In terms of open standards, is there any reason to switch from Flash to HTML5 video if that video is going to be in H.264?
I understand that there are possibly technical reasons for Chrome\Safari choosing H.264 as the default codec instead of Theora but it strikes me as somewhat disingenuous for people to harp on about the need to move away from a proprietary technology like Flash, if the alternative is an open standard built on top of a proprietary codec.
H.264 is not proprietary. It's a standard, created through the coordination and cooperation of a large number of groups. Unlike much software that is 'protected' under patents, the development of MPEGn, H.264, etc. was a significant investment in both time and money by those participating. That does not make it any more justified, but it is something to keep in mind -- the project is not a joke or a patent troll.
Anyone can view the standard and implement it. To distribute, you are to acquire a license from the MPEG LA. The terms are not onerous or the fee excessive. Google and Apple both pay the license fee for each download of Safari or Chrome. The patent holders have so far not prosecuted projects like x264, which distributes its implementations without a license.
Do I think software patents should be abolished? Yes. Do I think Mozilla is holding back the open web by not supporting H.264? Yes.
If the MPEG-LA's fees are neither onerous or excessive then why was there widespread industry revolt when they were introduced? Didn't that one company have a very public falling out with them about it? What was their name again? Oh yes, Apple:
"Apple Computer has rejected proposed licensing terms for the emerging MPEG-4 video standard, leaving the future of its QuickTime multimedia technology in limbo.
At a company-sponsored conference on Tuesday, Apple previewed the latest versions of its QuickTime digital media player and new QuickTime broadcast technology, both built on MPEG-4. But the company said those products will remain grounded indefinitely as it seeks to change MPEG-4 licensing terms unveiled last month by a key licensing clearinghouse.
The terms, set by MPEG LA on 31 January, have prompted a wave of criticism in streaming circles for including a per-minute streaming charge that adds up to 2 cents an hour for video clips delivered in the MPEG-4 format."
This is for a broadcast license, from an article in 2002, for an older technology (straight MPEG-4, not the newer superset H.264 which is now widely embraced.) I don't know whether or not this proposed broadcast license fee was ever even enacted, though QuickTime does support plain MPEG-4, so I imagine not.
What do you mean by "broadcast licence"?. Streaming web video was part of that dispute, and fees for web video providers are a cruicial part of Mozilla's argument. As they're only due to announce what the fees for publishing H.264 will be at the end of this month we'll have to wait for then to see if they are onerous or not.
I've also heard that the only reason Microsoft's VC-1 codec is in the Blu-Ray standard is because MPEG-LA were playing hardball on their H.264 licence fees.
Here's the manager of Blu-Ray making the very simple point that surrendering to a single patented standard is only going to let them ratchet up prices:
"There are other advantages to having two compression techniques," Doherty says. "Moving forward, the technologies can have competition to help drive down licensing fees and improve picture quality."
If Apple (who also fell out with them about AAC payment terms) and Blu-ray need to play games to achieve reasonable terms then what hope do the small businesses have, especially when the standard response is "let's all lock ourselves into this one codec, what could possibly go wrong?"
Mozilla is not a small business. Businesses play games with each other because they are competing in an open market. End users do not have to do this. I don't work at Mozilla, I do not know what their situation is, but saying 'no way' to the whole thing and using a technology that they know nobody else will use and fragmenting web video is not helping end users.
If we're lucky, this is all actually maneuvering on the part of Mozilla to get the MPEG LA to lighten their terms with Mozilla.
That's the second time in this thread you've implied that only Mozilla is affected by H.264 patent fees.
Apple and Google have already tried to get MPEG-LA to freely licence a lower quality subset of H.264 to break this impasse. The individual patent holders of that subset weren't impressed by this suggested compromise and even if they were it would still be a bait and switch technique that leaves open source products as second class citizens.
One more thing, you call it an open standard elsewhere. If a standard is described as "open" then that traditionally means no patent fees. H.264 is a standard, but it is not generally held to be an "open standard": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
Yes it is. It is owned by a consortium, and that consortium wants money off me if I write and distribute software (my own software, that I have written, for fucks sake, not their software that they have written) that implements it.
> The terms are not onerous
The license terms are incompatible with free software. That makes them onerous.
> Yes it is. It is owned by a consortium, and that consortium wants money off me if I write and distribute software (my own software, that I have written, for fucks sake, not their software that they have written) that implements it.
Proprietary means "manufactured exclusively by the owner of intellectual property rights (IPR), as with a patent or trade secret." So, no, it's not proprietary. The fact you can write your own version of the standard without reverse engineering proves that.
