Youtube enables Flash-less video viewing... for Chrome only

[Dominus Atheos]

Which is great for phones and devices that had video playback in mind when they were built, but most cell phones and small devices don't, and will have to add one if they want to be able to claim being HTML5 compliant.

For example, the Blackberry Curve doesn't support it.

Look, we have to draw a line somewhere. You have to drop support at some point, that's just the way it goes.

What?

Furthermore, you argue for an open codec (e.g. Theora) which isn't supported in hardware at all, anywhere! You can't at once argue "well, not all phones support H.264 in hardware" and then go "we should support Theora!"

Maybe you've lost track of what we're debating. I said that Mozilla would have to pay money to implement an h264 decoder in Firefox, and you said they could just pass it off to the hardware.

Mozilla could just implement Theora support in software. It should playback fine, after all Flash is (for now) pure software, and it...

er...

Maybe that's a bad example.

[Dominus Atheos]

That makes it even worse, not only does Apple shun Flash, they make the adoption of a competing format more difficult through their insistence on their OWN codec.

Tsk, tsk.

Apple does not own H.264.

Apple doesn't wholly own it, but it is a part of the group that created it and is a member of the group that licenses it; so they own part of it.

[Dominus Atheos]

Update: And now Chrome is only going to support the WebM standard, and is going to be converting all of it's youtube content, eventually disabling Flash altogether.

In a move to encourage support for royalty-free codecs on the Web, Google announced this morning that it will remove the patent-encumbered H.264 codec from future versions of its Chrome Web browser. This new twist in the video codec debate could help accelerate adoption of Google's own WebM format, but it will also compound the technical challenges faced by content producers who want to use standards-based video to reach a broad audience on the Web.

Used on Blu-ray discs and supported across a wide range of mainstream consumer electronics devices, the H.264 codec is the current de facto industry standard for encoding digital video. Although H.264 has many technical advantages, Web standards advocates oppose using it as the standard format for the HTML5 video tag. The underlying compression mechanisms in H.264 are patented and adopters have to pay royalties to a licensing consortium called MPEG-LA. Standards advocates view this patent encumbrance as undesirable for the Web.

In an effort to provide a viable open alternative to H.264, Google acquired video technology company On2 and opened up the company's competitive VP8 codec, creating a new royalty-free media format called WebM. Support for WebM has since been added to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. Microsoft and Apple have declined to adopt the new royalty-free format, however, and have remained committed to supporting H.264 in their browsers. Apple favors H.264 because its quality is still considered technically superior and because it already has robust hardware-accelerated decoding support on Apple's popular devices.

Google appeared to favor the pragmatic approach and had opted to support both formats in its own browser, but is now moving towards a fully open approach. In a post on the official Chromium blog, Google says that the benefits of an open format outweigh the pragmatic advantages of supporting H.264. The company believes that innovation, in the long term, will be best served by an open technology ecosystem.

The move will resonate strongly with standards enthusiasts, but it won't help reduce the complexity of the HTML5 video landscape. The split between H.264 and WebM poses some challenges for content producers. Companies that want to use HTML5 to display video on the Internet will likely have to support both codecs in order to reach the broadest possible audience. Microsoft's substantial browser market share and the popularity of Apple's devices simply can't be ignored by content producers. It's likely that many content producers will continue using H.264 and will simply use Flash instead of the HTML5 video tag to display video content to browsers that don't natively support the H.264 codec.

Although Google is taking a forceful position in favor of open codecs in its browser, it's not clear yet if this principled attitude will carry over to other aspects of Google's Web strategy. It seemingly contradicts the company's pragmatic complacency on the issue of proprietary browser plug-ins. It's also unclear if Google's newfound commitment to pushing open video formats will cause the company to rethink its support for H.264 on its popular YouTube website.

And now someone finally does some GODDAMN RESEARCH on this shit and figures out how much Google and Mozilla would have to pay to support h.264.

There’s no royalty for the first 100,000 units of a licensed product; sublicensees pay 20 cents per unit up to 5 million and 10 cents per unit above 5 million. The current agreement includes an annual limit: “The maximum annual royalty (‘cap’) for an Enterprise [is] $6.5 million per year in 2011-2015.”

