Tons of recent news out there about H.264, specifically in browsers due to the announcement by Google about dropping support in Chrome. I think what bothers me most about this move is that they are trying to pass it off under the banner of "openness" by attempting to push people towards WebM.

Mozilla has been very honest about their reasons for not including H.264 decoding, and no version of Firefox has ever shipped with H.264 support. They are a non-profit, and can't justify paying the licensing fees. Their browser also doesn't support other MPEG licensed pieces, like MP3 and AAC. Consistent message from day one and an understandable one.

Google on the other hand has paid for the license, and is likely at the cap already due to YouTube, or possibly for Android (not clear on if Google pays or if HTC/Samsung and others pay). In any case, the license applies to the entire company and any products they ship. And the've shipped millions of browsers with the tech already, along with tech to playback MP3 and AAC audio. They also still haven't provided any immunity for people using WebM, in case it turns out that the tech is indeed in violation of patents that the MPEG-LA holds.

Google did post a followup here. And an Adobe employee jumped in too, with the odd claim that MobileSafari isn't standards compliant due to the lack of plugin support. The HTML spec for object tags specifies the browser has to understand them (instead of crashing, or otherwise having problems when one is encountered), but it doesn't specify it must support every possible plugin in existence. Beyond that, MobileSafari does support plugins, but has no method for users to add their own beyond the ones that Apple included.

Most people now see this move as one that won't move us closer to HTML 5 video tag use, and instead will just push developers back to using Flash for video. Moving to a model where every video has to be encoded in both H.264 and WebM just doesn't seem feasible. At least before, it was easy to just have H.264 video, and serve it via either Flash or HTML5 video. This solution worked for all the major desktop browsers, and all the mobile devices that support hardware H.264 decoding. No device today has WebM hardware acceleration. And thanks to the slow adoption of newer Android versions by most Android phone providers, WebM software support will likely not roll out in a quick fashion even to Google's own mobile OS. This could change in time, but the momentum has been on the side of MPEG standards for a long time now.

What frustrates me with the whole situation is that this is coming after Microsoft gave up the video codec fight and has just moved to support MPEG like most other companies. Right when it looked like there might finally be a unifying codec, Google had to throw their influence around and complicate the situation again. If Google really wanted a good open video codec, they should have made their move years ago, around the same time Microsoft was also pushing VC-1 for HD-DVD/BluRay.

Can't someone make an add on to Chrome that supports it ? I can watch H.264 stuff in Firefox and it doesn't have built in support. It seems silly to take out something that was in there already though.

You can do a plugin but you can't guarantee that somebody will have it installed.

It just means video will still be in H.264 and that browsers without native support will use plugins, most likely Flash. WebM is sure to die unless Google starts sinking a ton more money into pushing it on people. But it's an apparent patent powder keg according to experts in the field. If Google was absolutely confident of its defensibility it would provide indemnification to those implementing it.

If you base your business on WebM you're opening yourself up to being sued out of existence down the road.

The only openness Google likes is what it owns and can control. Microsoft's evilness at its peak was nothing compared to what Google is headed for. Mark my words.

I don't buy the "we're a poor non-profit" bit that people keep attributing to Mozilla - did they ever say that? Their income in 2009 alone was over $100m, pretty much all from google. I can believe it's an ideological stance though.

On the android phones, H264 decode (and sometimes encode) is built into the hardware - this will have been paid for by the chip vendor and rolled into the chip price. I don't believe google "sublicense" H264 decode.

As for HW accelerated WebM decode - recent video decode engines tend to be more programmable than the older ones which were very very hard coded in silicon for maximum efficiency... but there could well be many roadblocks that prevent any current hardware from being able to effectively hardware-accelerate WebM decode (it doesn't take much to throw a spanner into the works of hardware that's been highly optimized for existing standards).

It's not quite that they can't afford to pay per-end-user licence fees, it's that the Mozilla open-source licence, like all good open-source licences, explicitly and by design precludes them even knowing how many end users they have, or even how many sublicensees (forks). Under those circumstances there's no way for them to honestly sign any licence agreement that the H.264 patent-holders would tolerate. So in that sense yes, it's an ideological stand.


But Protocom were insane even in their heyday. I'm sure programmable hardware is the norm these days, if only to avoid having separate hardware for MPEG2, H.264 and VC-1. In my distinctly inexpert opinion, you'd be unlucky to design hardware that could accelerate all of those but not WebM.

Peter

Digging deeper, it does seem the non-profit excuse has been tacked on by supporters and others, but not directly by Mozilla. I found this article from Robert O'Callahan, and it's all an ideological stance as you suggested. It looks like the Mozilla Foundation is the non-profit portion, with that organization owning the taxable Mozilla Corporation (Firefox) and Mozilla Messaging (Thunderbird) organizations.

