Patent Troll Larry Horn of MPEG-LA Assembling VP8 Patent Pool
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VP8 is a huge threat to H.264. Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Opera have instantly committed to it for HTML5 video. If MPEG-LA fails against it, Apple will likely come on board as well since it's an open technology (vs. Flash which is closed) and the fact that chip makers look like they'll implement it (Broadcomm has already committed for its mobile chips). So, MPEG-LA is clearly going to fight against it. Theora was more of a curiosity (no offense intended)* - an older video codec (based on VP3, IIRC) that didn't have the support of major companies or chipset makers. VP8 is being pushed hard by heavyweights.
Google is not indemnifying users of VP8, but they're going to defend it. I'm sure Google has a decent patent library that they'd be more than happy to use to strike against not just MPEG-LA, but also its constituent members. It's important to remember that a corporation is made up of shareholders. If Google has a patent that many shareholders infringe on, they can strike at those shareholders to get them to pressure MPEG-LA not to go after VP8. Shareholders ultimately control companies including MPEG-LA. I'm sure Google could make life more difficult for those shareholders.
*The Theora developers have done an awesome job, but they're working from a base specification that's, well, old.
They'll be under some amount of pressure as people will be able to view WebM in Safari via Flash which will make their browser a second class citizen compared with Chrome, Firefox and Opera. (A quicktime plugin will be released in a few weeks that will enable HTML5 in Safari as you currently can for Theora but Flash will probably quickly overtake it for installed base once it gets WebM support).
Hey, I've just realised that Macs come with Flash pre-installed, which curretly includes VP6 and soon will include VP8. Wonder what Steve thinks about that?
MP3 and AAC had better hardware decoding support than Vorbis. That affects Apple a lot. Theora (to my knowledge) doesn't have chipsets made for it. On a mobile device, you kinda need hardware decoding for both processing time and battery life. With Google's weight behind VP8 and Vorbis, Broadcomm has committed to implementing it in their chips. Qualcomm is also on board with WebM. So, that might assuage Apple's concerns.
In terms of patents (which is one way Apple argued against Theora): I think this situation might be different as well. First, it looks like it'll be implemented by a large number of rich companies quickly (Google, Qualcomm, AMD, Broadcom. . .). When people pushed Apple for Theora support, who was implementing it? Who has implemented it? Few. Having lots of rich companies in the same boat means more people to to defend against patent holders. And, to be fair to Apple, I don't really know of mobile devices that have implemented Theora. It's nice to have someone else go first and prove that it can be done. I mean, from what I know, Android doesn't support Theora. Anyway, with the weight and excitement, we're likely to see patents come to light, if any, sooner rather than later.
Plus, Google wisely put a clause in the license saying that you lose rights to their patents if you take action against anyone using WebM. If there's enough weight behind WebM, it's going to be hard for people to pass up access to those patents. If WebM becomes web video, you're not going to want to sue a WebM user and then potentially be permanently banned from playing in the web video game. Think about it: 5 years down the line Qualcomm, Broadcom, and other chipset makers decide they can save a lot of money implementing WebM rather than MP3/AAC/H.264. Most web video has gone WebM. It's what people support. Then someone comes along with a patent. They're not going to want to be excluded from being able to push video to the millions of devices out there that are WebM devices.
But yes, I shouldn't be so confident. I think I've made my case that Apple is more likely to support this than previous free stuff, but you make a good point.
Lack of Vorbis support you can just about give a pass on since it might confuse users and spoil the Apple vibe. Not implementing FLAC in favour of your own homebrew ripoff that you don't licence out is just unforgiveable. Again, I've said before that, for me personally, was the point that Apple jumped the shark.
Sansa's the number two in the iPod/DMP market, one of their latest models drops AAC support, while retaining mp3, WMA, Vorbis and FLAC. If the web follows Youtube to WebM I can see similar playing out for H.264, though more realistically it's H.265 that's been strangled at birth.
edit: The first paragraph above may come off as too harsh on Theora, and too easy on Apple. For what it was proposed as, a baseline web format that would be guaranteed to work everywhere for your cat videos, government speeches, educational content, wikipedia footage of rare animals etc. Theora was and is perfectly suited just as gif and jpeg get the job done today despite better alternatives. It was Apple and their supporters that framed this as "there can only be one" codec and I guess they're reaping the whirlwind on that now.
