This is awesome news. No patent encumbrance means Firefox will support it. Terrific performance means the rest of us will actually use it. Google backing the technology means Youtube, with their unfathomably large proportion of the world's video content, will support it.
Not really. Google might have paid for a copy of Flash or Flex to build the player, but other than that they don't pay any licensing fees to Adobe since they don't use Flash media server.
Well, it seems like Google can easily add the codec support to WebKit, in which case it would be hard for Apple not to support it -- they'd have to explicitly disable that code. That seems unlikely given that Apple has really been pushing HTML5 forward, and it's no work from them for a cool feature.
Obviously getting Microsoft to add codec support is another issue altogether, but it seems plausible that it could be done. Since Google would own all of the IP, they can sign some patent contract with Microsoft promising that yes, this really is open, and no, they won't ever sue Microsoft over implementing the standard. If that were the case it would make the VP8 codec the most promising among the alternatives for Microsoft, since it would be free and its IP status would be certain and guaranteed. It seems like the question hinges on whether or not Microsoft plans to add <video> support at all, and since they've made vague claims supporting HTML5 and these new fangled web standards, it seems plausible that some version of Internet Explorer could support the codec in the future (even if it takes them a while).
Er, Google just controls the Chrome and Android ports of WebKit, not the Mac, Windows, or iPhone ports. They all have their own media frameworks which are separate; the Mac and Windows Safari ports use QuickTime, and thus support whatever codecs QuickTime supports (so, you can install a Theora plugin, and presumably VP8 once it's released), while Chrome uses a modified version of ffmpeg, and I'm not sure what the iPhone or Android ports use.
Getting Adobe Flash to support it would be a much cooler business hack, and would probably force Apple and Microsoft's hand in to the bargain. (And they have been cosying up recently)
To be honest it's getting away from flash which makes this exciting for me. Wrapping VP8 in Flash would be the equivalent of putting granite wheels on a Ferrari.
No, it would be like if you wanted to put really nice wheels (VP8) on your Ferrari (Chrome) but those wheels won't take you far if the roads haven't been upgraded (widespread usage of VP8 on websites). So you upgrade the tires of all of the crappy cars (IE6,7,8 and probably 9) for free and without them having to do anything (Flash auto-update to VP8) and then people start upgrading the roads (websites using VP8). Most people have still got crappy cars, so they might not notice any improvement but it makes a big difference to everyone else trying to make better cars and roads (the open web).
Giving up on the car metaphor, it's Flash support for H.264 that makes it viable for 85% of the market. Adobe can win it for VP8 if they want to, but I think Google can do it with out them too, it'll just take longer.
Well, except that Firefox already has a non-patent-encumbered format they've put a lot of effort into. Apple/Nokia refused to implement the previous non-patent-encumbered format, why would they change their mind for this one?
I'm not sure Google ever actually stated on-the-record why they refused to add Theora support to YouTube, but 'cost to re-encode all that video' has been widely cited, and I don't see why re-encoding with VP8 would be particularly cheaper than re-encoding with Theora.
Theora had several drawbacks. Its performance is simply not as good as h264. It's a previous-generation codec based on VP3, whereas VP8 is cutting edge.
Flash never supported Theora, which invalidates its use for the vast majority of web users today. Even with HTML5 video, content protection worries is going to keep a lot of content wrapped up in Flash players for a while. On the other hand, Flash has a good chance to support VP8--Adobe already holds a license option on VP7 and has supported the codec line in their players.
The lack of players, content hosts, and embedded decoders all prevented Theora from ever taking off. I think there's a better chance that Google's direct backing of a codec (both as a content host, mobile platform, and browser, give VP8 a better shot.
I have also read that Theora's "patent-free" status is questionable; to my knowledge nobody has reviewed the codebase to ascertain what patents it may infringe on. On2, as a commercial enterprise licensing its codecs to others, has had to navigate the patent minefield already. I trust its status more, especially with Google behind it.
As for what Firefox will do, well, that remains to be seen. I just think it makes sense for VP8 to succeed where Theora failed.
Theora is not as good as h264... but neither is VP8 (granted, VP8 is closer to h264, but it's still inferior).
