Google's dropping H.264 from Chrome a step backward for openness

1) Google uses us as tools in its battles and wars, because it is us who will be inconvenienced for years to come if companies continue to fight over video codecs. Sure, the explanations are grandiose — "we fight for openness" and the like — but the fight is being done by our expense.

2) Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable. H.264, an ITU/ISO standard, documented, with reference implementations, with a free/oss encoder (x264) and hardware support in a bazillion devices is called "closed and proprietary". Meanwhile, Adobe Flash (which this whole fight will just strengthen) is just fine, thank you. Oh, MP3 and AAC are fine, too.

I'll skip over technical details in this post, suffice it to say that I know and understand why H.264 (especially Main and High profiles) is vastly superior to On2 VP8 (now renamed WebM).

> ISO and ITU do not require the members working on their various standards and specifications to give up any specific patent claims that may cover the technology that they define.

Quite the contrary -- the ITU specifically had language that every contributor agreed to provide their contributions royalty-free. Unfortunately the politics got complexated when it became a joint ITU/ISO thing. Some of the biggest players made noises that they would agree to a "royalty-free baseline profile" (ie without some of the more patent-rich features, such as interlace and B-frames).

At the last minute, like Lucy from Peanuts, they took their ball and went home, leaving all the smaller players who had an interest in a truly free standard high and dry. This event IMSHO left a vacuum that resulted in pent-up demand for a truly free codec, which created room for Theora and WebM.

[disclaimer: I was involved]

VP8 and Flash are not open standards, but they are royalty free. AVC was openly developed and is an ISO standard but is not royalty free.

Although the Ars article mentions that MPEG-LA won't charge per-stream royalties for free youtube videos (for 5 more years, anyway), H.264 content from the Youtube Store are already subject to per-stream fees, starting at the beginning of this year. Also, Google TV streams may not fall under MPEG-LA's definition of royality-free "Internet Broadcast AVC Video". Furthermore, MPEG-LA hasn't yet made it clear exactly how much these fees will be!

WebM (vp8), along with lower-quality FLV (vp6), is a hedge against both current and upcoming per-stream h.264 royalties.

But there is a concrete issue involved: under MPEG-LA's licensing terms, Google should be paying $6.5 million a year to distribute a H.264 decoder. Under that license, the end users only get the rights to use the software "for personal and consumer purposes": they couldn't fork Chrome, redistribute it, etc. The Ars article mentions this, but immediately moves on.

It's possible Google expects MPEG-LA to try to enforce the patents, and that's why they're dropping H.264 support. After all, Google is the only browser vendor not in MPEG-LA worth trying to get money from. The yearly licensing amount just went up by $1.5 million, which might have influenced the timing of the announcement.

Comparisons with Flash are irrelevant: it may be less open than H.264, but not in the way that matters to Google.

if you weren't planning on doing so, you were either going to have to serve video via flash or not at all anyway. google's decision only tips the scales a little more.

+edit: note that I'm not prognosticating a new firefox monopoly or anything, just that firefox 4 will rapidly replace most of the current firefox 3.*s out there, which currently make up the referenced marketshare.

No, that doesn't particularly make sense. Choose your battles. They are endless in number. Nobody has time to fight them all. Fight the ones that matter most.

All else aside, there is nothing hypocritical per se about taking a stand on one issue and not another.

If I understand things correctly, for people shipping decoders the royalty amount is capped at $6.5 million a year. So they're making $6.5 million from Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. All in all, probably a few hundred million over everyone?

Would it not be more advantageous to leave that money on the table, completely entrench your format EVERYWHERE, and then pick it up on the professional/encoder side of things?

CNN, CNET, Fox, whoever, probably wouldn't mind paying a little more and getting a single universal format for everything everywhere and home users/hobbyists can play for free since they'll never hit the thresholds. Startups can get going by working in the free zones (< 100k paid subs, free un-paid use).

This is simply not true, MPEG-LA would go after any commercially successful project not paying royalties.

If someone comes up with a catchy slogan for their concept whether it's "Free Market" or "Fair Trade" it's simple politeness to engage with that and make a substantive point rather than making up your own definitions to suit and play semantic games.

For the love of God, stop saying 'Openness'

Even the title doesn't make sense. They could say "step backwards for easy of use" or "step backwards for MPEG LA", but saying "step backwards for openness" is ridiculous.

If it's encumbered with patents, it's not open, no matter how many free software implementations it has. Open means, open to anyone, not only open to those who pay for it.

Let's just make forks of Chromium and Firefox that include built-in support for as many codecs and file formats as possible. Someone wants to use a psd in an img tag? Sure! Someone wants to use a flac in an audio tag? Go for it! Want to use a bink video in a video tag? Be my guest.

Even if it's illegal, who cares. You can do it the same way that Windows Media Player and Ubuntu handle it. Every time the user comes across a video they can't play, a popup asks them to click a few times, and then voila! They have the codec.

Web developer are always going to have a crappy time of it. We will never ever be able to simply make one site one way and have it work nicely on all devices with web browsers. Give up on that dream. But the dream of making things good for the users, is achievable. Aim for that first.

Having a company like Mozilla pay a royalty on each user would cripple Firefox and any new browsers that may come along.

I keep hearing the Flash analogy, which is nonsense, flash doesn't just do video playback, the technology is ubiquitously used in a variety of ways and is not comparable to a video codec, and does not have any of the patent licencing issues h264 has.

This move is a step forward towards openness as it will force publishers and users to consider the non-proprietary alternative.