LWN: Comments on "Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5"

Ogg or H.264

jrincayc — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:44:47 +0000

gmaxwell specified 10 years from now, or 2019, in which case many of MPEG-LA's H.264 patents will not have expired yet since the last US patents expire in 2028.

US MPEG-LA patent list:
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-...
based on
http://www.mpegla.com/avc/avc-patentlist.cfm

I think there is some possible justification for software patents (assuming that some way of distinguishing good patents can be found) but I have never seen a good justification for why software patents should last 20 years from filing date.

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

lambda — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:13:50 +0000

The HTML 'standards' have always been mostly theoretical, and it's naïve to think that this is going to change with HTML5.

Actually, part of the point of the HTML5 standards process was to move away from this, and actually try and write standards that would be implemented. The W3C tried to move HTML to XHTML (which in practice doesn't achieve much more than pages completely failing to render if you have one syntax error), and then write backwards- incompatible standards (XHTML 2) that did very little that anyone actually wanted while making a few architecture astronauts happy.

The WHATWG groups was started by Mozilla, Opera, and Apple to try to actually improve HTML in ways that would benefit the web and be implemented by browsers. This involved "paving the cowpaths," or writing specs for all of the things that had become de- facto standards like XMLHttpRequest or contenteditable (which helps make the job of new implementations easier, as you don't have to reverse engineer what the other browsers do), as well as specifying new features that authors actually want and vendors are willing to implement.

Now, Microsoft has not been very involved in the HTML5 process. They have actually implemented some new HTML5 features in IE 8, but there are a lot of issues (like the <video> issue) that they haven't made any statement one way or the other on. Apple has been highly involved, has helped invent features like <canvas> that have become very popular. Apple saying that they cannot implement something carries some real weight with the WHATWG, and Ian Hickson really does not want to go down the path of previous HTML versions in which features are added to the spec just because they make the standards committee feel good while having no chance in hell of actually being implemented by several major browser vendors.

If Microsoft committed to Theora, I'm sure that you could turn the heat up massively on Apple, and probably get them to implement it. However, given that Microsoft already licenses H.264, and hasn't said anything, it's more likely that they fall on the other side of the debate. With two major implementations refusing to support Theora, it means that writing it into the spec is just wishful thinking, and wishful thinking is one of the things that HTML5 is explicitly trying to avoid.

Huh? What are you talking about?

bojan — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:57:51 +0000

> Some (but not all!) of them have one and only one incentive: future royalties from associated patents.

For something to be distributed, it has to exist (i.e. you need to make a movie, music etc.). So, without these folks (the content providers), there is no mass distribution. If they want to distribute this in digital format, one has to exist. If software patents exist and one technology corners the market, royalty collection is not just from the content, but also from the patents enabling the content to be seen (in some cases it is the same company collecting both: see Sony). That would be the double dipping.

Now, if software patents didn't exist, digital media still would (same reason as before: smaller, faster, cheaper, better). Content producers would make sure someone develops the codecs for them, so they can sell the content. Everyone still gets paid, just not in perpetuity.

Now you are just bitter...

bojan — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:36:31 +0000

> But when you are starting the whole "software patents have no good sides to them at all" you just show yourself as someone totally detached from reality - and so make all your other argument suspicious too.

Oh, there are good sides to software patents. For the patent holders, that is.

Once again, history is forgotten. Software was being developed _without_ patents just fine. But, as usual, lawyers have found an angle, so they pursued it. And now we have the mess, as you said yourself.

> But it's no coincidence that this area is so heavily patented - and to ignore the fact is to throw out the baby with the bath water...

Coming back to your original remark:

> Patent-encumbered formats were developed faster then totally free ones - and diffirence is sizable: years, not days or months.

The only question here is this: if software patents were not available, would the same companies develop digital video at the time?

Your answer to this question is "probably not" (i.e. maybe there is something to having software patents after all).

I'm pretty sure they would. Said companies would licence their product differently - using just copyright - but they'd do it just the same. Even 20 years ago people understood Moore's law. They knew processing power in the future would make digital players cheaper than analogue ones. The also knew that storage would improve, making it practical to have a superior digital recording on a medium that can actually hold it. And they knew that if they didn't keep improving their products, nobody would want to buy them.

