YouTube Now Transcoding All New Uploads To WebM 267
theweatherelectric writes "According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video. Google's James Zern writes, 'Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we're also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we've already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We're focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we've made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we'll keep you posted on our progress.'"
Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have critical mass, use it. Microsoft and others can bitch about their patent encumbered format 'til they are blue in the face, but Google knows when it comes to video on the web, Youtube is the first thing people think of and the first place they look.
If no other move makes a difference in this html5 format war, this move is the blitzkrieg that will pretty much end it quickly and definitely.
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Step 1: All videos available as WebM
Step 2: HD videos only available as WebM
Step 3: All videos only available as WebM
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Step 1: All videos available as WebM
Step 2: HD videos only available as WebM
Step 3: All videos only available as WebM
Step 4: Profit (cmon, this is the one time this meme is appropriate, Google want to make a profit from YouTube).
More seriously... (Score:3)
Indeed. But, for it to work, there's also another needed step :
Step "1 1/2" : Widespread hardware availability.
It's already on the way.
WebM is basically H264 with the patented bit swapped out, so just like lots of prior knowledge could be leveraged to code a WebM codec, lots of prior hardware blocks in dedicated decoders could be leveraged to make WebM hardware support.
Also, lots of modern embed platforms feature much more than just a RISC CPU core : vector units, DSPs, and Compute-capable graphic cores are
Is this why some resolutions were failing for me? (Score:2)
In the last few days, I've found that increasing numbers of videos will work ok at 240, maybe or maybe not at 360, and fail at 480. The failure mode is that the image is a big blob of green, maybe with a few red pixels around the edges.
Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, Google isn't selling a product -- just making content available. (They do sell advertising, not that I see much if any of it) It's "their content" and they can put it into any format they want and make it available to anyone who wants to see it. They will just need a browser with support for WebM... whether that is in the form of a plug-in or native to the application. It will work for everyone and will cost the users nothing.
Antitrust cannot really be used to require the use of proprietary or patent encumbered stuff. Well, it "can" but I don't think it would fly.
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Google certainly owns the domain for the webmproject.org site. But as far as "owning" it goes? It's open source so "everyone" owns it and "noone" owns it. It's using a BSD license which means it can be put anywhere and even taken into closed source implementations if desired. This is especially important since closed source implementers would not be limited or required to put out the source code of anything they modified and published. I am pretty sure that was by design as the expectation would be tha
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Step 4: Massive anti-trust fines!
Step 5: here you go Mr DOJ, the full specifications for the WebM format, in exactly the way we've implanted them, oh and have some source code too.
I've got enough for you too Mr EU, dont you worry.
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Just because whatever you are leveraging to advance your business is open source doesn't mean you aren't committing anti-trust violations. In this case they are using youtube to push webm to drive up their browser and cellphone OS market share.
Re:Google/Youtube learning from Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for the whole patent encumbrance bear trap in h.264.
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Exactly why we users should shun WebM as long as it's not governed by a third-party standardization organizations like ISO/IEC.
Yeah 'cause we all just love what the way they handled ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML).
Take some responsability for your own content (Score:2, Insightful)
Grandpa can always re-upload his videos (for free!) if he's not satisfied by the quality of the (free!) transcoding.
You aren't using a (free!) web service without keeping a local copy, now are you?
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I'm guessing Google always keep the original upload, regardless of what format it was in. It's the sensible thing to do, and stupidity isn't usually a Google trait.
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If no other move makes a difference in this html5 format war, this move is the blitzkrieg that will pretty much end it quickly and definitely.
The format troops will be home by Christmas.
Unfortunately I dont share your optimism here. Google may have launched a veritable operation Overlord with WebM but the Axis of MPEG wont give up that easily.
Apple and MS will fight this tooth and nail on the mobile front. Lets just face it, not being able to watch a video in the browser and having to open a separate application is just a pain in the butt, even on Android with supports true multitasking. Apple wont permit WebM to be in the browser and I'm n
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MS are not really relevant in the mobile market right now, meaning it's pretty much a battle between Google and Apple.
