Chrome dropping support for H.264? Yup. WTF?

[zaxrex]

Wait, MS not in it for the money?

[Sabre]

Several comments speculated about Microsoft’s financial interest in the codec. (Microsoft participates in MPEG-LA with many other companies.) Microsoft pays into MPEG-LA about twice as much as it receives back for rights to H.264. Much of what Microsoft pays in royalties is so that people who buy Windows (on a new PC from an OEM or as a packaged product) can just play H.264 video or DVD movies. Microsoft receives back from MPEG-LA less than half the amount for the patent rights that it contributes because there are many other companies that provide the licensed functionality in content and products that sell in high volume. Microsoft pledged its patent rights to this neutral organization in order to make its rights broadly available under clear terms, not because it thought this might be a good revenue stream. We do not foresee this patent pool ever producing a material revenue stream, and revenue plays no part in our decision here.

why on god's green earth would the world's largest software company do such a crazy (in google's eyes) thing? they're clearly not buying into h.264 for the money... interesting, yes?

Why? Easy! So that they can sell more copies of Windows

MS pays y into royalties
MS gets back x from MPEG-LA
The above says y>x

MS sells Windows for z
z+x>y

So by including H.264, they are appealing to a wider market for very little off of their bottom line in terms of licensing profit from Windows. The little off their profit more than makes up for having to pay for the license. So yes, they are in it for the money.

In regards to indemnification: You're right, Google (right now) is not offering it. Probably because they would loose money instantly and open them selves up to lawsuits in the process. What other free product (for both production and playback, as in VP8) offers it though? MPEG-LA/H.264? HELL NO. Google really is trying to offer something for free to the people and get it widely adopted, but it's not going to take legal heat should the shit hit the fan.... and neither would MPEG-LA. They own the patent pool, but if something in H.264 did come up, you can bet your mortgage that they wouldn't protect the end user. They would simply say "We protected you from the patents that we own... and that is all that we signed on for. Have a nice day."

[complacent]

Why? Easy! So that they can sell more copies of Windows

MS pays y into royalties
MS gets back x from MPEG-LA
The above says y>x

MS sells Windows for z
z+x>y

So by including H.264, they are appealing to a wider market for very little off of their bottom line in terms of licensing profit from Windows. The little off their profit more than makes up for having to pay for the license. So yes, they are in it for the money.

In regards to indemnification: You're right, Google (right now) is not offering it. Probably because they would loose money instantly and open them selves up to lawsuits in the process. What other free product (for both production and playback, as in VP8) offers it though? MPEG-LA/H.264? HELL NO. Google really is trying to offer something for free to the people and get it widely adopted, but it's not going to take legal heat should the shit hit the fan.... and neither would MPEG-LA. They own the patent pool, but if something in H.264 did come up, you can bet your mortgage that they wouldn't protect the end user. They would simply say "We protected you from the patents that we own... and that is all that we signed on for. Have a nice day."

actually, one of the main reasons for the patent pool is to provide protection. taken from their website

Benefits for Patent Users

We help your company manage its intellectual property risk intelligently, without the costs that it took to do this in the past

* Enabling technology to be more widely used by making it accessible to everyone on the same terms
* Bringing together essential patent rights owned by multiple patent holders
* Saving time and money
* Averting legal costs and concerns
* We are your trusted partner

if you're using licensing their patents, you're pretty dang safe. that's the point. where is h.264 used? EVERYWHERE. for how long? ehh, since about 2003.

here's another great article on the history of h.264 and video adoption online: unl.edu linky

one of my favorite parts:

As it turns out, the developer of the free x264 h.264 encoder (if I’m losing you now, keep going … you’ve got too much time invested to stop now), Jason Garret-Glaser, went looking. And what he found was a veritable minefield of potential submarine patent claims in VP8/WebM. “With regard to patents, VP8 copies too much from H.264 for comfort, no matter whose word is behind the claim of being patent-free. This doesn’t mean that it’s sure to be covered by patents, but until Google can give us evidence as to why it isn’t, I would be cautious.” That’s the way he put it. The way I’d put it is “Here, There be Dragons.”