So, yeah, I _really_ do think that software patents are a terrible idea. Digital video included. If this makes me a lunatic, then fine.

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

petegn — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:30:40 +0000

>Screw Apple. What a bunch of jackasses. There is no reason why they couldn't of easily added Ogg support to Safari except that they wanted the Ogg support to die.<

Very well put if Apple dont want to conform screw them (it's about time they got crapped on anyhow) they got no interest in anything they cant make money out of and using a free codec just aint pleasing old S .Jobbs bank manager screw em

Pete

Huh? What are you talking about?

pboddie — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:39:31 +0000

I too am struggling to see what is being discussed now:

I don't see what makes video codecs so much different/more special than other areas of software development.
There are no differences if we are talking about "just a codec" (things like Theora, Vorbis or Dirac). There are big differences if we are talking about "media format" (be it VHS, CD, DVD or MPEG4).

Plus...

The fact that as result of this collision we've got all this patent mess is unfortunate, but it's quite obvious that we only get these standards (H.261, MPEG1 and all others) as early as we did is because software become patentable at this point.

Then...

Again: we are talking not about guys who develop DRM and sell movies, but about guys who develop codecs for these movies.

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that a significant incentive for people to develop codecs is the ability to patent them, although that incentive doesn't exist for other software. But then you suggest that a patent isn't really an incentive for developing a codec after all, but it's the ability to bundle the patent in a standard which is the incentive, and by insisting on everyone using that standard, a nice little tax is imposed on a whole domain.

Again, there's an assumption that one thing follows from another: in this case, that patents lead to standards. Yet we know that standards quite happily emerge without people asserting patents on those standards: various Web standards have convincingly demolished the top-down, patent-heavy, pay-per-copy standardisation model. If anything, patents merely lead to standards cartels and that pernicious little tax I mentioned above that becomes impossible to avoid.

Meanwhile, I think it's disingenuous to claim that the people who want DRM are distinct from those making the standards. An insistence on the most egregious DRM mechanisms is a well-known excuse used to discourage people from using open formats on an open Web, all under the banner of standardisation.

The means are different, the result is the same...

pboddie — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:13:51 +0000

Yup - and where this enterprise went? Right: nowhere - to the extinction. The same people founded another enterprise (heavily-based on patents) and it's thriving today (I mean ARM Ltd).

Careful: the people who did Replay may have had a lot to do with the ARM architecture, but that doesn't mean that they wrote ARM Ltd's business model. Moreover, ARM is a hardware design licensing business, albeit with dubious aspects which probably get people into trouble even for making stuff that interprets their instruction sets. So it isn't as simple as saying that patentability makes for good business in all/any fields, even if Acorn made the mistake of not licensing their software in any sense to other people. In fact, had Acorn merely made their software available for other platforms and relied on good old copyright, it would have helped them a lot more than letting them have software patents.

Do I still believe in the future of Vorbis? Yes. The quality was better than MP3 ten years ago, at least with the tools I had available, although I really prefer lossless formats. Likewise, the myths about Theora's quality compared to the cartel formats are being put to bed as I write this. Sure, "sunk costs" ensure that there's little incentive for established companies to adopt other formats, but it's the effect on everyone else that needs addressing, at the very least.

It's easy for people to argue for more patents on the basis of giving people incentives because that's what patents are supposed to be about, but it's far from accepted that patents have been the vehicle for stimulating innovation that such people claim. Instead of going along with such claims, I suggest that the burden of proof is shifted onto those making such claims because there's plenty of evidence of the negative aspects of imposing patents on a domain.

My point about Replay undermines the assertions that people need patents to develop such stuff and that large teams in large corporations are also required. Not only are those two supposed factors independent of each other, they are also independent of whether innovation actually occurs.

The means are different, the result is the same...

nye — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:09:04 +0000

>MP3 tools will be free by 2012 - do you still believe in future of vorbis?

Absolutely. Vorbis eclipses MP3 in technical quality, which is really the only thing that matters in cases where you control the player.

All the world is not an iPod, and the uses for compressed audio stretch far beyond personal music players.

Sure, but which standards?

khim — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:10:04 +0000

You do realize that the point docking on those tests is directly based on the standards, right?

