Google open sources VP8

A comment I read - maybe in the announcement - hints that VP8 probably uses a compatible but simpler, more restricted version of "the Ogg container" for multimedia. i.e. that some operations that are legal in Ogg will be rejected by VP8.

The comment makes me curious about how difficult a container or multiplexer format for data streams can be - if it's only a container. It sounds like complaining about an envelope, or the pastry on a sausage roll. Is it really so hard to get at the meat?

Read the link given by a friendly commenter on the earlier article:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
There you have someone who went over the code and who seems to know codecs and h.264, and he notices too many similarities.
Seems to me it's not blind bashing but unfortunate realities that there are possible some issues here.

If You really have nothing to contribute then please rethink whether You should post at all.

move towards open source solutions is always good thing, regardless who are driving it forward.

And if You post "truths" about the VP8 and H.264 I hope You have the facts straight and have really read both specs and actually used and compared the formats using the same source media.

Otherwise you just as credible as anyman.

Don't shoot the messenger even if his tone is somewhat biased at time to time.

...mean they're using the Ogg container format, or has the Goog applied any smear of sanity to that?

I've been looking for a decent iPod-alike that supports Vorbis [without luck -- please make suggestions for anything <$200 and 20GB+] and this has mostly lead to discovering criticisms that are sort of justified - Ogg's handling of timing is fairly insane, and the everything-is-potentially-interleaved-any-which-way looks like a developer's nightmare compared to more narrowly-defined containers.

Meanwhile, Google has enough money to defend anything and see how it plays out, so more-power-to-them on this particular issue but it's still a crapshoot until it hits the US Supreme Court. Surely some of the players with a vested interest in keeping video pay-to-participate licensed [Apple, MS, Fraunhofer] have some ridiculously basic patents along with the more technical ones, so this is going to be one of those messes that takes a decade+ to litigate, by which point the bandwidth to ship uncompressed QHD just *might* be cheap enough to render it all moot. [Wired Magazine predicted this more than a decade ago, but thus far CPU cycles have still remained cheaper than bits-over-distance, at least to the end user footing the bill.]

There might've been a point to this, but I'm Pretending To Be British [drinking heavily], so extract what you will from it.

I love your articles, Nick.

These flames are obviously from Apple Cool-Aid drinking drones with no mind of their own.

It's about time Apple wakes up and realizes that it's flashy "American Idol" commercials aren't going to suck in people who understand marketing and have reasonable doubts about a much hyped product.

Jobs, in his quest to rid the world of Flash and Pr0n, is hurting his own real estate. Every rant he makes these days is reducing his aura, making him seem weirder, and driving people away from his proprietary gadgets.

While I agree with Jobs that a thin, ultra-light, always connected device (like a big iPhone) will be the future for a good deal of people, the methods he is using to sell and justify such a device are questionable.

How does this post relate to V8? Freedom of choice! Something that you don't get with Apple.

I have no love for for Apple, but why is this article singling out Apple in Google's move to provide an alternative to H.264? From my understanding, Apple is just touting H.264 in HTML5 as a replacement for *Flash*, not because it has any stake in H.264 or V8 or whatever.

If V8 is opened up, I'm sure Apple will be just as happy to see it become the alternative/replacement for Flash video, as its main beef is losing control of its services platform to another company like Adobe.

I'm starting to feel like many others here: that the INQ has degenerated into a shoddy rag devoid of any value whatsoever. Now it just seems like the INQ is just filled with erroneous/ridiculous articles, links to that shitty V3 sister site, or regurgitated articles from the BBC.

Why does Nick Farrell still work here?

Places where his text diverts from the real world:

1. "Steve Jobs' proprietary H.264"

- H.264 has almost nothing to do with Apple, what is mentioned in the linked - and supposedly READ by the author - article.

2. "Most web browser vendors are in favour of the open standard, open source video format"

- H.264 is an open standard itself - just not free.
- MS will NOT be supporting VP8 playback without third party software, installed by the user beforehand. They probably won't do it differently until the patent threat is a thing of the past. Will it really cease to exist...? We'll see. They will, too.

2a. "For a start there is no provision for digital restrictions management (DRM) on it (...) However it being open source means there is nothing to stop them from creating their own self defeating DRM scheme for it."

- Welcome to the world of proprietary solutions, Mr. Farrell - exactly the same as the H.264's one.

3. "The complaint has been that it will be too tricky for anyone to write an encoder or decoder solely from the specification, however that's not a very credible criticism because Google's implemention of VP8 is, after all, open source and therefore available for study."

- How about you take the world's economics data form the last two years and try to deduce the existence and modus operandi of Bernard Madoff from that and try to create the measures to counter it? Because, you know, you would have about as much luck with that - unless you invested exponentially bigger amounts of time than what should normally be necessary in a reasonable world with an intelligible description of said events. Go, have fun.

4. "Jason Garrett-Glaser moaned to AppleInsider about possible H.264 patent infringements by VP8, among other things."

- JGG is one of the main x264 developers (go ahead and confuse it with H.264, Mr. Farrell) and AppleInsider's article was largely based on his blog post - WHICH was linked in the SUPPOSEDLY READ and UNDERSTOOD by Nick Farrell article. Reading someone's blog post is strikingly far from interviewing.

You know... After Mageek's departure, even as a tech tabloid Inq doesn't do very well. Time to turn off the lights, guys.

