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Comment by jzzskijj | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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