Yup - but which ones? ACID3 tests: DOM, ECMAScript, SVG (and SVG fonts), SMIL... These are not HTML5 by any stretch of imagination...

I think Theora and Vorbis fit nicely in the "list of things we need to see in future browsers"...

Now you are just bitter...

khim — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:30:50 +0000

And Oracle. And Autodesk. And Adobe. And Borland. And Lotus. All innovators at the time.

All? You mean Apple or AT&T were against software patents too? Industry was divided back then like it was now. World is not white and black - there are other colors.

Have it your way. Software patents are just peachy and everybody loves them. Let's have more of them. Then we'll have to have even more stupid workarounds like the recent VFAT kernel stuff. Awesome.

Again: don't oversiplify things. I never said software patents "are just peachy" - on the contrary I think they must be abolished. Not because they are pure evil, but because benefits are not big enough and fallout is way too big. But when you are starting the whole "software patents have no good sides to them at all" you just show yourself as someone totally detached from reality - and so make all your other argument suspicious too.

And we have digital video today because we had software patents. Otherwise, we'd still be stuck with the old analogue gear.

Today? Nope. Not even close. We had diginal video 20 years ago because of the patents and now we have huge mess in this area related to said patents. Was the advantage of getting digital video sooner rather then later worth it? Hard to say, but probably not. But it's no coincidence that this area is so heavily patented - and to ignore the fact is to throw out the baby with the bath water...

BTW, any idiot working at USPTO or any other patent office that sees fit to approve moronic things like Microsoft's "computer bolted to the car that has wireless" should be immediately fired and words "patently stupid" tattooed on his/her forehead.

Nope. The system is designed in such a way as to punish honest worker (lost royalties! waaah!) and reward hustlers (Ok - this patent was thrown out by court... let's try the other 100 patents we have available).

If the problem was moved to courts - it should be fixed there. Right now the patent litigation process is designed in such a way as to make it great for patent trolls and disaster for honest guys. Even if you win patent litigation and prove that patent was frivolous - you get nothing in return! May be pat on the head... If we know that a lot of patents are bogus - why not introduce something like "reverse treble damages" for litigator? I mean: Microsoft is free to claim it lost $100'000'000 because TomTom refused to buy license patents in question - but then it should be ready to pay $300'000'000 if the patents are reexamined and invalidated. This will make 99% patents useless - but the rock-solid ones will be kept around.

I'm not the sure it's the best way to fix the patent mess. May be, may be not. But we should think in this direction and not in direction of deus ex machine which can remove all frivolous patents from existence after the fact...

Straw man attack - here we come!

bojan — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:21:05 +0000

> Microsoft was against software patents because it had none - but to say that the whole industry was against them is just... how come they were ever created and used (including in audio/video codec standards) if everyone was against them?

And Oracle. And Autodesk. And Adobe. And Borland. And Lotus. All innovators at the time.

As usual, there is always enough of the established players that want to retain status quo for a greedy proposal to go through. Just think of that used car salesman again. Do you really need to ask him what he thinks of the car you're pointing at?

Have it your way. Software patents are just peachy and everybody loves them. Let's have more of them. Then we'll have to have even more stupid workarounds like the recent VFAT kernel stuff. Awesome. And we have digital video today because we had software patents. Otherwise, we'd still be stuck with the old analogue gear.

PS. BTW, any idiot working at USPTO or any other patent office that sees fit to approve moronic things like Microsoft's "computer bolted to the car that has wireless" should be immediately fired and words "patently stupid" tattooed on his/her forehead.

PPS. When we entrust patents to the morons that come up with rationales like this: http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/strategies/case_kambrk.shtml, all kinds of things go wrong. Note: the company is alive and well, despite the fact it didn't get that patent, when it supposedly should have.

Huh? What are you talking about?

khim — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:15:58 +0000

It is not about whether they can make good money on all this. Oh, no! It is about whether they can rip you off for _more_ than they would normally be able to. That's why they want patents - no other reason.

Nice new collection of straw mans you have here. Again: we are talking not about guys who develop DRM and sell movies, but about guys who develop codecs for these movies. Some (but not all!) of them have one and only one incentive: future royalties from associated patents. Kinda like Rambus. People may hate them, people may love them but it does not change the fact that such firms do exist.

