Ogg founder moves to Mozilla to work on new video codec | Hacker News Reader

Ogg founder moves to Mozilla to work on new video codec

gigaom.com

183 pointsbsimpson39 comments

This is excellent news.

Monty Montgomery is among my hero developers for nearly two decades now, building Xiph, Ogg, Vorbis, Theora, and the like.

Mozilla and Monty sounds like a wonderful match for creating free open source codecs, and bringing them to everyone.

Congratulations to Mozilla and Monty!

Don't forget cdparanoia!

Check out his fantastic demo pages for a look at the work being done on Daala. http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml

This is great news!

Excellent news that H.265 has competition, but at the same time I am feeling a bit pessimistic. Consider Theora for example: Even if there is open source VHDL available for Theora, it was only implemented in Nios II and LEON processors and according to Wikipedia "there are currently no Theora decoder chips in production". Even a license free codec wasn't enough to attract interest from manufacturers.

Youtube delivers huge part of the "relevant" video material in Internet. And Google has their own video codec. Would they include Mozilla's codec into their browser (and smartphones) instead and start encoding videos in their own service with Mozilla's codec? Quite unlikely. At least the article doesn't mention anything about DRM, so would it be enough for Netflix?

> Excellent news that H.265 has competition, but at the same time I am feeling a bit pessimistic.

Daala is not meant to compete with H.265, it's meant to compete with the successor of H.265. As he mentions it won't be ready for production before the end of 2015.

I'm sure Google will be just as enthusiastic about incorporating Mozilla's new video codec daala as Mozilla is about adding Google's image codec webp.

Well Mozilla supports Google's webm and WebRTC natively, so it's not as if they typically turn down Google tech.

Seems like a big case of NIH syndrome if you ask me.

Mozilla has studied WebP and found it to be worse than JPEG in many cases. http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...

They also found HEVC-MSP "worse" in some metrics. Seems a red herring to me. WebP isn't just about replacing JPEG, it's about replacing GIF and PNG. Today, on the web, if you want transparency or animation, you have to choose much worse formats.

And why is it so awful to add WebP to the list of image formats gif, jpg, png, but we can have a much longer list of supported audio codecs? What is different about audio? Or video for that matter? The argument seems rather arbitrary and self serving.

I agree with this, I've never understood why Mozilla (are dragging their feet) when it comes to implementing webp.

It's hardly a huge maintenance burden, all development is done upstream and there's an easy to use c library implementation, and of course it's fully open source and royalty free.

That's exactly what it is and while all these teams spend time inventing technology that is 98% the same as the existing stuff the people with the technology that is 100% the same as the existing stuff (often proprietary) laugh all the way to the bank.

It's 2013, there are dozens of codecs, many open enough to be used, just flaming pick one.

I'm not sure you realize how different Daala is from any other video codec in usage. It's ALSO royalty-free with a permissive FOSS license. It will also ideally be significantly better than anything else on the market.

It also won't arrive optimistically until almost 2016, effectively making it dead in the water if H265 gets rolled out in every smartphone, or if WebM is everywhere.

There are lots of promising codecs that were proposed to be different. Wavelets used to get lots of hype too. It's a very risky bet to just punt for 3+ years on the hope that promising research will pan out into something viable.

Research projects shouldn't delay moving forward on stuff that's ready now.

> Research projects shouldn't delay moving forward on stuff that's ready now.

Mozilla supports WebM.

Direct link to his announcement: https://plus.google.com/110063726540320603118/posts/PdXWDAyT...

Should I stop refreshing this page hoping for more?

http://www.xiph.org/video/

He said he's going to continue working on these videos. He actually has scripts for two more planned out.

Same exact job, just on somebody else's pay.

Sweet. They must take a ton of effort to make.

Monty was one of the smartest engineers I worked with at Red Hat. Brilliant guy, quick on his feet. I'm a bit disappointed he's moving on, but at the same time, he belongs at Mozilla. Once all the engineers are in the same room, Daala is going to kick ass.

So that's him living in MA working remote. He did not show up at monday meeting!

Sorry to be the one to do this, but

Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/927/

Relevant yes, but in this case the requirement for a new standard doesn't arise from vanity or "more use cases", but rather from the fact that video compression is a patent minefield.