ouch... that looks nasty. but what would he know, right?

additionally... i find this part pretty important:

MPEG-LA, the organization that administers the MPEG-4 patent pool, announced that h.264, AVC, Part 10, whatever you want to call it, would be permanently royalty-free online as long as the video is free to end users. In other words, if you encode your video in h.264 and put it on the Internet to be enjoyed by others, and you don’t charge those viewers to view your content, neither will the patent-holders of h.264 charge you for using their patents. And those patents are known, legally-vetted, and in contrast to WebM, much closer to being a sure thing. Granted, h.264 isn’t ‘free,’ as in ‘freedom’ in the sense that technogurus like Richard Stallman espouse.

again, what's so horrible about this (h.264)? it's free to small shops and production houses, cheap for big companies and institutions, free to end users, high-quality, established and safe.

did you stop flying in an airplane because the airplane manufacturers formed a patent pool? no.

what about rfid? same deal... just sayin'.

[Sabre]

and I'm sure you knew I was going to post this
/. : Google Announces WebM Community Cross Licensing

Google's WebM project has announced the formation of the WebM Community Cross-License Initiative. Members of the WebM-CCL agree to license patents they may hold that are essential to WebM technologies to other members under royalty-free terms. This initiative would seem to address some of Microsoft's concerns about WebM. Meanwhile, the MPEG LA appears to have remained silent after the submission period of its call for patents essential to WebM ended over a month ago.

The Reg: Google and friends wrap open video codec in patent shield

Google has announced a patent-sharing program around WebM in an effort to guard the open source web video format from legal attack.

On Monday, with a blog post, the company introduced the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative, which brings together companies willing to license each other's patents related to the format. Founding members include AMD, Cisco Systems, Logitech, MIPS Technologies, Matroska, Mozilla, Opera, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and the Xiph.org Foundation, as well as Google.

"CCL members are joining this effort because they realize that the entire web ecosystem – users, developers, publishers, and device makers – benefits from a high-quality, community developed, open-source media format," said Matt Frost, Google senior business product manager for the WebM Project. "We look forward to working with CCL members and the web standards community to advance WebM's role in HTML5 video."
...
According to a March report citing people familiar with the matter, the US Department of Justice is investigating MPEG-LA over its efforts to undermine the royalty-free nature of WebM.

Very happy to see that Google is doing this. I think it will persuade some of the naysayers <cough Colin> to realize that it was trying to do "no evil" and make a good CODEC (that is becoming better with every release) available to all. I'm also VERY happy to see that the DoJ is investigating the MPEG-LA, as what they were trying to do is down right shitty.

Looks like a lot of good companies are jumping on the bandwagon too, so I expect products to be available soon!

April 25, 2011 — The WebM Project today announced an initiative to establish a Community Cross-License (the CCL) with 17 founding members.
Google, Matroska and the Xiph.Org Foundation already make the components of WebM openly available on royalty-free terms.
With the establishment of the CCL, CCL members will agree to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL.
The founding members of the initiative are:

AMD
Cisco Systems
Google Inc.
HiSilicon Technologies (for itself and on behalf of its parent, Huawei)
LG Electronics
Logitech
Matroska
MIPS Technologies
Mozilla Corporation
Opera Software
Pantech
Quanta Computer
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
STMicroelectronics (for itself and its 50/50 joint venture, ST-Ericsson)
Texas Instruments
Verisilicon Holdings
Xiph.Org Foundation

[complacent]

yep, knew it was coming. saw the article on /. this morning and had a tab open for most of the day.

i am very happy to see google working on this patent pool. it is absolutely vital for something like this to work and be adopted on a global scale.

the pool however is still in its infancy. google hasn't even gotten the whole of their own content in this codec yet.

all of those concerns about battery life, etc still remain and will continue to do so until hardware support for this codec is mainstream in commodity hardware. set-top boxes, smartphones, laptops, portable video players, etc.

