LWN: Comments on "Swift and predictable reactions to WebM"

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

hozelda — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:58:52 +0000

Did you mean to say,
> than So you're not any more safe when *paying and* using H264 than you are when using WebM.

Software patents are insulting to decency and to progress. Except for the troll situation, they are protectionist, serving to protect the large producers from the small producers.

Open source gets sucker punched because our innovation is not given automatic patent protection as is the case for copyright protection (imagine if there were no GPL conditions possible for us but proprietary companies could still use aggressive copyrights against us). Thus patent holders and licensees can use our innovation all they want, but we can't use their patents without licenses. This doesn't exactly present a fair market condition, and the bias is in favor of the more secretive and greedy (who already exploit trade secret). Our patent system is a system to protect the wealthy and less productive (who can spend their days patenting theirs and others general concepts) from the majority of us working on full and high quality solutions. All small outfits suffer (including the closed source based ones) because we have our shared open source cushion removed.

Software patents violate the US Constitution because they don't promote the progress. They also violate our First Amendment right to freely express ourselves and communicate as we find necessary and proper.

Software patents surely are not needed in order to make decent income.

Patents allowed in other information fields would have done great harm, as the biggest breakthroughs and highest quality products/theories/etc, have all depended greatly on sharing and leveraging others' work and ideas. It's impossible to bypass society. "Revolutionary" breakthroughs don't overcome or exist independently of social context. Granting long broad monopolies is very arrogant, foolish, and stifling (more so because the low obviousness bar means, statistically, many above average practitioners developing ideas and products further will have their work pulled out from under them by less skilled individuals).

http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/02/software-paten...

Confusing MPEG and MPEG-LA

n8willis — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 17:30:11 +0000

I'm not the least bit confused about the differences between MPEG and MPEG-LA. All of the statements cited were by MPEG-LA and Larry Horn; MPEG itself had no direct connection to the story, and was not mentioned in it.

Nate

This is a badly researched article.

nye — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:27:47 +0000

Do you have any idea of the kind of work you are demanding? It's fairly obvious that you are strongly biased here, so there is probably no convincing you, but let's try to take this into another domain which may be more comfortable.

Let's imagine we're talking about, say, performance. One individual has undertaken to provide a review of another's work, though it is of no benefit to them. Looking over it, they point out several sections and say: 'I think this technique might not be too good. Perhaps you could research this bit and see if you might improve it. Right now it would cost me a lot of time to look into it for you myself, and I could well be wrong, but I hope this pointer is of some use'. Is that FUD? 'He pointed out an area which looks suspicious, but didn't fully analyse or benchmark it! That monster!'.

This is a badly researched article.

jschrod — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:28:50 +0000

Would you please disclose your own involvement in video codec development, or multimedia projects, or declare explicitly that you are not involved and just a user?

Thanks in advance.

This is a badly researched article.

jschrod — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:26:39 +0000

Would you please care to disclose your own involvement in video codec development, or other multimedia projects, or explain that there is no involvement?

Thanks.

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

bboissin — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:41:11 +0000

But it's very likely that Google engineers (and others from big companies) do read patents, and use their legal dpt to check for potential infrigement. The problem is different than the usual small OSS project.

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

mlankhorst — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:30:42 +0000

For open source perhaps, but triple damage on google just means the patent trolls can buy an even bigger villa at some tropical island..

Static vs moving images

giraffedata — Sat, 29 May 2010 17:21:11 +0000

You'd likely perceive one as "sharper" than the other, even without consciously noting the extra details. Our brains are quite good at such fast, parallel processing.

Actually, fast is one thing the brain is not. That's the reason that 24 frames per second is ususally indistinguishable from continuous motion.

Parallel, yes.

In this case, the most important feature of the brain is it's ability to track a moving object. It sees the object, not a series of scenes with the object in different places. So watching a ball move across the screen for 2 seconds is as good as staring at a single frame for 2 seconds for noticing how sharp the ball is.

