Google has recently announced their intention to remove the H.264 video codec from its Chrome browser. This decision has been smeared as an evil campaign for controlling video on the web, akin to not-invented-here syndrome. It’s also been lauded as the push that the web needs to remain open and free. Mostly, it’s been marked as inconsistent, due to the bundling of Adobe’s proprietary Flash player.
Richard Stallman doesn’t like the term Open Source because it fails to embody the true meaning of “free software”, and the one thing that’s worse is the word “open”. This debate can’t simply be labeled as one for or against openness (even ignoring the technical details).
H.264 is an open standard. It was developed by a committee, standardized, reviewed by many engineers and developers for multiple companies and has been standardized for use with a multitude of containers and devices.
However, H.264 is not royalty free. Software patents in many countries restrict the distribution of software that utilizes the codec to those who pay the MPEG-LA.
VP8 is not a standard. It was developed secretly by a single company, and until recently, had only a single working implementation. The public wasn’t open to collaboration on the specification until the bitstream spec was frozen, including the bugs that existed within. Now, the source code and
reference implementation are available under liberal licenses, and all the related patents are irrevocably royalty-free.
Adobe Flash, while not synonymous with a video codec (unless you mean .flv flash videos, which are either VP6 or Sorenson Spark), is going here anyway because everyone feels like comparing it.
Flash’s SWF format is not standard, but it is open. There are a few implementations (Swfdec, Gnash, GameSWF, Gordon, etc), but none of them are as complete as the official proprietary implementation. There’s a bitstream specification that anyone can read to create an independent implementation of the player. Implementing and using the Flash player is still royalty-free (Since the Flash VM can decode H.264, obviously that part, not controlled by Adobe still has royalties), anyone can make software that can export SWF animations without paying Adobe.
Code: Select all
Implementation vs. Distribution
Or: How Bundling Flash doesn’t violate the Novikov self-consistency principle
Name Standardization Implementation Distribution Dev History
Theora Standardized? Open Source Royalty Free Mostly Open
VP8 Not Standardized Open Source Royalty Free Mixed
H.264 Standardized Open Source Royalties Open
Flash* Not Standardized Proprietary Royalty Free Proprietary
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Often, the argument against VP8 is that it’s inferior to the H.264 codec, and to me, this seems like the most ideologically valid concern. But in a lot of cases, it stems from a misunderstanding of how H.264 works. H.264 is not a single video codec (not even to mention multimedia container formats), but rather has several Profiles that work on different devices and implementations. Rarely are videos encoded only in MPEG-4/AVC H.264 Extended Profile at 1080p and 60fps. Go on the Apple store and you’ll see that every iPod device you can find (including the iPhone), includes what video codecs are supported. And it doesn’t just say H.264, but rather, something much more wordy like
Video formats supported: H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
For the insanely great iPhone 4. Google is meaner and doesn’t make the information about profile support on the Nexus S quite as accessible (though it’s not the only reason I’m an iPhone user), but it should be safe to assume it’s something along the lines of what the iPhone 4 supports. The iPod Classic has a nice, even longer string, that represents even less support for H.264:
H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats;
This is because very few devices can actually utilize all the great features that H.264 defines. Wikipedia has a nice pretty chart. So the point of all of this is to say, even though VP8 is inferior to H.264 from a purely technical standpoint, you probably can’t just use the Main or Extended profiles to support all the devices that “support H.264″. Does this invalidate the inferiority argument? Nope. Dark Shikari said “I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264″. But the large number of devices that support H.264 might actually only support the baseline profiles.
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VP8 is a bit worse than H.264, and had it been a patent encumbered video format, there would be almost no reason to prefer it over AVC. The <video> part of the HTML5 specification states:
It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue and this section will be updated once more information is available
The only major codecs that are royalty free are Theora and VP8, and the former probably isn’t of sufficient quality. Both of them come with patent risks (or at least that’s what MPEG-LA wants people to believe), leaving a set of zero acceptable codecs. For this to work at all, something needs to be compromised.
H.264 defines a baseline profile that all decoders could be reasonably expected to handle. Such a profile exists so that the video can be viewed, albeit with inferior compression on a variety of devices and platforms with limited computational ability. The internet was built on interoperability, and HTML5 needs an equivalent “baseline codec” for the web. Something that compresses video at sufficient, though not bleeding-edge quality. Something that can be implemented and distributed openly on all platforms.
did they wait so long to enter this fight any damn way? show me an hd camcorder that doesn't default to h.264. or a blu ray. or an apple device. or most portable video players. or most set top boxes. i've got every stick of media that i own in h.264. if google had intended to "do good" they should have done so when there wasn't a prevalent standard for compressing hd video. 
Looks like WebM is licensed under a BSD license (ya!). Here is the part that is interesting: