum of product from theatrical production, cable, satellite and broadcast distribution. Security and Industrial video. Military applications. Home video. The video card. The video game console.
The web is only one small piece of the puzzle.
We are talking companies the size of Mitsubishi.
Philips. Samsung. Fuji. Hitachi. NTT. Panasonic. Pioneer. Sony. Sanyo. Thomson. Toshiba. Yamaha.
If I have focused on the Asian here - there is a reason: Of the 857 AVC/H.264 licenses most are Asian - with a domestic market in the billions - and export markets on the same scale.
They are - collectively - far bigger than Google and no strangers to flexing their own muscles.
The enterprise cap for H.264 licensing is $5 million a year.
Given WebM's resemblance to H.264, the sensible thing to do - from the mega-corp's point of view, at least - would be to throw WebM into the H.264 pool and let it sink or swim as best it can.
It doesn't work that way. (Score:3, Insightful)
Fixed those for you.
Thanks for the sour persimmons, Buster.
The first term of the License runs through 2010, but the License will be renewable for successive five-year periods for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions...but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS [mpegla.com]
The H.264 licensors fall into three basic categories: R&D [Fraunhofer,] Operating Systems [Apple and Microsoft,] and Manufacturing [Mitsubishi, Philips, Samsung and all the rest]. These companies - among the largest and richest in the world - make their living by providing the infrastructure on which others will build.
There is no intelligible reason for the manufacturer of 3D television technologies to up the cost of 3D production and distribution. The pennies he makes on licensing isn't worth the dollars he loses on sales.
Re:Not nearly every... (Score:2, Insightful)
Which makes it an ideal format for video editing. Yes, they give huge files, but then, today disk space is cheap, and it's not the form you distribute anyway. There's no problem if your currently edited film needs 100 GB. On the other hand, the less compression losses/artifacts you get in the intermediate steps, the better.
Nonsense. It means huge bitrate for better quality, because you get less compression losses/artifacts.
That's the whole idea with open standards (Score:4, Insightful)
> Did you know that nearly every video produced for Web viewing has been, at one point or another, in MPEG format no matter in what format the video is ultimately saved?
That's the whole idea with open standards. Did you know nearly every photograph has been, at one point or another, in JPEG format? Duh. All the camcorders make MPEG-4, which is a standardized QuickTime container. All the editors edit MPEG-4. All the players play MPEG-4. That is the whole idea with MPEG-4. That is why Apple gave the container away. Before MPEG-4, it was the QuickTime container that was universal in that same way. It was standardized not just to make it vendor neutral, but also because it was practical and possible to update media and tools and players that used QuickTime containers to use MPEG-4 containers. It's not practical to switch to another container. That would be like trying to replace Unix on the Internet. No, we cannot even switch to WebM. That would be a bigger project than the Great Wall of China. WebM is not even standardized.
The codecs are a separate issue from the container. There are licensing fees for some commercial use of H.264. In theory, H.264 could be displaced as the consumer codec by something like Google VC-8. However, in practice, the patents on H.264 will expire before that could happen, and VC-8 is vulnerable to submarine patents which are much worse than H.264's patent pool.
Professional content producers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's what is in all the tools, and consumers are going to continue to make H.264 because that's in all their still and video cameras, and they're going to upload it directly and share it directly from the devices without transcoding, and they're going to watch it on their smartphones and media players and tablets and set-top boxes which all have hardware H.264 decoding and which cannot support software codecs. And they're going to watch it on their PC's, which even though they can support software codecs, also have hardware H.264 decoding in their GPU's and so get 10 times the battery life playing H.264 as any other codec. All of the activity I just mentioned is totally 100% royalty-free. Even the professional creatives and producers pay no royalties at all. It's only the sellers of video like Apple with iTunes and the sellers of video encoders like Apple with QuickTime Pro that pay royalties, and the royalties are very small and cannot go up more than 10% every 5 years, and they do not go to patent trolls, they go directly to the people at many different organizations who created and standardized the codec.
So in short, no matter what your politics, you are I and everyone else is stuck with MPEG-4 containers, that is all that has existed since the dawn of digital video. They just used to be called QuickTime containers. They are not going away any more than Unix is going away. And no matter what your politics, we are all stuck with H.264, because that is what was deployed as the consumer standard for video codecs 10 years ago, and it has universal deployment and it's how most Web video is displayed today and for some years now, even if you view it in FlashPlayer. It's all of YouTube and iTunes, it's Netflix and Hulu. It's Canon SLR's and Flip camcorders and iPods and Droid phones. It's WebKit and IE9. It's Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu. The small costs associated with some commercial use of MPEG-4 H.264 (selling video, selling encoders) are well worth what we get for it.