...

For ad-supported videos delivered over the Internet, such as those on YouTube today, “for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view … there will be no royalty during for the life of the License.”

There’s also no royalty for any title 12 minutes or less in length, even if it’s paid for. For anything over 12 minutes, the rates depend on whether the end user pays on a title-by-title basis or as part of a subscription service. directly for video services.

So Youtube would be mostly free. I seem to remember their videos being capped at ten minutes, probably for exactly this reason.

However, Mozilla and Opera would have to pay millions of dollars to add support to their browsers. Remember that those companies only get what little income they have from Google in exchange for using them as the default search provider.

[Marcus Aurelius]

However, Mozilla and Opera would have to pay millions of dollars to add support to their browsers. Remember that those companies only get what little income they have from Google in exchange for using them as the default search provider.

I'm pretty sure that's not true. Both companies have other sources of income. For example the Opera Mini Java version comes pre-installed in many feature phones and I'm pretty sure they get something out of that from the manufacturers (Nokia & Samsung) even though downloading Opera is free for the users. (Opera is not open source unlike Mozilla.)

[JediToren]

I'm skeptical that WebM/VP8 will be able to challenge, let alone overtake, H.264, which is used almost everywhere and plays on just about everything. Almost every mobile device capable of playing back video has a hardware H.264 decoder, not just those made by Apple. My android phone has one, my brother's web-enabled BluRay player has one, etc.

I'm a freelance editor and a number of local post houses as well as other freelancers are either looking into or have already installed hardware H.264 encoders. One facility I freelance for installed a turnkey encoder into their machine room primarily to deliver live feeds to their national broadcast clients, as apparently H.264 is in used in that market as well, in addition to web/mobile, BluRay, etc. These hardware encoders allow real-time or faster encoding and since H.264 is used everywhere, it works for virtually any delivery medium.

Of course, the first hardware WebM/VP8 decoders and encoders are due to be released this quarter, but no word who will be installing them in their products. It's called the RK29xx made by Rockchip and apparently it can do full 1080p video conferencing with minimal battery usage.
Of course, there are already millions of H.264-capable devices that will never be able to play back WebM/VP8 until their owners replace them, and without any WebM-exclusive content, you won't see people rushing to replace their phones or BluRay players just to get the new format.

Adding WebM support also means more money spent on hosting and bandwidth for delivering video, since H.264 can't simply be abandoned. Fortunately, any web browser that doesn't support H.264 (Firefox, Opera, Old versions of most other browsers, and now Chrome) can simply fall back to a Flash-based player which will play H.264 files just fine. Flash also plans to support WebM, which will allow browsers that don't support the format to play the format, but this won't work on devices that don't support Flash.

In the various tests comparing H.264 and WebM/VP8, VP8 appears to be inferior in many cases to H.264, and even the most favorable reviews show VP8 is only on par with H.264, not surpassing it in terms of quality vs. bitrate.

This leaves it's patent-free status as its one and only advantage over H.264. While MPEG-LA and others have disputed this status, even if turns out to be true, supporters of VP8 would do well to remember that H.264 became the defacto industry standard in spite of it's patent-encumbered status and associated licensing fees. It's clearly not the deal-breaker WebM supporters would have us believe.

The large number of existing devices that will only ever play H.264 means that even if support for WebM becomes ubiquitous in newer devices, content providers cannot simply ignore the H.264 format for the foreseeable future. However, they can ignore WebM without any consequences.

WebM could improve it's odds if it offered some more compelling advantages, such as:

1. If support for the format becomes common and it remains patent-free, content providers could reduce their licensing fees for H.264 by using WebM as the primary format and using H.264 as a fallback format.
2. WebM supporters have pointed out that the encoding software for VP8 has a lot of room for improvement, and that the quality of VP8 could be improved substantially without having to update or upgrade any decoders. If a VP8 stream could achieve the same quality with a much lower bitrate than H.264, that would be a huge advantage.
3. Premium content that is only available in WebM would encourage consumers to update/upgrade software and devices in order to access WebM content.