This is a badly researched article.

roc — Sat, 29 May 2010 10:20:26 +0000

He didn't point out any specific problems, that's why it's FUD.

If he said something like "VP8 infringes patent #1234567 on flux capacitor tuning", that would have identified a problem specific enough to be refuted, and would not have been FUD.

On2 vs. the MPEG LA

roc — Sat, 29 May 2010 10:13:40 +0000

Licensing the AVC pool only gives you the right to use those patents in an implementation of H.264. It does not give you the right to use those patents in an implementation of VP8. So On2 being an AVC licensee is completely irrelevant here.

On2 vs. the MPEG LA

DonDiego — Sat, 29 May 2010 09:35:07 +0000

> On2 Made a big deal about their codec's being "patent free" in that they
> had done the patent research and made sure their codec's didn't infringe
> any known patent they didn't own.

This is a hearsay rumor that gets repeated all the time, but I see no basis for it in reality. Please present us with a quote that shows On2 claiming VP8 does not infringe any MPEG LA patents.

If you look at the list of licensees in good standing for the AVC/H.264 patent pool of the MPEG LA

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensees.aspx

you will find On2 (and Google) there. There was absolutely no need for On2 to avoid any patents from that pool, they paid for using them. On the contrary, if any of the described techniques would help them reach their goal of improving their own codecs quicker, it made good business sense to use them...

The test was unfair

bawjaws — Sat, 29 May 2010 07:47:49 +0000

The test *is* biased, just not in brutally obvious ways. Not that I think VP8 would have won in a fair fight with x264, but in many ways that just makes it less acceptable.

The test clip benefits greatly from an x264 feature not generally found in other encoders, even other H.264 ones. He actually calls this out earlier in the article as the greatest single improvement in x264 and links to before and after images:

before: http://doom10.org/compare/parkrun_psnr.png
after; http://doom10.org/compare/parkrun_ssim.png

Notice anything familiar? Yes, it's basically the same clip that he's been tuning for, and the problems you see in the competing encoders are very similar to the ones you see in x264 before this was added (blurring in high frequency areas).

On top of that he's done the old classic of choosing the testing bitrate so that the favoured codec looks 'bad' but the competitors look 'terrible'. If you compare with the original (conveniently not provided) you'll notice that even the best x264 encode totally wrecks the human figures, making them look like the pixelated sprites from the original Mortal Kombat. If the bitrate had been increased to make x264 look actually good then the competitors would have increased quality proportionally more, if it had been dropped lower than both would have looked different shades of terrible.

You can see this effect better in the comparisons at http://www.quavlive.com/video_codec_comparison where the bitrates where chosen to match standard Youtube sizes and bitrates. One clip, with the bee, is 'easy' so both encoders look effectively identical, while the parkjoy clip from the x264 test and another riverbed one, are difficult so both look kind of rubbish.

Maybe extreme clips and bitrates are necessary for codec quality testing when encoders start to converge in quality, and maybe comparing your known strong points against competitors' known weak points is standard practice in marketing material, but both seem out of place in an article billed as an in-depth technical analysis of a new codec. It features a single image of the codec output and it happens to be of a carefully engineered failure mode. Is it any wonder that the second most common summary of this analysis you see accompanying links to it (after "turns out it infringes H.264 patents") is "turns out it sucks".

Static v.s. moving images

dododge — Fri, 28 May 2010 20:23:52 +0000

From his blog post:

all encoders are optimized for optimal visual quality wherever possible. [...] the bitrate is (as close as possible to) the same on all of these files.

He also provides the motion clips the frames came from, as well as comparisons with H.264 Baseline, Theora, Dirac, and others.

This is a badly researched article.

farnz — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:12:48 +0000

Cut the rhetoric, please. I didn't see anyone asking for a full solution on a silver platter, except you in this comment. And I'm afraid that I agree with roc; he doesn't point to patents which are infringed, and say "I think you infringe this patent". Instead, he says, "well, this is very similar to H.264 (which we know is patent encumbered), but slightly different. Ergo, the patents we know about might affect it, so you can't claim you don't need a patent licence to use it without being on dodgy legal ground".