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And on that front (mobile, that is), Google seems to be currently winning, and win or lose looks to remain at least a substantial chunk - and supposedly as of "Gingerbread" (Android 2.3) and later, WebM support is supposed to be provided. Granted, it's likely done in software rather than hardware-accelerated on current devices, but it means that the format will at least hypothetically work for quite a few mobile devices.
(I haven't tested it yet on Cyanogenmod 7, so I can't confirm that it works there, but
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"Hey, let's deliberately prevent our users from accessing the single largest content provider in the world as part of our pissing contest with Google over meaningless more-or-less identical (to the end user) media formats - That should boost our market share!"
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Again: there is no suggestion that YouTube will stop delivering H.264.
YouTube keeps multiple versions of every video, and your client negotiates which one it wants. Size, format, etc.
I'm curious about codec efficiency (Score:2)
It's been established that WebM's only real advantage is in being supposedly patent-free, with H.264 still offering significantly more room for higher quality at lower bitrates.
But YouTube doesn't care about efficiency, really. They care about speed and compatibility, which significantly reduces their options. I wonder how x264 fairs compression-wise against YouTube's WebM encoder when tuned to run at the same speed. I'd guess probably still better, but I haven't seen anyone do this sort of test.
Based on
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Of the tests that are floating around the internet, WebM is comparable to H264 base or main, but not high (the different profiles are almost like different codecs, requiring more features as you get higher). Considering pretty much no phones can play high, or maybe even main, the quality comparison is kind of moot, unless you roll multiple versions of the video for different devices.
But no, the one of the advantages of WebM is that it is patent free (there is always a chance of submarine patents though, sam
AVC baseline profile (Score:2)
x264's results consistently bests WebM at same (and sometimes even lower) bitrate.
The consensus among previous articles linked from Slashdot stories, as I understand it, is that VP8 is roughly comparable to AVC's baseline profile. When you compare the VP8 encoder to x264 set to baseline profile, what do you get?
Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough (Score:2)
They are out of date
By how long? And how much are you willing to pay the testers to update their comparison?
They use poor source material
They transcode from one lossy source to another
As I understand it, all consumer and prosumer camcorders use a lossy codec. So what freely available non-lossy source do you recommend using to evaluate codecs? Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough, as CGI movies don't exercise the portion that deals with real-world camera noise, real-world detail, and the lossy encoding artifacts inherent in home-movie source material.
They use still shots of moving video to prove a pre-conceived notion that one is "better" than the other.
I assume that in a lot of cases, they can't make the ac
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I've seen people continue to link to an article that compares x264 to the year-old WebM 1.0 release and quote it as "fact".
Does the article compare year-old WebM to year-old x264? And can you recommend newer articles to which people can link in order to support your position?
The problem is that most of the comparisons do not make any allowances for this, or in many cases do not even mention the possibility that the artefacts they experience may partly be due to the conversion process.
Perhaps because they believe it's a given that most videos transcoded into VP8 or AVC will be from lossy sources, whether from DVD/BD rips, from TV recordings, from video game captures recorded on consumer (that is, lossy) equipment, or from low-quantizer lossy encodes out of home movie editing software. Therefore, it is important for a codec not to blow up
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The original comparisons of WebM to h.264 are out of date by one year.
Which search engine and which keywords would you recommend that I use to find an updated comparison? Google 2011 (webm OR vp8) vs x264 quality didn't appear at first glance to produce anything relevant.
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Does WebM take more processing power to decode? (Score:2)
I noticed this week that YouTube videos will now make my old laptop overheat and shut down. I can't get through a 4 minute video anymore. I took it apart, cleaned the fans/heat sinks, made sure the fans still ran, and tried a few different video sites, but YouTube seems to be the only one with a problem.
Is this a freak coincidence (or not so freak, it is a 4 year old laptop and my test was far from scientific), or is WebM more processor intensive to decode than the old encoding?
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On my setup the situation is opposite - Adobe Flash heats my laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43) to the point where even with the highest fan speed the CPU temperature climbs to 70C degrees and I either have to lower the frequency ceiling or pause/stop playback. Fullscreen is infinitely worse, if there is such a thing. And an interesting thing: even with videos that don't have much motion or use a static image, it'sWebM is much less resource intensive there.