H.264 wasn't trivial to create. It involved a lot of work to both meet the quality requirements and the technical requirements for supporting all the various ways in which it can be used. MPEG-LA isn't imposing a fee for your work, they're only imposing it for the costs associated with defining the standard. You're not charged more if you write a more complex implementation of the standard.
That being said, I still think it's dumb to charge for the standard. But it's perfectly within their reason and we have OSS alternatives to fall back on.
Well, what if I decide to make a toy web application that works with video and I decide to use HTML5 video standard? Will I have to pay royalties only to serve this webpage? And what if I put the source code of this application on github or any other repository that's open to anyone? And if I want to found a company that wants to make a living working with video online but nothing charging users directly, will I have to pay royalties only because every new user will expect that I should support the patented codec that he uses? Now, what's about that's is open?
Well, what if I decide to make a toy web application that works with video and I decide to use HTML5 video standard?
Nobody is going to come after you. You're not even worth their time. Is it stupid that technically this may be interpreted as a possibility under law? Yes, but that's the stupid country we live in. The same thing could happen with Theora if someone claimed to hold a patent covering it, and you'd be equally screwed.
And what if I put the source code of this application on github or any other repository that's open to anyone?
No problems there.
And if I want to found a company that wants to make a living working with video online but nothing charging users directly, will I have to pay royalties only because every new user will expect that I should support the patented codec that he uses?
Talk to your lawyer. You're a company, right?
Now, what's about that's is open?
The standard is open. You are free to implement it. The licensing terms are open. You are free to license it. You are not free to distribute implementations to users without licensing the technology that has been openly provided.
> The same thing could happen with Theora if someone claimed to hold a patent covering it, and you'd be equally screwed.
This is key. Theora is just as likely to be a patent target as h.264. You really can't do a competitive video codec right now without stepping on somebody's patent.
There is a big difference between operating technology that is currently in use without being subject to patent proceedings and operating a technology one knows to be patented without a license.
Ignorance is a defence here, particularly for end-users, as this is only potentially tortuous infringement and not criminal. Even for a major corp, if they can't be shown to have been aware of the patent then they can avoid a far greater penalty.
You can be told to cease and desist on the basis of a submarine patent on Theora, for sure, but a compliant end-user losing money over this? Not a chance.
Incidentally patents only cover commercial activity (at least in Europe).
Right. This is how Chromium works. Chromium does not build with H.264 compatibility out of the box. Projects using Chromium (not the Chrome package Google defaults for end-users) must explicitly enable H.264.
All they have to do is add symlinks to their non-broken ffmpeg libraries in /usr/lib/chromium
You don't have to compile chromium any differently, just tell it not to use its bundled ffmpeg (even chrome only includes a few codecs), and it'll figure out what's supported at runtime.
I'm not sure how this works, but if x264 has been getting along fine without legal tangles, then why can't Mozilla use this instead?
Unless their primary fear is of being a larger patent attack surface.
Additionally, I was under the impression that the patent sabre-rattling can happen only in places where software patents are valid. So why can't Mozilla offer a build of Firefox for download only in, say, India? Too much effort?
> "I'm not sure how this works, but if x264 has been getting along fine without legal tangles, then why can't Mozilla use this instead?"
Suppose my neighbor exceeds the maximum driving speed regularly but so far nobody has come after him. I am the owner of a truck company. Shall I tell all my drivers, "yeah go ahead and exceed the max driving speed, they're not coming after you"?
x264 is an encoder. Browsers need a decoder. The most popular open source H.264 decoder is the one that's part of FFmpeg, which is used both by applications that do pay a license fee (Google Chrome) and applications that don't (VLC).
Because they are based in France and EU does not recognize software patents. If you are using VLC in US/Japan, it is your responsibility to pay the fee.
This is entirely incorrect. Despite the wording of the EPC disallowing patenting of software "as such". That little couple of words on the end means that you can patent software - the old term was that it required a "technical contribution" or "technical effect" though there have been decisions on this since I was working in the field (particularly Aerotel/Macrosan in the UK).
It is does not solve Mozilla's problem with fees paid by authors and publishers. Do you want to pay license fees for videos you will put on your webpage? Thought so...
There is another advantage VLC has: it is academic project, sponsored by University. Even in US, you can use patented technologies for research without license.
Again, VLC's distribution is not for academic purposes it is a commercial offering (yes, even though it is free).
In your last sentence you are right, you can but you can't pretend you are aiding others to do their own research as a cover for commercial activity as that would be contributory infringement.
Just because they don't pay a fee, doesn't mean they don't have to. However, they seem to be passing on the responsibility to the end users:
"... Hence there is not need to obtain any patent licenses for VideoLAN software within the European Union. In other venues, please check any applicable law."
http://www.videolan.org/support/faq.html
The VideoLan organisation may be based in the EU, but there are a number of companies in the US whose servers act as VLC mirrors. Would they be potential targets if the MPEG-LA decided to do something about VLC being unlicensed? With its widespread popularity it can hardly have gone unnoticed.