Straw man attack - here we come!

khim — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:00:25 +0000

Software was being developed just fine without patents. Plenty of innovation. I mention that before.

And it's now what I'm talking about at all. I'm not saying (and never said) lack of software patents will bring number of innovations down to zero. Just like lack of copyright will not bring number of stories down to zero.

Back in the 90's just about everyone in the thriving proprietary software industry was _against_ software patents.

Suuure. IBM was against patents? Or may be Philips was against software patents? Microsoft was against software patents because it had none - but to say that the whole industry was against them is just... how come they were ever created and used (including in audio/video codec standards) if everyone was against them?

Glad we agree in the end...

bojan — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:42:53 +0000

> I just said software patents encourage innovations but they discourage adoption - and you never convincingly disproved this point.

Short memory - that's what we all have. Software was being developed just fine without patents. Plenty of innovation. I mention that before. But, you claim this does not disprove your theory of software patents. Back in the 90's just about everyone in the thriving proprietary software industry was _against_ software patents. Now they are for them, because they want to protect status quo. This is monopolies 101.

> Yes, but this system only works if rules are not changing.

Rules (laws) are constantly changing. Otherwise, parliaments would be out of business. The deal is that there are always transition periods. You tell people that what they have will be respected, but going forward after some point in the future, rules will be different. So, they adjust the expectations and continue. This is standard legislative practice.

Glad we agree in the end...

khim — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:26:15 +0000

Would things develop down a different path? Sure.

And this was my initial point. Please read again the statement I objected to again. I never said world is better for software patents. I never said innovations induced by software patents system are worth it. I just said software patents encourage innovations but they discourage adoption - and you never convincingly disproved this point.

It's called capitalism. Meaning, you have competitors. Meaning, you cannot stay on top forever. It's no picnic, but that is how it works.

Yes, but this system only works if rules are not changing. If you were offered one deal (monopoly for 20 years) and later this deal is changed (let's abolish the software patents after 2010, for example) - it's fraud. Just like copyright extensions were transgression of "big boys" (like Disney) against public (when Mickey Mouse was created the reasonable expectation was that this character will be available to everyone in 1984) - just in opposite direction.

Of course Congress is entitledto change rules "on the fly" (otherwise you can not ever change rules at all), but this is not something to be done at the drop of hat. And when this change is contemplated it's good to consider both sides of the software patents coin...

There are similarities, there are differences...

bojan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:50:49 +0000

> Videocodecs are not unique: there are audio codecs too. That's because it's place where software development mets content distribution. CD, VHS, DVD, ATRAC, MPEG, etc - all these developments are heavily influenced by future royalties and huge firm create and break huge alliances in fight to control future markets. The latest such battle was HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray - have you already forgotten about this? Questions about patents and future royalties figured prominently in the fight.

This is by far the biggest pile of crap big copyright holders are peddling. Even if there was not a patent in site, these would still hold true:

- many people would go and watch films in theatres
- many people would rent media
- many people would buy media

It is not about whether they can make good money on all this. Oh, no! It is about whether they can rip you off for _more_ than they would normally be able to. That's why they want patents - no other reason.

Volume vs monopoly? Does not work...

bojan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:32:27 +0000

I'm all in tears for the bankrupting industry! Not.

It's called capitalism. Meaning, you have competitors. Meaning, you cannot stay on top forever. It's no picnic, but that is how it works.

In the end, it is not about the industry. It is about the public and if they are getting the goods at the most competitive price. Monopolies of any kind create price increases, so if you like paying more for goods, then keep advocating software patents.

And let's not forget, the software industry already has a monopoly protection awarded to them - copyright (which includes the most draconian law there is: DMCA). And it's been awarded patent protection at the time when development and competition was fierce and there was no good reason to give them another monopoly. Now that they do have it, of course they don't want to give it up. They'll be screaming bloody murder for a long time. We've seen it all before.

Would things develop down a different path? Sure. Would we get similar results? Most likely. In the end, people develop and use things that work well and are cheap to produce. Just look at non-patented landscape of IP devices and web. Absolutely amazing what kind of software and devices evolved around this. But I'm sure you've heard all these before - no need to repeat them here.

Submarine patents could affect any codec

hingo — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:41:05 +0000

Also note that this is not Apple's argument alone, but also Nokia's, who uses webkit in their phones. (The no off-the-shelf hw could also come from there, don't know.)