I didn't know that Adobe had an option on VP7, but I'd be impressed if Adobe added VP8 support to Flash - I mean, the whole point of this exercise is to undermine Flash, and I'd be surprised if Adobe joined in except in the face of overwhelming customer demand.
Yes - if Google officially supports VP8 in Chrome, Android and YouTube, that'll be a very strong argument (far stronger than Theora has had) for other content providers and user-agents to support it... but Apple/Nokia/MS and YouTube already support h264, so adding support for another, less efficient codec seems silly.
Theora's "patent-free" status comes entirely from On2 saying "we give everybody the right to use all our IP involved in VP3". Presumably On2 had the same due-diligence issues when it was licensing VP3 to others; I don't see how On2 could give VP8 a stronger "patent-free" declaration than Theora already has, unless (as other people have suggested) Google has bankrolled an exhaustive search for applicable patents.
I don't really mind whether VP8 or Theora winds up being the dominant format on the web, I'm just skeptical that VP8 is all that different when it comes to the pain-points that have prevented people from adopting Theora.
In the last Theora/H.264 thread on HN, I recall somebody saying that VP8 was better than H.264... when VP8 was new, and H.264 encoders were still largely experimental. Nowdays, things like x264 and commercial codecs shipped with QuickTime are better than VP8.
Actually that author/developer usually specifically calls out Apple's Quicktime as a very poor H.264 implementation, so if he says VP8 will be nearly as good as the second best H.264 implementation then he's saying that it will be much better than Apple's. That probably applies to Adobe's encoder and in fact the vast majority of commercial H.264 encoders.
Considering he's an x264 developer that article is very positive about the quality of the VP codecs. The stuff he's down on e.g. it being proprietary, licence fees, patents, big name corporate approval, mobile support, buggy encoder are all stuff people expect Google to fix quite easily (well apart from patents).
(My earlier reply was to the original version of your comment.)
It will benefit Google in two ways:
First, it insulates them from encoder licensing fees going forward, and from decoder license fees if MPEG-LA decides to back off their free-for-web-streaming arrangement. It also means they're free to bundle the codec with Chrome.
Second, if you believe the publishing hype, it could save them up to 50% bandwidth. I doubt it's that effective, but at Youtube's scale, processing is cheap and bandwidth is expensive; every 1% helps. If they can reduce the number of storage nodes, bytes transferred, and by extension, open conns/sec, that translates to very real savings.
They won't recode from h264 and drop the originals immediately. There are too many hardware h264 devices out there. My guess (given how their transition from h263 went) is that youtube will add it as another encoding target and use it for their web formats as soon as flash supports it. Mobile will remain h264 in 3gp, but that's only one out of six formats.
Why is everybody talking about recoding? Can't they just keep the current videos as they are and encode new things in a different codec? As far as I know all the old H263 videos on Youtube have never been recoded. And why would they? Recoding H263 to H264 would just degrade quality.
I understand what you're saying, and I'd love to be educated if you know more about the topic, but aren't they both perceptual encoders? Ie, wouldn't the parts of each frame they're identifying as unimportant be quite similar?
(I'm quite certain I'm wrong on this point, but I'm interested in learning why)
I understand the sentence, but what I'm trying to understand is why the information removed is (significantly) different - since they're both perceptual codecs, there should be a large overlap in what is removed from the output.
Eg, take a frame which has a solid chunk of blue. Codec 1 removes some of data to make things more consistent and then compresses it. Codec 2 looks at the output of codec 1, sees the consistently large blue area, doesn't see any info worth removing, and compresses it.
I don't know all the maths behind it, but try saving a JPG, close it, open it, save it again, repeat a few times. You'll see quality degrade every time you close it. My guess is that the lossy compressors try their best to preserve the previous compression artifacts, but in doing so they introduce more compression artifacts.
You pay per encoder and per decoder, both of which would adversely affect Google with their encoding farms and popular browser if the charge wasn't capped at around $5 million (I think it's gone up to just under 6 million this year) to stop the big players doing something silly like getting together and developing their own royalty-free codec.
Unfortunately for that cunning plan, Google clearly sees more benefit from a codec that's compatible with the open web and open source than they do from licence discounts.
Sweet.