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Yes, I did that once too, a couple of years ago. But somehow, afterwards, I came to detest the idea that I have to unscrew the poor thing whenever it stops being able to ventilate itself. I repaired four or so Thinkpads and some other models - call me a bad nerd, but I am really tired of fiddling with computer internals, especially when it's a laptop (everything is tiny and more fragile). Yes, I know - it's the nature of having moving parts and being cooled by air and so on and so on, but if what you sugges
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It's quite comparable in complexity, but it's less likely to have (full) hardware acceleration support for the decode. Some parts of H.264 decoders would be reusable, though.
Then again, if your laptop is so old that decoding a video overheats it, it probably didn't have it for H.264 either.
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Thanks, I didn't know that.
I guess I didn't analyze the phrase: "we've already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site" accurately enough, and thought that 99% of views were transcoded videos, which isn't what the phrase says.
I'm downloading FF4 now, I had been assuming it was still in beta since I've been updating Firefox 3.6 regularly and it's never asked if I wanted 4.
Mod Parent Up, Please +1 Informative (Score:2)
Thanks - I've been using html5 on Chrome, hadn't known FF4 supported it yet.
Copyright issues? (Score:3)
One thing I've been thinking ever since I joined YouTube HTML5 preview, is: do they know how much easier it is to download their videos when playing them back in HTML5? I know that one can also extract Flash video in one way or another, but with HTML5, at least on my setup - Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 9.10 - all it takes is choosing "Save Video" in context-menu. Voila - you can now have whatever you like on YouTube for your own private viewing.
The definite advantage to this, is that one can skip the page parsings and renderings, and instead simply use say mplayer to launch and watch or listen to your favs. Let's face it - the cloud or web 2.0 applications are too slow, at least for me there is noticeable delay. mplayer handles webm videos in much better way than even Firefox 4, not to mention the monstrocity that is Adobe Flash. I simply download anything I watch more than 5 times in a month to the local storage.
Possible solution? (Score:2)
I just got this crazy idea for dealing with this problem:
When people make unauthorized copies of non-free material, prosecute them for doing that.
I know this goes against the legal mainstream (viz. find out what they used to do that and ban it); I'm just thinking out loud.
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I am not talking about the legality of downloading copyrighted content as such, but about how it is far easier doing so with HTML5+WebM than it ever was (at least for me, and I can write C/C++ software _AND_ Adobe Flash Player applications!) with Adobe Flash video player they have. Simply because nobody ever made it big with a sensible, easy-to use thing that gave you a "Download this FLV" button. I've used some Firefox plugins but first, they tended to break whenever YT made changes to their website code a
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If your watching the flash version on linux, look at the files created in /tmp... Flash downloads the video file into /tmp and gives it a random name, but its there ready for you to copy.
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Thanks for the tip, i'll check it out. Still, you got to admit - there is no "Download video" button, is there, as is the case with HTML5 video. It's the small and simple things... And yes, one can do a plugin or two, or a script or a launcher or what not, but it's already there with HTML5, from day one. That's the important difference.
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And of course, for the completely clueless, they won't ever know or care about /tmp, but they WILL (sooner or later) discover the context menu and choose the convenient "Save video" option. And it will spread like wildfire in dry grass :-) Before you know it, it is a fact that YouTube is essentially a video and music installment that lets customers walk out with the content they (YT) put up, without the customers paying a dime for it. Will we get the sort of witchhunts for the average consumers that the Bit
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I have collected a host of content from YT in the form of .webm files and I don't notice any visible degradation in quality. However, even if I would, and since some apparently do, if we assume that YT encodes the WebM content targetting same file size, it will be of lower quality than the corresponding file carrying H.264 video and MPEG-1 audio.
batch processing system? (Score:3)
cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos
Finally, a clear and concise explanation of "the cloud". Its batch processing just like JCL on MVS/360. And to think people thought it was something new...