Lack of hardware support

joedrew — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:57:31 +0000

> This 'hardware' will actually be a relatively general purpose DSP which is almost certainly reprogrammable to decode theora.

Nope - it's a specialized block of functionality added to Apple's Samsung-fabbed ASIC, the chip that also includes the ARM core.

Some iPods, the iPod video in particular, did include a DSP, but all recent ones are specialized hardware.

The means are different, the result is the same...

khim — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:33:37 +0000

Even so, other companies with limited experience of pre-digital video were able to deploy digital video solutions (such as Acorn, with their Replay codecs), demonstrating that capable innovators were actually able to enter the market satisfactorily.

Yup - and where this enterprise went? Right: nowhere - to the extinction. The same people founded another enterprise (heavily-based on patents) and it's thriving today (I mean ARM Ltd).

These days, such innovators would be excluded by the kind of innuendo and veiled threats that sees open video standards excluded from open Web standards by, naturally, members of the existing patent cartels.

1. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about adoption oproblems
2. Acorn was easily excluded by other means back when Acorn Replay was relevant.

Meanwhile, well-researched (technically and legally) open codecs, such as Dirac, are the elephant in the room.

Not really. There are very few ways to produce Dirac (do you know a can which can save files in Dirac format?) while H.264 can be produced easily. There are a lot of hardware and software to play H.264 - not so with Dirac. Typical case of sunk costs. Thus I'm pretty sure dirac will not displace H.264 (like vorbis failed to displace MP3). It's good to have all these backup plans but you can be pretty sure mainstream will continue to be MP3 and H.264. And in the long run it's irreleant: by 2024 (may be earlier) all H.264-related tools will be free for anyone to use, so this particular was is lost. MP3 tools will be free by 2012 - do you still believe in future of vorbis?

Ogg or H.264

tzafrir — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:19:43 +0000

Err... years from now the patents will expire.

ffmpeg's implementation has no issues other than patent rights, AFAIK.

There are similarities, there are differences...

khim — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:12:15 +0000

I don't see what makes video codecs so much different/more special than other areas of software development.

There are no differences if we are talking about "just a codec" (things like Theora, Vorbis or Dirac). There are big differences if we are talking about "media format" (be it VHS, CD, DVD or MPEG4).

Surely you're not suggesting that software development was stymied and slow before patents?

Not at all.

So why are video codecs unique in this way?

Videocodecs are not unique: there are audio codecs too. That's because it's place where software development mets content distribution. CD, VHS, DVD, ATRAC, MPEG, etc - all these developments are heavily influenced by future royalties and huge firm create and break huge alliances in fight to control future markets. The latest such battle was HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray - have you already forgotten about this? Questions about patents and future royalties figured prominently in the fight.

For what it's worth I've worked on a LOT of software projects for companies both big and small, and never once in all those years was ANY decision about what to build or whether or not to build something EVER based on whether we could get a patent or not.

How many of these projects were about collaborative development by fierce competitors?

The fact that as result of this collision we've got all this patent mess is unfortunate, but it's quite obvious that we only get these standards (H.261, MPEG1 and all others) as early as we did is because software become patentable at this point.

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

davide.del.vento — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:16:43 +0000

They didn't say that re-encode is unpractical (which I think with their huge machine number isn't). They *incorrectly* stated that Theora would take much more bandwidth than H.264, by the voice of Chris DiBona, fake open source program manager at Google. Please read the link before commenting

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

iabervon — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:59:53 +0000

It's appropriate for HTML5 to try to be something that people will implement (and, if it's successful, this will be something that the W3C unfortunately never managed). But the Acid tests are intentionally designed to be wishful thinking, rather than reflecting reality. They test a bunch of features chosen to be things that web designers would like to be able to get consistent results out of and currently cannot. And they provide a way for web designers to look at the things that they'd like to use, and compare this against what browsers currently support, so that they can decide how to cope with reality.

The best solution is probably to test, first, that the <video> tag is handled and the browser will, if offered H.263 and Theora, pick one it supports; then to test that, if only offered a single file, it will be able to use it. Of course, there's the question of whether web designers wish everyone could handle Theora or whether web designers wish everyone could handle H.263. I personally wish Theora was what web designers would prefer, but I don't know if that'll be true. I expect the actual answer is that some designers want each.