It's conceivable that when someone says they're assembling a patent pool, that means that patent owners are selling/transferring their patents into a non-practicing corporation, which will then litigate. Since the patents are now held by a non-practicing entity, Google's revocation is meaningless.
The large number of H.264 decoders in the wild is akin to the large Flash player install base. The key difference is that you can't simply download a hardware VP8 chip.
(And you can indeed "download a hardware VP8 chip" if you happen to have a Nokia N900, Palm Pre or Motorola Droid and want better quality video since they have a general purpose OMAP3 setup to do exactly this kind of thing, as already shown by Theora DSP work. And OMAP4 has already been announced by TI to have WebM built in so maybe TI themselves will do the work necessary.)
No, a very large proportion of them support High Profile. It was only the very early mobile phones and iPods that used Baseline chipsets. Nowadays H.264 support is almost always H.264 High in hardware devices.
(btw on the OMAP3 in existing devices supporting WebM, the TI rep answered someone's question on their blog with: We are working at the moment on supporting VP8 across all our OMAP products and we will contact you directly with a schedule for your products based on OMAP3.)
Flash Player is not completely open sourced, because of H264( the patent pool of which, Apple is part of). Adobe pays the licensing fee for using H264 . Adobe has released enough code and specification to let anyone build a flash playing software. Completely open sourcing Flash Player wont be possible unless H264 is open and patent free. So if Apple really wants, they can build their own Flash Player without Adobe's approval.
src: http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2010/02/following_the_open_trail...
Flash is mostly open. There are still portions that Adobe isn't so open about. Plus, when something is created and maintained and extended by a single company, it's very different from something like HTML. I mean, Adobe can implement something, launch a working player and then tell people about the specification for it. At which point, alternative implementations are always behind. And there's a part of me that says that any situation where one company is essentially 100% of the market can't be open. Openness means coding to a spec and making sure that your stuff works on multiple implementations. If I'm a Flash developer, I'm not going to code to a spec - I'm going to code to the Flash player since it's the only implementation of the spec that people really use.
So, Adobe does restrict certain things, there isn't an open development of the spec ala HTML, they haven't open sourced the vast majority of the Flash player that doesn't rely on licensed technologies (and whose open-sourcing would greatly help). . . Adobe likes being the only game in town for Flash.
Frankly, even when you look at the WebM stuff, you can see that Google is trying to make it a place for more than just Google. The WebM project website (http://www.webmproject.org/) is actually copyrighted by the WebM Project - not Google! There's no Google branding - Google is barely mentioned more than other companies like Opera. That's open. I'm guessing Google would love contributions and enhancements from non-Google people. That's different from Adobe. That's a community process. And it is different.
Flash still feels very much under Adobe's thumb. No, it isn't closed like many technologies (and that's a positive thing), but there's a meaningful difference between the openness of Flash and the openness of HTML and other truly open technologies.
Often there are more than one ways of looking at things (see the quote in my HN profile). Flash can totally be considered open and just no one has put the effort in like Adobe has to make a good player - and you're right that Apple could make a mostly complete Flash player if they were willing to put the effort in. But, from my perspective, it isn't as open as I'd like. Adobe/Macromedia did stymie alternative players for many years - even including clauses in their players EULA that you couldn't work on an alternative implementation. Those days are gone and Adobe publishes the Flash spec (which is an awesome step that we should acknowledge no matter where we stand on the Flash debate). However, there are always little things like RTMP which have edge cases that aren't as open. And my personal opinion is that open technologies don't come from one company or person and can be improved by everyone.
Even if a technology comes from one person or company, that can be the catalyst of a broader community that works on it. Take WebM. Google is the company behind VP8. However, as the WebM site says, "A key factor in the web’s success is that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP are open for anyone to implement and improve." That implies that Google is expecting others to contribute and for it to become like HTML or JavaScript or Canvas. That's exciting for me (compared to Flash where improvements just come down from on high). And, to be honest, if Adobe were totally committed to openness, they could try to get the WC3 involved in Flash. There are standards bodies that could take over Flash or they could start a project like WebM with Google, Mozilla, and others to openly implement Flash (with H.264 and other parts as compile-time options to be included). Yeah, it's easy for me to say that sitting here in the cheap seats, but Adobe could put in more of an effort. Even Microsoft has been helping the Moonlight folk to implement Silverlight.