It's no different from me saying "well, we know Microsoft have software patents on Windows and Office, and Linux with GNOME and OpenOffice.org is awfully similar to Windows and Office. Ergo, the patents we know about might affect it, so you can't claim you don't need a patent licence to use it without being on dodgy legal ground."

This is a badly researched article.

nye — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:37:47 +0000

>Right, he doesn't make any concrete claims that could be refuted, he just speculates and suggests. That's called FUD.

Yes, because clearly anyone trying to point out any problem somebody might have, but without investing millions in a full solution and handing it over on a silver platter with dinner and a movie, is engaging in FUD.

Please, now you're just being offensively paranoid.

This is a badly researched article.

mpr22 — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:54:37 +0000

There is clearly a broken interaction between their stylesheet and your browser.

This is a badly researched article.

roc — Thu, 27 May 2010 03:39:19 +0000

> And he definitly does not claim that VP8 violates any patents (he writes
> that the claim that VP8 is patent free is dodgy at best)

Right, he doesn't make any concrete claims that could be refuted, he just speculates and suggests. That's called FUD.

Confusing MPEG and MPEG-LA

roc — Thu, 27 May 2010 03:16:32 +0000

No, he says it's better than H.264 baseline.

This is a badly researched article.

Tester — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:04:33 +0000

Almost all mobile DSP chips that claim to support H.264 only support the baseline profile.

This is one of the untold reasons why Flash video isn't supported on most mobile devices (because it uses the Main profile)

This is a badly researched article.

rahulsundaram — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:37:56 +0000

Must be some problem with your browser or something. It clearly does mention Matroska and links to it even.

This is a badly researched article.

ballombe — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:15:50 +0000

Yes, I would like to see that. All I can see now is

is WebM?

an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

fines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files
video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams 
ed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the 
a container.

No mention of Matroska.

This is a badly researched article.

Sho — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:36:47 +0000

While I agree with you, it's worth mentioning that Google worked together with the Matroska folks on WebM, and that the Matroska website has posted a notice of full support, as have individual Matroska developers in their blogs.

Confusing MPEG and MPEG-LA

gmaxwell — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:25:24 +0000

I'm pretty sure that Jason would no longer stand by that statement-- he was simply blowing off steam there. I think that we have a good working relationship with him. It's a bit unfortunate that every comment one of makes on an obscure forum or mailing list will forever be quoted as some kind of official statement.

The comparison he did with VP8 wasn't unfair but it is important to understand it for what it is: A comparison between something very mature and well developed with something very new and raw. Even given that VP8 did reasonably well- it was quite competitive with x264's baseline profile encode.

Static v.s. moving images

aleXXX — Wed, 26 May 2010 17:14:10 +0000

Are these images from the same bitrate and quality settings ?
The 264 one is indeed much sharper, it looks like twice the resolution of the vp8 one.

Alex

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

njh — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:54:23 +0000

One thing that occurs to me: I have seen a lot of speculation and commentary on whether Google has done sufficient due-diligence with respect to the question of whether VP8 infringes on any MPEG-LA patents, but not much about the reverse question.

Between competing corporations patents tend to be something that they horde so that they can be used in defensive "mutually-assured-destruction" threats - "if you don't attempt to enforce patent X against us, we will not attempt to enforce patent Y against you ...".

On2 have been in the video codec business for a while now. I wonder if Google have inherited any On2 patents that could be used to put the thumbscrews on H.264, or other portfolios that MPEG-LA care about ... ?

Static v.s. moving images

DonDiego — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:25:41 +0000

x264 clearly preserves more detail, VP8 is blurrier. Thus x264 is better.

You are free to choose VP8 (or any other codec) nonetheless, but the quality difference is not something that can be honestly disputed.

