Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate(arstechnica.com) |
Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate(arstechnica.com) |
This article and the HTML 5 codec issue in general really illustrates the stifling effect that software patents are having on technical progress.
Are there any compelling reasons left to keep software patents around? It seems like they're doing way more harm than good.
It's unfortunate, but it isn't the catastrophe that the article implies. The vendors that are going to support Theora out of the box are going to do so anyway, and the vendors that are going to support h264 out of the box are going to do so anyway. Standardizing on either wouldn't have done nothing but dissociate the spec from reality.
So now web designers have to deal with incompatibilities introduced in the last century, as well as ones introduced in yet-to-be published specs.
What is the point of standards if everyone is going to ignore them? The HTML5 committee could have saved a lot of time by not writing the spec and instead concentrating on a free reference implementation. (When browser vendors have to implement a spec on their own, they are going to cut corners to make things easy. If they can just cut-n-paste from a reference implementation, they will probably just use that.)
That's the point. That's why that part was removed. If Theora had been mandated, Apple would have ignored it. If h264 had been mandated, Mozilla would have ignored it.
http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-July/002415.html
It's worth pointing out that no-one has suggested H.264 as a recommended codec, not even Apple or Google who are both shipping H.264 support. Since it is patent encumbered it simply doesn't pass the first test for getting into a W3C standard. You'd be as well to suggest Flash or Silverlight be added to the spec, it would get shot down just as quick.
Apple apparently tried to get one of the less advanced H.264 profiles made royalty free, so it could go into the standard, but was getting pushback from some of the other patent holders in the MPEG-LA. That would have been interesting as it would have been a "first hit is free" kind of deal, where Safari/Quicktime would be able to support the higher levels of H.264 but Mozilla/Chromium/Linux wouldn't and Opera presumably would refuse to do so on principle.
BUT, expose this information to the server, so I know which video to serve. Add an Accept-Video-Codec and an Accept-Audio-Codec header, and that is all you need to do.
For extra points send some information on screen resolution in the headers, instead of making me use javascript for it.
The reason this is good is that browers don't need to support anything. They just use the media libraries on the computer. If I want more codecs, I install them, I don't need to convice the browser to support them.
Of course, we should really just get rid of software patents.
I don't think it's so bad to reward that with a license fee, and the patent administrators are benign dictators. There are lots of exceptions to allow startups to use it, there are sub-inflation caps on the fee increases, and the maximum license fee per hardware device is 20 cents. Online is a bit more complex but still very cheap. full terms here: http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
On principle, I lean towards a totally free software solution. But pragmatically, this is a very fair approach to administering a patent for a technology which delivers a lot of value, and and I think h.264 will persist for that reason.
Even when <object> based video worked, the plugin architecture made it slow, unstable, unpredictable and generally a horrible user experience. The only reason we have video at all today is because Flash provides it internally.
Any web video standard that fails to standardize the codec has made zero direct progress. However, it looks like the HTML5 attempt may have resulted in an acceptable defacto standard: a browser must support one or both of H.264 and/or Theora. Since the <video> tag makes it easy to provide both formats, I think this is a compromise that web developers will be able to live with.
1. flash will remain the dominant video platform for the near future.
2. This stalemate between theora and h.264 is a huge win for chrome, the only browser that will support both.
(People don't want a standard saying how to play videos on the web. They want to be able to say <video src="foo.video"> and have it work for all their users, including those using free software.)
In brief, Theora is more open-ended (supporting up to terapixel resolutions!) but at the price of being far less optimized or well-supported for acquisition and delivery needs today. h.264, while processor-intensive and subject to long-term limitations delivers outstanding performance right now and is widely supported.
Also, Theora brands itself as ideal for web delivery with limited bandwidth leading to graceful rather than abrupt degradation, which is great, but of declining utility as bandwidth and reliability increase. It isn't pushed as a great choice for high-quality delivery, leading to a lack of awareness among content-providers who would rather use use h264 for everything from blu-ray to Youtube.
Now, that doesn't mean Theora has no future - as it matures it will become more desirable as a supported option, and the long-term architecture will help with that. Right now, however, it doesn't offer any significant technical benefit, like massively smaller compression or massively better image representation, compared to competitors. Making film and video is expensive and the patent licensing costs are such a tiny fraction of that cost that content providers and distributors really don't care. To them, Theora is a solution in search of a problem (indeed, many have never even heard of it). There is no economic incentive to deliver in this format, so they won't.
tl;dr programmers care about Theora, video people don't.
Open-source, on the other hand, has a most unphysical habit of proliferating without the original creator's involvement. If Canonical promises to pay 20c per CD they ship, and 10% of those CDs are imaged and torrented and downloaded and burnt and re-imaged and re-shared all over the web, nobody knows how many "units" are out there, and there's no reasonable way Canonical (or Mozilla, or any other prospective licensee) can comply with any patent license more complicated than "do whatever you want".
Since the fees are capped, some organization could just pay the cap, distribute a "free" codec, and write the cost off as a marketing expense. Mozilla can afford to do this, but refuses on principle.
Is there anything like this for .mp3 support?
Fluendo distributes a "free" MP3 decoder; they pay the license fee on behalf of users.
<video>
<source src="example-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="example-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
</video> <video>
<source src="example-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="example-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" default/>
</video>