FSF Announces Support For WebM

An anonymous reader writes "The Free Software Foundation has signed up as a supporter of the WebM Project. They write, 'Last week, Google announced that it plans to remove support for the H.264 video codec from its browsers, in favor of the WebM codec that they recently made free. Since then, there's been a lot of discussion about how this change will affect the Web going forward, as HTML5 standards like the video tag mature. We applaud Google for this change; it's a positive step for free software, its users, and everyone who uses the Web.' The FSF's PlayOgg campaign will be revamped to become PlayFreedom."

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Riding coattails!

[SuricouRaven]

Because x264 is far more advanced - mpeg2 couldn't do HDTV without insane bitrates.

Re:Riding coattails!

[mcvos]

I think you underestimate the size of YouTube. It's way bigger than all other video hosts put together. If a WebM browser gives you the best YouTube experience, that's what people will want. And with Firefox's sizable market share on the desktop, and Chrome's market share on smartphones, I'd say WebM cannot be ignored.

And if YouTube offers video in either HTML5+WebM or Flash+H264, iDevice users definitely have a problem.

Re:Riding coattails!

[TheRaven64]

Hardware acceleration means a wide range of things. It can mean implementing the entire algorithm in hardware - feed in an H.264 bitstream and get out decoded frames. It usually doesn't. Hardware makers are much more keen on code reuse than software makers, because bugs are much more expensive, and most hardware acceleration for video playback already needs to support multiple codecs (H.264, MPEG-4 ASP, MPEG-2).

In a typical device, 'hardware acceleration' for H.264 means two things:

• Dedicated implementations of some algorithms, such as DCT, that form building blocks of most video decoders.
• Stream processors with ALUs tuned to the kind of instruction sequence that you find in a video CODEC.

The 'hardware decoder' is actually a software decoder that runs in the DSP and uses the specialised accelerator units. For something like VP8, it's relatively simple for to provide a firmware upgrade that adds a decoder using the existing hardware. For something like Dirac (which uses DWT instead of DCT, for example), it's much harder.

Re:hardware

[u17]

From Texas Instruments [ti.com].