As a separate though, an interesting discussion came up at work last week, centered around H.264 licensing, and why VideoLAN Organization (makers of VLC) is based in France. It seems the H.264 license is based on paying for the number of encoders or decoders. In France, a decoder is defined as having a hardware component. So if a computer maker shipped a computer in France with VLC preloaded, it would count. But software alone without a computer doesn't count. Thus VLC doesn't have to worry about licensing, and simply passes it downstream. In most other places, including the US, software does count, however source code doesn't. Source code can't decode H.264, it's just a description of how to, similar in idea to the patents. For end users, they don't need to pay anything to the MPEG-LA due to their stance that the first 0-100,000 are exempt from fees. Even if an end user uses an encoder to send a video to YouTube and it gets more then 100,000 unique view, it then falls under the free clause for internet distribution.

The VLC project was started by people at École centrale Paris though so the choice of having VideoLAN Organisation also based in France isn't necessarily based on licensing reasons.

Currently. But they might change their mind in 2015.

I don't know about VLC's French connection, but aren't they using x264? In other words, an open source implementation that does run afoul of MPEG-LA licensing in itself. It's also used in a lot of other free software such as Handbrake, which is also in violation.

Much open source software has a ton of stolen and "illegal" content in it in terms of patent violation. IMO, software patents should all be nullified anyway, but while they're still in play...

Will Mozilla be implementing WebM? Google holds patents on it, so IMO, it's still ideologically tainted, even if Google doesn't currently charge anything for it. And it more than likely contains a number of patents represented by MPEG-LA. Can't wait to see this one hit the courts. Though it may not if WebM fizzles completely.

I also wonder how much money Adobe is paying Google to drop direct H.264 support. There's something going on there.

That's old. They came out and said free forever.


x264 is distributed out of the Netherlands, where they apparently share similar views with France. Handbrake also comes from France. The person I talked to about x264 specifically seemed to indicate MPEG-LA is pretty happy with them in general, as it did help to boost the number of H.264 users by quite a bit. And assuming someone in the US simply downloads the x264 source (not a decoder), and then compiles it (turning it into a decoder covered by the patents), then they fall under the free for 0-100,000 use part. This hasn't been fully legally tested, but these were his views on it.

And yes, Firefox 4 includes WebM support.

Not all countries recognize software patents as being valid, which is, IIRC, the case with France, and much of the EU. Hence, there is no patent violation. This is also true in Canada.

Wow, I didn't know Canada didn't allow software to be patented. Kudos for the Canadian patent office. However, that's all moot since the USPTO does and anyone doing international trade would more than likely want to be able to sell into the US.

In other words, even though I'm in Canada, I can still have my ass handed to me as a commercial entity if I violate any US patents.

I didn't either, 'til I looked it up. I was going to lump Canada and US together as "North America allows software patents."

The more interesting thing is that this was ruled on way back in 1978.


Yeah. And it's a stupidly big stick.

But at least open source software is safe. For the moment. Assuming it's developed (and hosted) outside the US. And comes with the appropriate disclaimers about the user being required to ensure the legality of it's use in whatever country you're in. Or something like that.

I'm with you. Down with software patents.

I'm pretty sure that they'd just be able to pay the maxed-out fee (where it gets capped) and call it a day... I'm also sure that every big H264 license has been negotiated in one way or another, even if it is just to keep the lawyers off the streets.



You'd be surprised, then; it's not a case of accelerating (eg some DCT work), the hardware tends to do the entire job - point it at a bitstream and a framebuffer and off it goes. Some are programmable (ie you'd load an H264 decoder into it then set it off... though they're not general purpose CPUs) but many are not.

They're hardcoded often because the companies in question had the IP lying about, all nicely optimized and low power from previous generations of parts used in things like DVD or Blu-Ray players.

Yep. Microsoft has released a Chrome extension to add H.264 back when a user is on Windows 7. It works by tapping into the valid and licensed decoder built into the OS's Windows Media framework. Similar could be done on OS X and Quicktime.

Overall I found the Microsoft response an interesting one. Not only did they release the extension for H.264, they also brought up many of the same questions about WebM. While they won't ship WebM support with IE9, they have been working with Google to ensure a plugin works.

For all the evil Microsoft, and specifically IE has done in the past, I have to say I'm pretty impressed with the current team there and the goals of IE9. Looks like they are going to stand alongside the rest of the browsers in trying to help move things together. Now to just get this video mess sorted out once and for all.