i still think they should have started this ten years ago if they were so worried about "not being evil" and freeing us from the "evils" of h.264. this whole product and its argument are only here because google couldn't monetize h.264-encoded content with ads. yes, the byproduct is a free codec, but you're delusional if you think google is doing this to "not be evil." google didn't create webm because they saw a void in codec freedom. google did this because google saw the chance to make money. anything to the contrary is horseshit.

i'll move a step toward the "wait it out and see" column, but i don't like the idea of trashing an existing consumer product base just to use this free codec.

my best guesstimate regarding the adoption of webm in mobile devices is going to be much like adobe flash... it's going to suck. a lot. might get better with time though. that's kind of google's thing - release early, release often.

personally, if i'm spending money, i don't want a half-baked, wait-for-a-future-update-for-all-functionality product. *cough* Xoom *cough*

i could very well be wrong. tbh, i'd almost be happy to be wrong. as it stands i still don't think it's a very good product. i hate the fact that google is turning their back on content that people have already spent money on. i'm happy being a curmudgeon on this one.

my other guesstimate is mpeg la is being quiet for a reason... look out for the drop!

[Sabre]

I'm sure you'll get a kick out of this one:
Yes, the new Android movie rentals use Adobe Flash

Google believes online video should be delivered with the HTML5 video tag and open source WebM media format. And yet it just introduced a new movie-rental service that uses Adobe Flash and the royalty-encumbered H.264 codec.

It's a contradiction that makes perfect sense. If you're Google.

At its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Google unveiled a new movie-rental service for the Android Market. The service is already available from the web-based version of the Market, and it will soon be rolled out to the Market applications running on certain Android devices. When you rent via the service, you can view movies not only on Android handsets and tablets, but also on PCs and notebooks through a web browser.

When announcing the service on Tuesday, the company did not say how videos were encoded and delivered. But when asked about it on Wednesday, the company told us the service would deliver video to PCs using Flash. It's still unclear how videos are delivered to Android devices, but Flash uses the H.264 codec, and Google indicated that all videos were encoded with H.264 and only H.264. Presumably, it uses Flash across the board for DRM reasons.

On one level, the move is hardly surprising. Just before the Android Market announcement, Google expanded movie rentals on YouTube, and YouTube is based on Flash. The Android Market rentals make use of the YouTube player on PCs, Google told us.

But at the same time, the new rental service highlights Google's ongoing web video schizophrenia. Google has made it clear that despite its belief that WebM and HTML5 are the future, it still needs Flash for YouTube. HTML5, Google said in blog post last year, is limited when you need DRM, full-screen video, and camera or microphone access.

"YouTube doesn't own the videos that you watch - they're owned by their respective creators, who control how those videos are distributed through YouTube," the company said, when discussing DRM. "For YouTube Rentals, video owners require us to use secure streaming technology, such as the Flash Platform's RTMPE protocol, to ensure their videos are not redistributed."

The Android rentals require much of the same stuff. Plus, it just makes sense to use the same formats for both the Android market and YouTube.

The rub is that Google is slowing the progress of HTML5 video and its own open codec. Rather than put all its weight behind HTML5 and WebM, the company is happy to simply give the pair a gentle push from time to time. When Google launched WebM in May of last year, it promptly rolled the format into Chrome, but it retained H.264 support as well. Earlier this year, Google said it had decided to remove H.264 support, but this has yet to actually happen.

On YouTube, though Flash still the dominant force, Google is now encoding all videos in WebM for HTML5 viewing. But as long as YouTube – and sister Google services such as Android Market – continue to use Flash, you have to wonder how WebM and HTML5 will ever get over the proverbial hump.

The added problem is that although Apple and Microsoft have embraced the HTML5 video tag, they refuse to adopt WebM in their browsers. Microsoft says the codec may be vulnerable to legal attack, and apparently Apple feels the same way. With both these big names holding out against WebM, it's unlikely that Google, Mozilla, and Opera can turn the tide on their own.

