Firefox will support VP8 (aka WebM) | Hacker News Reader

Firefox will support VP8 (aka WebM)

hacks.mozilla.org

83 pointsAndrewHampton16 comments

The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264.

Interesting to see Mozilla support the idea that Theora provides markedly worse quality-per-bit than H.264.

I think before they were just claiming that Theora's quality was "good enough".

The post by Jason Garrett-Glaser (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1361442) suggests this move might be strange for Mozilla since there's a high chance that VP8 will be patent trolled soon.

Any particular reason to believe a patent troll will be involved, as opposed to a company suing over patents that it practices?

I suppose I didn't mean "patent troll", but instead spoke with a growing distaste for the way patent law is practiced. When I read that article I found difficulty locating where I stood between calling something a compression technique and just... math.

I've never understood the "just math" argument. Couldn't a similar argument be made against all drug patents ("just chemistry"), all mechanical device patents ("just physics"), and so on?

Oh, I agree that the argument applies more broadly than "just math". I'm also not sure what the ideal patent protects. It seems to lie somewhere on the discovery-invention axis, but I don't know where.

Well if they do anything related to the web in their line of business they're going to hampered by Google withdrawing the patent rights to use VP8 when they sue.

Does Apple or any other consumer electronics manufacturer in MPEG-LA really want to be left out on the cold on that?

This is just a special case of why Non-Practising Entities (i.e. trolls) are the terrorists of asymmetrical patent warfare.

There is a lesson in it to folks who claimed Mozilla should just swallow and go H.264.

And when Mozilla is sued by MPEG-LA for patent infringement will you say the same thing? Of the companies who say they will support this codec so far I think Opera is weakest and will be sued first, but Mozilla is domestic so they might be the one to take one for the team...

Google will most likely be sued first.

Also, it's not like there wasn't ever a debate as to how much Theora really is patent-clean.. So among the three it is clearly the best choice so far.

Will they start using GStreamer in Firefox like in one of their Fennec branches, or will they just add libvpx along with the existing liboggplay and implement their own half-baked media handling layer?

We went for the "own half-baked media handling layer". liboggplay is no longer used in Firefox trunk btw.

So WebM support won't be added to Firefox 3.7?

There will be no Firefox 3.7; it has been renamed to Firefox 4.

WebM may also be backported to Firefox 3.6, but people inside Mozilla are just starting to talk about that so there are no firm plans yet.

Well, that's the end of H.264. Knowing that Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe won't be getting licensing fees for most Internet video is just wonderful.

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