Again: why are you so sure?

pboddie — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:17:10 +0000

Why are you so sure this is the only outcome? There are another, simpler and cleaner solution: introduce some analog component. You can do a lot of transformations using less transistors in their analog mode for cheap. Sure, the quality may suffer, but this implementation is clearly patentable (it's physical thing like radio, right), so why not?

By asserting that patents were the crucial factor in making digital video a reality in a timely fashion, you're confusing at least two different things: hypothetical incentives and technical readiness. You actually touch upon the real reasons for the rapid availability of digital video solutions in your own comments.

In fact, the people already doing "proto-digital" video (such as Philips - a known patent cartel member - with their laserdisc solutions) were obviously in a position to leverage their existing expertise in video, regardless of whether patents might be offered as incentives. Such companies could obviously introduce hardware components at will in order to retain monopoly control over certain solutions, mostly because this was already what was happening (although one could argue that their motivation was to sell boxes to consumers, as seen with the multitude of failed CD-based formats and units).

Even so, other companies with limited experience of pre-digital video were able to deploy digital video solutions (such as Acorn, with their Replay codecs), demonstrating that capable innovators were actually able to enter the market satisfactorily. These days, such innovators would be excluded by the kind of innuendo and veiled threats that sees open video standards excluded from open Web standards by, naturally, members of the existing patent cartels. Meanwhile, well-researched (technically and legally) open codecs, such as Dirac, are the elephant in the room: Apple and friends would rather that people didn't hear about something that quite probably isn't encumbered at all (and BBC Research are probably the people most likely to know); it's best for Apple and company that the proprietary status quo persists and that they can blame some mystery third party for restricting the user's freedom, rather than owning up to their role in the whole affair.

Huh? What are you talking about?

madscientist — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:11:32 +0000

I don't see what makes video codecs so much different/more special than other areas of software development. Surely you're not suggesting that software development was stymied and slow before patents? Surely you're not suggesting that the only motivating factor for interesting or innovative (or rapid/efficient) software development is patents? That is demonstrably false. So why are video codecs unique in this way?

For what it's worth I've worked on a LOT of software projects for companies both big and small, and never once in all those years was ANY decision about what to build or whether or not to build something EVER based on whether we could get a patent or not. It's just not true that that this is something companies think at all about, or depend on in revenue forecasts etc., before they commit resources. Similarly, I've NEVER been involved with or even heard about a situation where development was stopped because it was discovered that the work was not patentable after all (obviously stopping or changing work because it was discovered that the work was or might have been already patented is quite another thing).

What really happens is that mid-to-late in the software development cycle managers ask the more senior developers to consider whether anything they've been working on might be patentable, and if so to help the legal department fill out a patent application. Most of the time you don't hear anything about the patent until you've already moved on to completely new things.

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

jond — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:42:48 +0000

How long do you suppose it would take youtube to re-encode their video base? I think the amount of resource required to do that means they have to take codec decisions very seriously.

Why are you so sure?

job — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:20:22 +0000

Fine by me, as long as I am free to build my own decoder in software.

Ogg or H.264

gmaxwell — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:11:21 +0000

The encoder licensing isn't all that exciting: Sure, it excludes authors using only legal freely licensed tools

The killer is that MPEG-LA demands royalty payments from content distributors. Though 'your first try is free' for the web until 2010, future pricing will depend on exactly how viable distributing only in unencumbered formats is at that time.

If everyone feels that they must offer H.264 or be incompatible they'll be no reason for that price to be especially low.

Even if you hate Theora and never intend on using it it's strongly in your best interest to encourage its robust adoption, unless you are one of the few companies participating in the MPEG-4 patent pool.

Specifying "one or the other" is a complete non-starter as the W3C's own IPR rules take H.264 out of consideration. Moreover, it would be short sighted: Ten years from now both H.264 and Theora will be considered old and lame compared to H.266 and Theora-III or whatever, as this is still a rapidly developing area. Legacy support is a fact of life, but having to carry around twice the legacy support is just double-uncool, especially since H.264 will still require licensing even when it is no longer anywhere close to the cutting edge and for a long time to come.