@ Uttstink

The article you referenced (from an H.264 developer -- perhaps not the most impartial judge of things?) is fallacious as it uses "straw man" arguments to try and convince people that the patent-encumbered H.264 codec is "better" than the free, open-source VP8 codec from the WebM project.

- The H.264 developer is comparing the performance of a beta release of the VP8 code to the current H.264 code.

However, the WebM project page specifically states that “there is more work to be done...some features of the WebM format are not yet complete...we expect to achieve better visual quality and performance in an official release soon...the performance of VP8 is very good in software, and we’re working closely with many video card and silicon vendors to add VP8 hardware acceleration to their chips”.

- The H.264 developer states that the VP8 specification is *final*.

However, the WebM project page specifically states that “the code and tools can evolve and improve for many years without requiring changes to the core specifications. We’ll maintain a separate branch of the code, however, for bold new ideas that could alter the specifications. If there are significant improvements to warrant a new revision we might adopt them, but only after careful consideration and after discussing suggested changes with the WebM community.” Open source code really never is “final”, and group consensus can agree to improve things while retaining as much backward-compatibility as possible. Google asks for code improvement suggestions on the WebM project page.

- The H.264 developer avoids mentioning the royalty penalties associated with using the H.264 codec, and that all these royalties are subject to change in 2015. And there is nothing “free” about H.264 -- someone somewhere is always paying royalties to MPEG-LA. Thus, MPEG-LA is effectively asking the world's citizens to slip the H.264 noose around their necks by allowing H.264 to become a web standard, with absolutely no guarantees that H.264 royalties will not skyrocket in 2015, or be preferentially enforced to exclude certain people or agencies from being able to exchange information using that format.

In any case, MPEG-LA is obviously worried, as WebM including VP8 – combined with yesterday's announcement of a Digital Agenda by the EU for open, interoperable digital standards -- has the power to completely wipe proprietary, patent-encumbered file formats off the world-wide web. And that would be a good thing IMHO,for the sake of free and open communication between all the world's peoples.

Mr. Uttstink, I must admit I am suspicious of your reasons for posting a comment in favour of a proprietary codec which has the power to hold the world and free communication ransom. You may be the H.264 developer yourself, or in some way being funded for your efforts by moneyed H.264 patent-holders. Those speaking in favour of VP8 on the other hand,tend to do so to support free and open exchange of information, and do not require someone to be stuffing dollars into their wallets to do so (so I thus afford them a higher credibility rating).

There is a simple way around this problem for MPEG-LA: just open-source H.264 with a BSD-style license similar to what Google used for VP8. But the money-hungry patent holders and MPEG-LA seem to be too greedy and too power-hungry to follow Google's example and make a gift of free speech and free communication to the world. So I for one will look forward to a WebM-centric web.

http://www.webmproject.org/about/faq/

I can just imagine the sinking feeling most fanbois got when they found out about this, especially the hardware support that's been promised by chip makers but wasn't covered by this article.

Suddenly, H264 has gone from being the obvious winner, with the freebie alternative being a three legged horse, to the open source option seriously looking like the inevitable predominant format whilst H264 will only be used to encode legitimate copies of films and TV shows bought from iTunes to watch by lifestyle fanbois who think it's cool and exciting to watch most of your 'quality' TV shows in the way the director intended - on a tiny Iphone screen with in-ear headphones whilst sitting on public transport and all the noise and other distractions that go with it.

ahh... i just wish that stewie jobs chokes to death with an apple.
it just pisses me off when every mildly-rich brainless apple fanboi starts arguing on how much better apple is, that their computers never hang, that they're as fast as lightning, that they don't have any viruses or security problems... it's just pure dogma, which, like the existence of god or whatever, cannot be argued, since it's just a matter of belief. anyway...

Or, you're confident that you know better than your computer does whether "implemention" is a word or not.

Or, you or somebody close to you added "implemention" to the luser dictionery. In which case you are probably stuck with it till you buy an new computer.

"to be fair to Apple"

Where's the fun in that?

you are sick...

"Jason Garrett-Glaser moaned to AppleInsider about possible H.264 patent infringements by VP8, among other things."

where did you get this rubbish from?

"Most objections came from Apple fanboi losers who cut and pasted their usual abuse on the basis that Steve Jobs had told them that H.264 would replace Flash."

For video as part of the video tag in HTML 5 - do some research

"Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 will also support the VP8 format."

via a plug-in or codec package

and apple is one of many companies in MPEG LA and from what i can see holds only 1 patent related to h.264/avc, check MS for example.

Google is using their open source codec for youtube so it would seem they have plenty of confidence that it violates no patents. They would after all be the first ones the patent lawyers go after. What happens to the code after it goes open source, I believe, is why google will not offer patent protection.

This was linked to in an Ars Technica article on VP8: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377

That sums up most of what my comments would be too.

Also, the comparison with Betamax is pretty apt. Like Betamax, H.264 is superior to the alternative. Like VHS, VP8 appears to be more "economical" to adopt even though it it inferior.

Given what's at stake in this someone will come out with a patent claim. I guarantee it. Whether it's a valid claim will have to be seen.

I think Google isn't confident in their own product by not indemnifying adopters against patent litigation. If Google was serious about its claim that all patents have been cleared and their "determination" to see it adopted then they would offer some such indemnification.

I know it's rare for any company to offer it but there is a lot on the line to get this to succeed. Google probably open sourced it just to shut up those who clamored for it and to gain brownie points.

Furthermore, as I understand it the "spec" for VP8 is pretty much just the source code to the reference encoder. It doesn't help that the reference encoder is a steaming pile of crap.