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"our cloud"
doesn't that sort of make it not "the cloud"? I thought the whole point of "cloud computing" was that you're using other people's hardware to do your work. If it's your hardware doing your work on your network, that's now called working 'in a cloud'? So the next time Pixar uses their Renderfarm to produce a movie, they can call it their "RenderCloud"? Heck, I scripted my computer downstairs chop up my audiobook downloads so they play nicely on my older MP3 player. Then it dumps it to a shared dri
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I don't know how you're missing this. A cloud is a massive cluster of nodes which collaborate to process requests, and can route around failures.
Yes, you can have your own cloud. Amazon's cloud services came about when they realised their private cloud had become big enough that they had capacity to spare.
No, a System/360 is not a cloud. Although, for as long as it's working, it might be indistinguishable from a cloud to the client.
The only question I have (Score:2)
The only question I have is does it affect me in any way? I'm using Fedora 14 with FF3. It would be very nice to ditch the flash plugin, which I'm only using for Youtube and other video content.
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As far as I know, FF3 doesn't do HTML5. FF4 does, and does so quite adequately. You won't be ditching the dreadful Adobe Flash pluging just yet though - last time I checked (this morning), a substantial share of YT content is still not available in WebM. Also, if you use Flash for other websites as well, then obviously nothing has changed there. I am a Flash Player developer on occasion, and I also wish i'd disappear. There are some things there is no alternative (HTML5 including) for though - camera and mi
WebM player vs flash (Score:2)
I just want to know one thing. :/
Have they stopped the RIDICULOUS policy of when switching a video to full screen, it re-buffers the whole damned thing again?
As an Aussie with mid speed internet links, it's just wasteful in both my time and bandwidth. Not all videos stream faster than you can watch
Yes, I've posted on their forums no response.
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Well said. It is absolutely ridiculous, and I thought it was just me having that problem. The partial solution I have found is to make it full screen before the video starts, back to small, and then when you next go back to big it should be okay.
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Well then let me answer it right here. It's not a policy, it's a setting. If you turn it off, it won't happen any more.
Log in, click your name in the upper right corner, click Account. On the left, click Playback Setup [youtube.com], then select "I have a slow connection. Never play higher-quality video." Save changes, and you're golden.
Here's a video to test on [youtube.com].
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Not really. They could continue to show your previously buffered content, appropriately upscaled, and then download new content (possibly, if they were nice and you had bandwidth to spare, back-filling over your existing buffer as well so you'd get the higher definition stream sooner). This is, for example, how Netflix streaming does it.
Like! (Score:2)
Re:Now what about 3d? (Score:5, Funny)
When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?
If I had to venture a guess, somewhere around April 1st next year.
Re:Now what about 3d? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Now what about 3d? (Score:5, Informative)
When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?
Youtube is already in 3D, and has been for some time. You can find 3D videos with this search:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yt3d%3Aenable%3Dtrue&search=tag [youtube.com]
3D videos have an additional '3D' menu at the bottom, to select the type of 3D output preferred.
Open Standards Troll (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Open Standards Fanboy (Score:5, Interesting)
H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.
At any point, someone not part of the group could pipe up and sue h264 for patent infringement, sure it's the same with webm, but to pretend that h264's patent liabilities are 'well known' is a farce. Sure some known patents are covered for, but there is no denying the possibility that there are submarine patents somewhere for it, just like there could be for webm.
That is the crux of it. All the people who made mpeg would have to do to get everyone on the h264 bandwagon is to say, unlimited royalty free redistributable license for all forever, and there would be no issue, since they won't do that, it's being worked around.
In other words, wait until the law suits start flying before you say webm is a patent minefield, or instead name some yourself that it breaks that it is liable for.
tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.
If that were the case, there would be no issue shipping implementations of it with free operating systems.
Of course, the "open" solution is allowing lots of competing plug-in technologies rather than dropping support for everything which doesn't support your desire for control and resultant bottom line.
Last I checked people can make plugins for both firefox and chromium, what is your issue here? they have to ship in-built support for every third party format now? no, they can support what they want to support and others are free to implement plugins that add extra.
Google might very well be becoming a skynet equivalent, but that doesn't mean you have to hate the nicer things they do for us. Their goal is for an open internet that is completely platform agnostic, it gives them more eyeballs which is what they sell. That it is in googles best interest to provide us with an open internet is convenient and you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.