Lack of hardware support

robert_s — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:16:55 +0000

"Wrong - the iPod has hardware for decoding AAC, MP3 and H.264."

This 'hardware' will actually be a relatively general purpose DSP which is almost certainly reprogrammable to decode theora.

Ogg or H.264

jamesh — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:42:25 +0000

Web browsers (and HTTP in general) have had content negotiation support for ages. I'd imagine it could be used here as well.

That said, your suggestion really just pushes the patent problem on to content producers. To make sure the video would be viewable by the maximum audience, producers would need to provide both formats. Now they've got to deal with patents on the H.264 encoders.

Ogg or H.264

YangBaxter — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 08:25:09 +0000

So, Apple doesn't want Ogg, and the rest does not like H.264.
Couldn't there be compromise in specifying that one should
implement ( Ogg or H.264 or both ) and the browser tells
the server which codec it is supporting?.

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

njs — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:20:13 +0000

> If there's anyone who could effectively push open standards in this area, it's the people who do the "Acid" browser tests.

Ian Hickson, the HTML5 editor and author of the email you're posting on, is from the (co-)author of Acid2 and Acid3.

I hope Apple comes around, but whatever it is they're trying to achieve by avoiding Theora (legal risk? something strategic?), they may well consider that more important than Acid4 compliance. And if Apple makes some loud and vaguely plausible argument about how Acid4 is so unfair -- they can't possibly comply -- and ignores it, then that runs the risk of making *the Acid tests* irrelevant, not Apple.

HTML5 has a similar problem -- it attempts to make a practically relevant standard (which job the W3C has completely abdicated), but that means that it can't just go around declaring reality to be other than it is. One can see this logic in the email -- it's being dropped from the spec because putting it in the spec wouldn't make a difference either way.

I think Jon's summary is overly pessimistic. This announcement doesn't change anything. The strategy for forcing Apple to bundle Theora was always to create web developer by shipping it in Firefox, and legal confidence by shipping it in Chrome.

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

rahulsundaram — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:47:59 +0000

... but not switching YouTube to use Ogg or atleast prefer Ogg suggesting that Ogg Theora doesn't meet their quality requirements while ignoring the fact that for a long time, they were using lower quality video doesn't seem that neutral to me.

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

iabervon — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:58:03 +0000

Theora, Dirac, Ogg, and Vorbis are standards, even if they're not referenced by HTML5. Acid tests have, at times, tested things that were not W3C standards, like CSS 2.1 and CSS 2.0 features that had been dropped from CSS 2.1. They're always tests of those features that the developers think should be available, not of a particular HTML version and its references. HTML4 doesn't specify that ECMAScript/javascipt is supported at all, and the latest revision of HTML4 predates DOM2 and CSS 2.1 entirely. Acid2 tests transparency in PNG, which (like PNG in general) isn't required by W3C standards. So there's no reason Acid4 couldn't simply state that it tests Ogg-related formats as one of the items that they think a browser should support correctly.

Are you sure?

khim — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:17:04 +0000

1. How many codecs developed in Europe without help from US companies do you know? How successfull they are?

2. MPEG-LA does have patens in other countries besides US. The full list is not easy to find (why the hell do we have "open standards" which unclude closed list of patents), but here are list of MPGE-audio-related from a single ~~patent troll~~ firm. I presume video patents include equally impressive list.

Learn the facts before writing the answers. It's not clear what role patents played in audio/video codecs development, but to claim that the fact that some codecs can be used in some small parts of the world without fear changes the situation totally is to fool yourself.

Huh? What are you talking about?

gmaxwell — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:14:34 +0000

What are all these European patent numbers? http://www.mpegla.com/avc/avc-att1.pdf

Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5

gmaxwell — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:13:11 +0000

You do realize that the point docking on those tests is directly based on the standards, right?

Huh? What are you talking about?

gmaxwell — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:08:15 +0000

There is an effort underway to get the IETF to allow an (audio) codec working group which would focus on the creating and standardization of royalty free (audio) codecs for the Internet.

If you're interested in this I strongly suggest you read the archives and get involved: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/codec/current/mail9....

Huh? What are you talking about?

wblew — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:01:42 +0000

Digital video technology has been developed and sold in Europe where software patents are (mostly?) not applicable.

The argument fails to hold water.