The swing vote may be Microsoft's. Despite its concerns over WebM's legal position, it has collaborated with Google to build software that lets users add support to Windows and IE on their own.

Or perhaps the swing vote lies with Google. Hopefully, one day, the company will fully embrace its own message.

[complacent]

can we make this face --->

about 100X larger.

good. frigging. grief.

pick one google.

[Sabre]

Ya, rather surprising... I'm going to guess that they will convert over to WebM eventually... but who knows.

[complacent]

so it starts... 12 organizations say vp8 infringes their patents.

this probably won't end well...except for the lawyers of course.

Twelve organizations have concluded that Google's VP8 video encoding technology violates their patents, according to a group called MPEG LA that's considering offering a license to those patents.

"Patents owned by 12 different patent holders have already been found to be essential to VP8," MPEG LA said in a statement to CNET yesterday.

This is a concrete data point in a debate that's lasted more than a year so far about how safe Google's technology is to use without fear of infringement litigation. Previously, MPEG LA had only offered the more limited statement that it believed VP8 violated others' video patents. MPEG LA declined to name the companies or patents involved.

VP8 is a codec--technology used to encode and decode streams of data such as video and audio--that Google released in 2010 as an open-source, royalty-free product that could be built into software such as Web browsers and hardware such as mobile phone processors. Google obtained VP8 through its $123 million acquisition of On2 Technologies in 2010; when paired with the Vorbis audio codec it forms the WebM video technology with which Google hopes to liberate Web video from the patent-encumbered incumbent called H.264 or AVC.

In particular, Google wants to find a royalty-free codec that can be used in conjunction with the HTML5 video technology, a move that could help advance Web video to make it as straightforward to use on a Web site as a JPEG graphic is today.

MPEG LA is in the business of licensing collections of patents relating to H.264 and to several earlier video codecs. These patent pools are actually owned by numerous companies, universities, and research institutes that set MPEG LA's licensing terms, collect some of the revenues, and choose to sue parties believed to infringe the patents. MPEG LA argues that it merely provides a one-stop mechanism to license intellectual property that's much more convenient than licensing patents from a multitude of individual organizations, but Google wants VP8 to steer clear of patent licensing restrictions altogether.

Earlier this year, MPEG LA issued a formal call for organizations to come forward if they believed VP8 violated their patents. Twelve now have done so, but it's not yet clear whether MPEG LA will offer a VP8 patent pool license or how the licensing costs might compare with those for H.264.

"A principal consideration for essential patent holders in determining whether to form a patent pool is whether offering a pool license alternative--a license to essential patent rights owned by multiple patent holders under a single license as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses with each--would be of benefit and convenience to the market," MPEG LA said. "MPEG LA is currently facilitating that discussion among them."

The Streaming Media blog reported the emergence of the 12 patent holders earlier this week.

Google didn't immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.

However, Google has felt confident enough in the intellectual property purity of VP8 to ship it in its Chrome browser and offer it as an option on YouTube. It has attracted a number of allies, too: Mozilla includes WebM support in the Firefox browser, and Nvidia's Tegra 2 mobile processor has hardware support for VP8 encoding and decoding.

Patent lawsuits are generally expensive, protracted ordeals uncommon in the technology industry, but many parties, including Google, have been swept up in a spate of such lawsuits involving the hotly competitive mobile phone market. It's not just competitors suing one other: so-called non-practicing entities whose sole business is licensing patents have been suing as well. Because such entities don't make or sell tech products of their own, they can't be countersued for infringement when they file suit.

Just having a patent isn't enough to win a lawsuit, though. Defendants often challenge a patent's validity, sometimes successfully, and companies often argue their own products don't infringe in the first place.

Google is working to form a group cooperating to allay fears of VP8 patent infringement suits. Through it, each member of the group "grants to the other members a patent license for any patents that may be essential to WebM," Mike Jazayeri, Google's director of product management for WebM, said in an earlier interview.