There is no one out there. (Score:2)
At any point, someone not part of the group could pipe up and sue h264 for patent infringement
There are about thirty H.264 licensors and one thousand H.264 licensees, who, collectively, manufacture essentially 100% of the hardware and software used in the chain of high definition television production and distribution from the studio camera to the motion picture theater and home television set.
The licensors include global industrial powers like Mitsubishi, Philips, Samsung and Toshiba.
Even the smallest players here would be considered giants in R&D.
Each and every one dangerous adversaries in
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Open Standards Fanboy (Score:4, Informative)
Utter rubbish.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?470666 [osnews.com]
tl;dr "Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of this specification"
IOW: Anyone may use, anyone may implement, full permission is granted irrevocably and in perpetuity (as long as you don't sue Google).
Specification is documented and submitted to the ITEF.
An independent implementation is here:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/499 [multimedia.cx]
Your claim "H.264 is far more open than WebM" couldn't be more wrong if you tried for millennia to make it more incorrect.
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Yeah, this is a case of, "what the hell else do you want?" They blew it as wide open as possible.
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webm = matroska(VP8,vorbis). there's some kinda subtitles in there too.
matroska is patent free and open standard
vorbis is patent free (by design) and has been around and in pretty wide use long enough that if there were submarines they'd have sunk by now.
VP8 was the last work of On2 tech, who famously donated the patents and source for VP3 to xiph for use in theora. there have been no challenges in court to this, and VP3 was used for years in flash video and youtube itself.
now, the technical problems:
matr
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Re:Open Standards Fanboy (Score:5, Insightful)
H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.
Why do people keep trolling with this garbage? H.264 is patent encumbered and the organization is constantly and clearly trying to position it to leverage for massive royalties down the road. They openly admit that. Its also closed sourced.
WebM is produced by one firm, controlled by one firm, has had no real determination of patent liability, and is documented well by... no-one.
What you mean is, it appears to be equally patent free, guarded by one of the largest tech companies on earth who clearly have an extremely important vested interest in its health and survival, is extremely well documented given that the source is freely available. Furthermore, anyone can use the codec in their project (modified or unmodified) for anything.
and there has been little to no effort to determine who may be owed what (legally speaking) for its implementation or deployment.
And this is just bullshit and stupidity. A company the size of Google, as standard practice, is absolutely going to perform patent searches and evaluate their current and future liabilities. Unless you have proof they specifically did not do what every large company does, you're trolling and talking about your ass. What a surprise.
tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.
Except in the real world where is absolutely is not unless you're a complete fucking idiot.
The bottom line is, WebM is already competing with H.264 in visual quality. WebM's encoding performance (time) is worse than H.264 but still acceptable. On the other hand, WebM has superior decoding attributes and is on par with H.264 (software vs hardware). With newer hardware which now supports WebM, WebM provides a superior decoding experience which directly translates into better battery life. Future hardware is expected to widen the gap even more.
The combination means WebM has visual parity with H.264 while providing superior battery life. For the majority of the world, no one gives a crap about encoding time and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter at, all so long as its good enough. Add to the fact its perpetually royalty free, open source, freely available licensing, and seemingly, patent unencumbered (which is technically on equal footing with H.264), WebM looks better than H.264 anyway you want to look at it so long as you're not a complete fucking idiot.
Hell, the fact that the H.264 consortium is going out of their way to patent troll WebM and has yet to state they've found anything is yet more proof of WebM's unencumbered patent status.
So please, stop with your fucking idiocy and stop spewing lies and trolling. H.264 is only more attractive if either you're a complete fucking idiot or you have a vested financial interest in H.264. For the rest of the world, WebM is the winner.
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They are trying to position it for massive royalities by... declaring it free of royalties for web streaming forever? That's one cunning plan right there.
I stopped read right there given that its factually incorrect. Its royalty free for non-commercial use. You must pay royalties for commercial use.
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No, when people use well established bullshit to support their point of view, I stop listening. That is the case here. As such, I'm tired of morons spewing ignorance and lies to support their holy war of stupidity; as very much seems to be the case here.