Situation: there are 0 free and libre state-of-art video codecs; Xiph is working on one supported by Red Hat and Mozilla.

Mozilla buys Monty Montgomery from Red Hat.

Soon: Situation: there are 0 free and libre state-of-art video codecs; Xiph is working on one supported by Red Hat and Mozilla.

... very relevant.

How are VP8/VP9 (webm) not 'free and libre'?

As I understand, Google can go evil and use its patents to impose certain restrictions, like killing potential independent VP10 project or messing with webm's royalty-free status.

Since Google are offering them under a _irrevocable_ royalty free licence I don't see how you could have come to 'understand' it that way.

Do you have any references to your claims?

Citation?

Actually, those fail the "state-of-the-art" part of the test.

Oh no, please not ANOTHER codec in the mix. Hell, we don't have a single codec that works OOTB in all popular browsers without external software (I consider IE, FF, Chrome, Safari and their mobile counterparts). For now, it's WebM, Ogg and H264 which one has to transcode and store just for shipping a video to desktop and mobile.

And while we're talking about mobile, I'm sure that SoC decoding support will take not 2015 to arrive, rather than 2016 - give or take a couple more years because some patent troll will always dig up some dirt.

Please consider why we don't have a single codec that works OOTB.

H264 has all sorts of nasty licensing stuff, which Daala is not subject to. It should also avoid all valid patent claims because it is based on lapped transforms as opposed to DCTs.

also, Ogg isn't a codec... it's a container.

WebM is a totally different problem which is mostly not supported, my understanding is, by Microsoft and Apple due to political reasons. This isn't something that Daala impedes. It's probably even more politically possible to adopt Daala than WebM due to the origin (Xiph/Mozilla).

I know ogg is a container, I just never can remember the names of the individual codecs. And as a matter of adoption rates, which devices actually ship Ogg audio/video support? Next to none do it in HW.

And who guarantees that no one holds some "shadowed" patents on something just enough related to Daala to impede it? And... who says Apple won't fk on standards like they do at the moment, did with Flash/X11/... before, and will ignore Daala while shipping their own stuff?

As far as I'm aware:

- Apple support standard MPEG4 formats at the moment - Flash was not a standard, and - Apple don\t currently ship proprietary video or audio codecs.

Let's face it - Vorbis solved a problem that theoretically existed, but had minimal practical impact. The same applies to modern video codecs.

When the Ogg formats have provided genuine utility they are used (see e.g. Speex in Siri and Google products) - and what would be really nice would be a free-as-in-patents, hardware-supported, high-performance video codec which can be implemented by all major vendors. Maybe it'll turn out that way.

The problem is just that unless the US dumps their patent system, no one has any incentive to use FOSS codecs.

Hardware/SoC providers will focus on the "licensed" stuff because buying a license will protect you from IP lawsuits, and the content providers will also use the "licensed" codecs because the support is far more widespread (and well, for mobile you need HW acceleration if you don't mind burning through the battery for a 2-minute cat video).

Long story short, as a manager of a company selling mobile handhelds, I would not give a dime about the "open" codecs because the risk of stepping on a patent mine is too high.

My palm T5 could play software decoded h.263 video just fine. I watched entire movies on it. Battery technology has only improved since then.

My current android phone can sw decode h.264 for many hours with no problems (Now games are another matter. 1 hour of PvZ and it wants me to plug it in).

Both vorbis and flac are open codecs and are supported in a wide range of devices, like every Android device for starters, same goes for webm which is also open source and royalty free.

However, hardware support for WebM is very thin on the ground; the Tegra 4 is the only mainstream shipping SoC to have it, and the Tegra 4 isn't _that_ mainstream. That Android support uses the CPU, and thus hits the battery and performs poorly on older devices.

Why is the parent being downvoted? Multiple codecs are a real problem for video-streaming services, and introducing a new one definitely has potential to bring more compatibility problems. Patent trolls are also a real obstacle (clean-room implementation provides no guarantees against patent infringement).

If you believe there're reasons that this specific codec will not cause such problems, please explain it in the comments instead of just downvoting.

HEVC is going to be coming mainstream over the next few years but may initially be kept for really high resolution content. I don't know if there is a royalty free alternative with similar efficiency.

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