I'm sure they don't want the negative press as they are trying to convince everyone to adopt their codec into HTML5. VLC's mirror servers could be shutdown but would they make money on a lawsuit? Do the VLC distributors have enough to make it worth while, not until they've managed to weasel into HTML5 implementations in all the top browsers - after that every video app using 264 will be a worthy target I'd have thought as the less apps not paying license fees the more sales of those that are.
It is primarily an effort issue. I have been trying to get an effort together to do precisely this, create standard build for media codec related open source products. used to build proprietary H.264 codecs earlier, so we know we can pull it of technically ! Just need to find time. Also plan to file a PIl case to force companies collecting patent royalties in India to stop doing so, it is technically illegal for MPEG-LA, GSM consortia and similar IP vampires to collect patent royalties in India.
>Do I think Mozilla is holding back the open web by not supporting H.264? Yes.
I'm wondering if it's fair to expect Mozilla (which I'm given to understand is a non-profit organization) to pay a license fee on every download the way a commercial entity like Google or Apple does? Do they get enough donations\royalties for this to be feasible?
Actually, as I understand it, only the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit entity. The Mozilla Corporation is for-profit and makes considerable amounts of money from search engine (currently Google) sponsorship. Estimates of $5mil for an H.264 licence for Firefox were being thrown around which is feasible for MoCo to pay. However, Firefox is just one product. Mozilla also have a mission to enable downstream projects, and buying a licence for Firefox wouldn’t cover these. They’d then be promoting a format on the web that would hurt long-term dependant projects of theirs; not a feasible solution in their eyes.
So why doesn't Google, a significant stakeholder of H.264 with both YouTube (don't want to reencode) and Android (H.264 is better on battery life due to hardware considerations), just sponsor Firefox's H.264 license?
Because that wouldn’t address the root issue of Mozilla’s objection: that downstream projects that use Mozilla code won’t be able to without paying for an H.264 licence themselves.
Safari hasn’t chosen it as the default, it’s chosen it as the solitary option. If they’d integrated Theora then every single browser that supports the <video> tag would also support Theora and the argument would be moot.
Safari hasn’t chosen it as the default, it’s chosen it as the solitary option.
Not true. They've chosen to implement it in a codec-agnostic way. It simply requires installing XiphQT, which itself only involves moving a file into a folder. This is unlike (say) Mozilla, to which <video> support of h.264 cannot be added by any means.
You could argue that Apple have made it the solitary option on their mobile devices, but that's because it depends on the availability of hardware decoder support, which doesn't exist for Theora.
and the argument would be moot.
No, the argument would shift over to trying to get content creators to use Theora, even though 70% or so of the browsing audience doesn't support it or <video>. Web video would still be dominated by h.264 in Flash, the only format that would work everywhere.
My understanding is that Apple and Google cannot use Theora because they are targets for patent trolls, and would be sued by a multitude of companies claiming to hold patents that cover Theora.
correction: It's just Apple/Safari that does not support Theora, not Google/Chrome, which does.
That's a red herring. Precisely the same wording could be used for any software publisher and any algorithm. Even with H.264, the fact that you're paying one patent holder does not preclude other patent holders suing you for other parts of your software. You could just as easily say, "My understanding is that nobody with deep pockets can distribute any software because patent trolls might show up."
Yes, that's right, to a degree. The amount of software patent litigation that exists now is absurd.
The reason H.264 is more secure for Apple and Google is that the technology is already covered by an existing patent, which is licensed out by the holder. If someone wished to claim ownership over technologies covered by H.264, they would have to go up against MPEG/MPEG LA and many others.
With Theora, as far as I know, the burden for legal defense would fall on whoever is using it, namely Apple and Google. The situation is ridiculous, but there you go.
That patent protection theory is wrong since Theora is "already covered by an existing patent, which is licensed out by the holder".
One of the avenues Apple was exploring in order to discount Theora was checking whether the Theora patent licence applied to independent implementations or just the xiph version.
Google made that point moot by buying the original patent owner.
While it might work for dead-tree media, I don't see any benefit of 4 little columns vs. 1 wide-ish block for a blog. Especially when blockquoting a fairly sizable amount of text.
I agree that it makes the page less readable, but I can forgive Roc that little indulgence; he implemented support for CSS columns in Gecko; it's only fair that he gets to show it off.
Asa Dotzler's blog (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/) has the headings twist by five degrees or so when you mouse over them; he's not even a Gecko developer, so he's got no excuse.