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Or...more realistically, someone who knows you're completely full of shit and have no fucking clue what you're talking about. I even glimpsed at your previous post - absolute lies and bullshit.
You are either a troll or a fucking idiot. Literally. Period.
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Seriously? The ISO (I sold out) organisation that Microsoft bribed to push their standard through. Who gives a shit about them? Let me guess, Microsoft employee or partner employee?
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All should have similar stand
Fuck off. I'm not supporting a patented standard that requires royalties.
Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free" (Score:4, Insightful)
Fact: Google is a huge company whose services are used by MANY people
Highly likely: Whatever format Google choose for YouTube will become extremely popular.
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Fact: Google is a huge company whose services are used by MANY people
Highly likely: Whatever format Google choose for YouTube will become extremely popular.
That may be fine if you have a high-powered PC that can run any codec in software but it's a complete pain if you have a mobile device with a low-power (both in terms of MIPs and energy consumption) CPU that, instead, uses dedicated, highly-efficient video decode hardware. That hardware probably supports a certain subset of (well defined) video standards (eg MPEG/VC1/H.264) and some new random system is not going to be supported.
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Any cost at all is enough to make it impossible to include in GPL software, legally anyways.
Re:WebM is too "geeky"; too "open/free" (Score:5, Informative)
Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format ;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.
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Android natively supports vorbis. that is a LOT of market penetration right there. As of 4th quarter 2010, 32.9 million androids phones had been sold, and the sales rate is only increasing.
The interface is terrible of course, but winamp for android clears that up nicely. The sound quality is actually pretty damn decent, and it can even drive my Beyerdynamic DT880 600ohm cans to a reasonable volume. The only reason I even still bother with my rockbox'd ipod is because it has more storage space than my droid.
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Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format ;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.
Would "near zero penetration" work better for you? Seriously, what percentage of the market for portable audio is that?
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Not true. It is easy to find music players that support not only ogg/vorbis but flac as well. The only player I've seen recently that doesn't support them are ipods, which isn't surprising given that it is primarily a vehicle to promote itunes.
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Btw, your missing the point. iPods and other mp3 players are doomed.
Future is phones. Show me the native support on the phone side, maybe Andorids have it. Symbian is suporter of MPEG4, Apple is supporter of Mpeg4. MS claims to be a supporter of Mpeg4 (i doubt that will happen).
Google maybe support non standard formats.
I'm not quite sure that's true. Apparently there are more than 60 million iPod Touches in the market. The Nano seems to sell well. But putting all that side, if MP3 players go away, and phones take over, the future is still in MP3 and AAC. After Apple and Amazon's music stores, what's left? There's just no question that if you take tens of millions of "portable devices that play audio", that the HUGE majority of them play MP3 and AAC, and the HUGE majority of the content loaded onto them is MP3 and AAC. Pho
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What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.
My player can play it out of the box just fine. You also have to look beyond the music industry, it might not have killed MP3 there, but when it comes to commercial computer games for example the penetration of OGG is extremely high, I see it used quite a bit more these days then MP3. I have even seen Theora being used (that one however is pretty rare). So while OGG isn't exactly an MP3 killer everywhere, it certainly has found a few niches where it is extremely popular.
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Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero.
Exactly. Only tiny nobodies like Philips and Samsung support it.
End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.
Ah Anon Coward doesn't seem to have heard of this new site called "YouTube", where end users now can upload videos as well as download. This makes licensing now a factor for end users.
Phillip.
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While I can believe the current market share overall isn't a majority, and I really can't argue against your central thesis that legally-free formats are very poorly marketed, Ogg Vorbis DOES have a larger market share than people give it credit for...
A number of generic portable media players actually do support Ogg Vorbis audio (some of them don't ADVERTISE this fact, though). Also, every Android-bas
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No. No, you couldn't
Okay. I'm not an iPod user, so I don't know everything.
'But your post is screaming "I bought an iPod, but it won't play Vorbis, that means Vorbis is baaaad". You got what you bought, and you bought what you had chosen. Bashing Vorbis in this matter is stupid.