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

paulj — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:28:50 +0000

Whichever one Google prefers working with? ISO and IETF are the main technology ones. IETF requires disclosure of patents from participants, which may be a benefit (presuming ISO does not have such rules).

This is a badly researched article.

foom — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:57:10 +0000

I also think that google should be a lot more open on whos work they are building on. For example, the container of webm is matroska, just relabled as webm. But with no word are they thanked for the great work they have done to create this container. They are simple forgotten in all the hype creation machinery.

Perhaps you'd like them to say something like this on their "about" page?

What is WebM?

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

jzb — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:05:47 +0000

And which standards body should be reviewing this?

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

sorpigal — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:29:32 +0000

What I was looking for and did not see in all of this is something from Google stating that they are submitting VP8 or VP8+Matroska+Vorbis to a standards body. It's nice if it's patent free and open source but it isn't a standard until it's a standard... and I would prefer the independent review that the process would likely entail.

This is a badly researched article.

liljencrantz — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:23:52 +0000

For the "long line of multimedia projects and companies announcing support for VP8 and WebM" that you're wondering about, look no further than the WebM home page:

Adobe
AMD
ARM
Brightcove
Broadcom
Collabora
Digital Rapids
Encoding.com
Grab Networks
iLinc
INLET
Kaltura
Logitech
MIPS
Mozilla
Nvidia
Ooyala
Opera
Qualcomm
Skype
Sorenson
Telestream
Texas Instruments
Verisilicon
ViewCast
Wildform

Static v.s. moving images

paulj — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:41:48 +0000

You'd likely perceive one as "sharper" than the other, even without consciously noting the extra details. Our brains are quite good at such fast, parallel processing.

B-frames.

cortana — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:16:30 +0000

B-frames may have been present in MPEG-1, but that does not mean the patents have expired, in every country, and that there are no other patents that continue the earlier patents, or that are worded differently enough to be considered separate patents, and hence filed later, but similarly enough to still cover the same subject matter.

This is a badly researched article.

liljencrantz — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:36:24 +0000

Just checked, content encoded with the main H264 profile works fine on my Ubuntu system, it is only high profile that doesn't work. Also, Android devices don't support anything but H264 baseline.

This is a badly researched article.

liljencrantz — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:31:15 +0000

I think you're misreading the part of the article about comparison images. I believe the article does not mean to imply that Garrett-Glaser did not post comparison images, I think it meant to imply that unlike the comparison images posted by Garrett-Glaser, those posted by StreamingMedia used comparable bit rates. Ironically, the article is still wrong, as all files are between 16 and 17 MB in size, the VP8 one being among the larger.

If you read what the actual comparisons compared, though, you'll find something interesting. Garret-Glaser compared VP8 to various codecs, including H264 with either of baseline and high profile, and concluded that VP8 is roughly comparable to the baseline profile, but noticeably worse than the high profile. StreamingMedia compared VP8 only to the H264 baseline profile and also found they where very much comparable, i.e. the exact same result with a rather different slant.

The question is what people _should_ be comparing VP8 with. It seems to me that the H264 baseline profile is what is actually used in the real world today. The video players on my system (mplayer and Totem under Jaunty) could not correctly play the high profile H264-clip from Garret-Glaser's site. My n900 phone claims to support h264 but only supports the baseline profile. My previous phone, the iPhone, also only supports the baseline profile. As near as I can tell from my own experiences, if we're considering VP8 as the challenger that needs to displace the currently entrenched H264 with it's vast base of installed players, we must compare VP8 with H264 baseline, because that seems to be the only thing that can be reliably played on systems advertising H264 support. On the other hand, if we're talking pure tech and wondering about which format has the coolest technical toys, there is no reason to restrict our comparison to the baseline profile any more.

This is a badly researched article.

KotH — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:25:15 +0000

Badly researched doesnt really cover it.

It's realy unnerving to see how much FUD is spread over LWN when it comes to video coding. Please, if you want to write about video coding, then talk to the guys who actually do work on it. Talk to the guys from FFmpeg, VLC, MPlayer, Xine, XviD, x264,...