Because for Mozilla it's not a case of side-stepping the law. It's a case of their moral intentions. They want the web to be usable for people who want to run free software, or at least for it to be possible to write a browser stack based on open code.
why not? if you distribute h.264 videos on a large scale (>100k viewers), you need to pay licensing fees.
if you want to bundle a h.264 decoder with your software, you need to pay, too. Only if you use the OS' native decoder, you don't need to pay. But Firefox is multiplatform. WinXP, Linux do not support h.264 out of the box.
"if you distribute h.264 videos on a large scale (>100k viewers), you need to pay licensing fees."
Clearly, the likes of Youtube and Vimeo don't care about this. They do seem to care about using a codec that is standard, widely supported and with good and varied implementations (both encoding and decoding, with or without hardware acceleration). Theora has neither of these characteristics.
"Only if you use the OS' native decoder, you don't need to pay. But Firefox is multiplatform. WinXP, Linux do not support h.264 out of the box."
Well, WinXP and Linux do not support Flash out of the box, but that doesn't seem to pose any problems.
So if you provide a service for just encoding video to H.264 (using ffmpeg)), without streaming the videos to end users, you are already deep into patent trouble?
Yes, producing encoded content would indeed require you to have a licence. But, if you're running such a service, at least licences are cheap (even if the pricing model is still set around the concept of hardware devices).
Well, given that Microsoft is on the list as well, 98% of all desktops are covered. The remaining 2% are welcome to purchase licensed third party codecs.
I don't want to sound offensive but just because some tiny portion of people would prefer a free/open solution, the large majority of the people (who actually use a commrecial OS and and don't really care about the whole thing just want YouTube working on their desktop) shouldn't be "punished".
Actually, it is new thing in Windows 7, so Vista also does not have H.264 decoder.
What about turning it around? 100% has access to open decoder, and if 2% wants to use licensed codec, they can. Remember, Theora was suggested as baseline codec, not as only codec.
Using h.264 is a win for bandwidth only if you know what you're doing. Most encoders out there (see the x264 site for details) are run with poorly tuned settings and generally do a poor job. And yet ... no one care, they do it anyway. The idea that marginal 20% or so bandwidth costs are expensive is mostly a red herring.
Frankly if Safari and IE were to suddenly support Theora (or Firefox and IE to suddently support h.264), this argument would be over. No one cares about the technical details. Any codec that works pervasively will win.
For businesses, this is a good question. H.264 licensing can be relatively inexpensive (free for moderate use, cheaper than MP3 or AAC for high-volume use). So most businesses are probably better off using H.264 than Theora.
Firefox is another story; they aren't charging, and according to the article, would be responsible for the licensing costs for every one of their (hundreds of millions of?) users.
How can there be an infinite number of licensees, when the number of people & corporations is finite, and licensing is only needed for a finite amount of time (until the patents expire)?
Theora. Whether it’s of ‘sufficient’ quality is debatable, but for normal YouTube style videos it’s fine. For higher definition videos there’s Dirac, but that’s not really field tested yet.
They could probably get a good chunk of improvement out of Theora if they broke the spec, fixed a couple of things that either seemed sensible at the time or were just plain stupid and took advantage of what we've learned about codecs and assumptions about processors speeds and capabilities in the meantime.
They haven't done so yet because there's still room for improvements to be wrung out of the current spec and the longer they wait to do a non-backwards compatible spec break the better they'll be able to make it.
If Google releases one of the VP codecs then it's probably not going to be that much better than what xiph could have done if they weren't trying to keep compatability since they're based on the same core technology.
"Normal YouTube style videos" are a historical target. The quality of video the end user is able to produce is progressing at a startling rate. Go to and see what even amateurs are doing, it's not just "My face in a small window with a bookcase in the background" anymore.
In general, I've been disappointed with theora output for very high def stuff.
What's more, the video standard affects more than just what software component you load. Vendors like Apple have devices which must support video playback in hardware. Without a very good solution there, theora is basically a non-starter. And people who complain that Apple should support Theora because it is free need to consider that, moving forward, mobile playback is extremely important.
Generally, this "hardware" decoding argument is bunk. It's just software in conjunction with a DSP. If your vendor gave you proprietary software that you can't update (and maybe they can't either if it's 3rd party) then that sucks, but it doesn't magically make it "hardware".
Note the big thing holding it back from even better performance is private APIs that they can't yet(!) use in open source code, not any lack of "hardware".
I understand that there are possibly technical reasons for Chrome\Safari choosing H.264 as the default codec instead of Theora but it strikes me as somewhat disingenuous for people to harp on about the need to move away from a proprietary technology like Flash, if the alternative is an open standard built on top of a proprietary codec.