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1st gen "classic" support is already in alpha phase. check the builds, it's pretty far along, it's just not "officially supported" yet. As you yourself mention, I'm sure that you know that it is entirely apple's fault that rockbox doesn't support newer ipods yet, as apple has gone out of their way to make it as difficult as they can, on purpose. The tone of your post however, despite your "disclaimer", seems to indicate that you think this is a failing of rockbox. It isn't like nobody is trying to overcome
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Seriously, why does this meme just keep going round and round?
computers/phones already have hardware capable of decoding WebM - it's the same hardware used to decode h.264! In most cases all that is/will be needed is a firmware update.
Android phones will obviously be there first - it's already available in Gingerbread. Apple will follow suit eventually, they might resist for a while but with Android's rising market share and Google controlling Youtube, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and I'
Or (Score:2)
"Apple will follow suit eventually, they might resist for a while but with Android's rising market share and Google controlling Youtube, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and I'm sure they know it."
Or...
Watch this space for iTube?
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Really? Everything I see on the web indicates that WebM is a container for VP8 video, not h.264. Now, I'm not intimately aware of the details of the two codecs, and they may likely use similar operations, but for them to be patent independent would require significant differences in their implementation. Purpose built hardware for h.264 would have to be exceptionally flexible to have firmware that could be rewritten to process VP8. Call me skeptical.
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Actually, VP8 uses many of the same techniques to encode video as h264, it is just implemented in a different way. The techniques themselves aren't patented, just the ways of using them, which is firmware not hardware trouble (well, depending how the h264 acceleration hardware was written).
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Now, I'm not intimately aware of the details of the two codecs, and they may likely use similar operations, but for them to be patent independent would require significant differences in their implementation.
The infamous article 377 [google.com] shows that VP8 is just MPEG-4 AVC with the patented parts ripped out. So yes, any DSP that can handle MPEG-4 AVC should be able to handle VP8 with a minor rewrite of the bitstream parser.
Patents are ONLY about the CLAIMS (Score:2)
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You seem to be somewhat uninformed as well. WebM indeed is a "narrowed" Matroska container format. The video stream however is NOT a H.264 but VP8, and ONLY VP8. Google chose to narrow down the Matroska and call it WebM precisely because they wanted to avoid having a format on the loose on the Web that could include any type of video stream. And so chose to limit video to VP8 and audio to Ogg Vorbis. Basically if you have a .webm file, the video (if any) it carries MUST be a VP8 stream, and the audio (if an
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No, the problem is that you don't know what you're talking about. Instead of stopping here, I will attempt to tell you why and what's what, if you care to read on.
Both are two different codecs in their own right. VP8 is as much H.264 as anything else that uses motion estimation, motion vectors, inter-frames, human-perception-based color space, DCT and a bunch of other clever tricks that around half of the more prominent AND standalone video codecs have been using in the course of the entire last decade or s
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It does have some interesting features like alternative reference frames though. Of course it has gone largely unexplored so far, I hope at some point there will be non-Google people who try to sqeeze every bit out of it in the way that x264 developers are doing with H.264 and xvid with MPEG4 part 2.
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That's great but how many of the 1 year or less Android phones and Tablets have that? Oh yeah, none of them.
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Any android devices based on TI's OMAP system can be rigged to hardware decode webm. And that's quite a lot of devices. Practically everything Motorola makes uses it, along with Samsung, Archos, RIM's playbook, etc.
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Are they transcoding from the original upload materia going back to 2005, or are they transcoding from 240p .flv in many cases?
Presumably, they transcode from the best version they have of any given video. I doubt they've been discarding the original upload for a very long time. Google doesn't treat storage as scarce.
Currently, if I upload an HD video, they transcode it into multiple formats at multiple resolutions; WebM is just another format to add.
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But yes, apart from that you nailed it.
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So let's take a step backwards here from the ubiquitous, standards-backed h.264
Where does it say they're abandoning H.264?
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Where does it say they're dropping H.264 from YouTube?
YouTube stores videos in a bunch of formats, and the client negotiates the best format for the current situation. It will keep delivering h.264 to you. It will have the option of delivering WebM to clients that are better at displaying that. Everybody's happy.
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It's like saying "Ford are now making Focus cars in black, whereas previously only Fiestas were available in that colour".
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