Flash being as open as it is, is important and I know that I've written it off a little too much in the past. I don't want to take that away from you, Adobe, or anyone. However, WebM looks like it'll be more open - that I could contribute (if I had the knowledge and skill). But even not having the skill, I know that everyone from Google to Mozilla to Adobe itself can help make it awesome! The open nature of the web has just been awesome. It's really exciting to me in a way that Flash just isn't. Yes, often times there's bureaucracy and it's annoying to get new things adopted and coordinated - and maybe Flash offers a nice single-source that can push the boundaries of new technologies without worrying about multiple implementations.
There's no reason that HTML5 video and WebM mean that Flash has to die or that it has no place on the web. Maybe Flash can be thought of as a kind of proving ground for things that won't be implemented by multiple vendors until they've proven themselves - kinda like video (Adobe implements video, it catches on like wildfire, the W3C starts incorporating video into the HTML spec using a more community process). I don't want to sound like an Adobe-hating person who thinks they're just evil even if I prefer HTML5 over Flash. However, for the long term, I think that open, community involved technologies are better and the direction we should be going in rather than a single-sourced technology even if the spec is being published for it.
As for Apple, I'd be really surprised if they embrace it any time soon.
Google (in particular YouTube) has 2 options.
1. Pay to license h.264 (or some other proprietary codec) 2. Release alternative and competing codec and do battle in the court room.
Both options were going to require spending money so they're going with route 2 which is likely the better long term option. There's also a good chance they can get some other heavyweights to back them in support.
Google is playing for control. Likeliest outcome of VP8 being found infringing is some cross-licensing deal and new patent pool with Google as major stakeholder. They would thus have significant control over the resulting VP8 license costs vs being "just a customer" to the h264 group. Having a compete product thus acts as a powerful check on h264 licensing too.
Google is simply trying to ensure that its business isn't held hostage by someone else. Either they win and no-one controls video, or they 'lose' and Google at least gets a hand on the wheel.
How will this pan out I have no idea, but the closest thing to a resolution that I see is Google will try to make MPEG adopt VP8 or the whole WebM in some way and join MPEG LA.
Of course they could be hoping to fight the patent allegations and not lose, but I doubt that Google have become so carelessly cocky.
If you launch or join attack against VP8, either directly or by proxy, for next 20 years (or however long it takes to VP8 patents to expire) you cannot ship anything that wants to play VP8 video.
For most H.264 patent holders (not MPEG-LA, think Hitachi, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba...) that could be a problem, if VP8 is successful. Would you want to be CE producer and unable to play Youtube?
So they can sue, but it will be an ugly battle, and unlikely to finish before the H.264 patents expire. It's really not a good idea.
I presume you mean MPEG-LA hold patents over VP8? Which? Also if the reverse is true, why aren't Google having MPEG-LA pay them license fees? Or, perhaps that is what's going to fall out of all this now.
In any case I think all of this clearly shows that the MPEG-LA are all about controlling the web and squeezing every cent out of it possible contrary to their apparently lax attitude [until 2012].
On the other hand, if MPEG decides to sue, Google will do a counter-claim, refuse to settle, and the thing could easily be tied up in courts until all the relevant patents have expired.
I'll give the guy one thing -- he speaks good run-on.
Nobody (that matters) is going to aggressively move to VP8 prior to that; you'll get the usual lip service. Or you'll get ignored. Or both. Until there's some standing and some idea of the patent landscape, any commercial entity (with money to move forward, which is also money to lose in a patent tussle) will be making an investment that may get the company either nowhere, or sued.
If it proves unencumbered, VP8 would put a ceiling on MPEG-LA and H.264, and thus the patent holders will undoubted get to tussle this in court.
If encumbered, you'll either pay or you'll be blocked depending on what the patent holder(s) want.
Apple has H.264 in hardware. They'll either ignore VP8, or it'll take multiple replacement cycles or a software work-around to get a new CODEC out. And given that Apple already has H.264, they'll likely be disinclined just because VP8 is not Better Enough to warrant the migration effort.
Either way the tussle ends, we'll know VP8 is in the clear or not. Odds are that there are patents. But until the legal tussles end and the CODEC is unencumbered or encumbered and licensed, it's all academic.