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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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