Then, about the article. Yes, Jason might be biased. Yes, he is an x264 developer. But if you read his blog post you'll see that he tries to have a balanced, technical analysis of VP8 compared to h.264. He isn't attacking it, neither does he bash it. And he definitly does not claim that VP8 violates any patents (he writes that the claim that VP8 is patent free is dodgy at best). And unlike most of the people who do compare different video codecs, he actually knows how to do a fair comparison without bias towards one or the other, even accounting for suboptimal implentations.

I wonder what the "long line of multimedia projects and companies announcing support for VP8 and WebM" is. FFmpeg (for those who don't know, it's the one single project that matters most when it comes to video coding as _every_ OSS video software uses FFmpeg somewhere and a lot, if not most comercial software does too) did not announce anything, neither was it "in the know before the deal was made". Also, FFmpeg did not get any patches until after the public anouncement. Some of the simpler patches were quickly commited, the rest will at least take a few weeks until all of them are ready to be included.

I also think that google should be a lot more open on whos work they are building on. For example, the container of webm is matroska, just relabled as webm. But with no word are they thanked for the great work they have done to create this container. They are simple forgotten in all the hype creation machinery.

Confusing MPEG and MPEG-LA

bawjaws — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:22:04 +0000

A related quote on damaging reputations from Dark Shikari:

"Xiph [is disliked because of] the methods that Xiph uses to market their bad technology. They have at times posted outright lies about their software and then, once proven wrong, often refuse to recant. Example: the Theora vs x264 PSNR comparison where they "accidentally" performed measurement wrong, making x264 appear 2x worse.

They use the same techniques as many of the more evil commercial companies out there, which annoys the hell out of people who disagree with such techniques. ffmpeg devs believe that open source should be about honesty and good technology, not lies and FUD. Xiph disagrees, believing that "the ends justify the means", creating a practically unbridgeable gulf.

Thus Xiph has spent the last few years spreading absurd amounts of FUD about everyone who they believe opposes them."

from here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164764

It appears the shoe is on the other foot now that the discussion has moved from quality to patents and his own project looks to come off worst. He's posted minor updates to his piece about certain patent areas he commented on, but his conclusions still stand uncorrected and I think you'll find his words quoted all across the internet on the patent situation with regards to VP8, something which he clearly isn't an expert on.

Static v.s. moving images

AndyBurns — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:10:38 +0000

> Contrary to what this article claims Jason *did* post comparison images
> here are two out of many:
>
> http://doom10.org/compare/vp8.png
> http://doom10.org/compare/x264.png

Given several seconds to flick backwards and forwards between the images I can see differences, but not necessarily say which is better; with 24 or 30 images per second I suspect it would be even harder to decide which is best.

This is not a badly researched article.

bawjaws — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:08:28 +0000

I'd read all the articles before I read this and didn't spot any that were poorly summarized, even though I personally would have added some different context to some of them.

This article has more info on what design decisions in VP8 are likely to have been impacted by patents:

http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=420

I note that the original Dark Shikari article has been updated multiple times by the author (search for "update:"). The initial burst of updates where to add more damning evidence of On2/Google incompetence in not doing things the obviously better MPEG-approved way, but the later ones acknowledge that the decisions made more sense in light of patent issues he was unaware of, or of features of the VP8 encoder that he didn't fully understand.

Swift and predictable reactions to WebM

bboissin — Wed, 26 May 2010 09:16:34 +0000

> It isn't sufficient to avoid one claim of each patent. You have to avoid ALL the claims of each patent.

Not if you dismiss the independant claim.

> There is also a very good reason for some parties NOT to study the MPEG-LA patents. If you have seen someone else's patents, and are later found to be infringing them, it establishes "knowing infringement", for which the penalty can be much higher.

As pointed out by Tridge, this isn't really true for most open source software, as the "simple" penalty already effectively kills the project.
http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents...