Bye Bye H.264!

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com
Thu May 20 18:26:47 BST 2010


On 20 May 2010 18:13, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> JOOI, can anyone point me at a relatively short & to-the-point
> comparison of the rival open or open-ish codecs proposed for HTML5?
> I'm no video format expert so I don't need some 86-page in-depth comparison.
> What, in a word, was so wrong with Ogg that Google has spent all this
> money buying then releasing a rival for it? H.264 wasn't & isn't free,
> AIUI, but now VP8 is, which implies that VP8 had some distinct
> advantages over Ogg, doesn't it?


1. The contenders.

* H.264: excellent codec, patent-encumbered up to *here*.
* Theora: not as good in theory as H.264, almost as good in practice
with a really good encoder. Not good enough for Google.
* VP8: Commercial codec which Google just released. Theoretical
quality up there with VP8, the Xiph guys are working on doing the same
magic with it that they did with VP3 to make Theora.

2. Patents.

If it wasn't for the patent encumbrance, we'd all just be using H.264.
VP8's patents are released for use in VP8 and derived code [*], and
the licence contains a provision that if you bring a patent suit
against someone over patents in VP8 you lose the right to use the
patents in VP8. This is a most interesting piece of mutual assured
destruction and is why this is Interesting Times.

3. HTML5

WHATWG is probably not going to adopt VP8 as the official HTML5
<video> baseline unless everyone agrees to it - Apple's veto was
sufficient last time. However, it has a good shot at becoming the
default codec anyway, particularly as the biggest provider of online
video, Google, is progressively putting out *everything* in VP8. I
suspect that'll be the deciding factor.


How's that?


[*] insert tedious details here, I can't be bothered, you get the idea.


- d.



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