[whatwg] forwarded: Google opens VP8 video codec

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

2010/5/20 Sir Gallantmon (ニール・ゴンパ) <ngompa13 at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 6:38 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 20 May 2010 00:34, Nils Dagsson Moskopp
>> <nils-dagsson-moskopp at dieweltistgarnichtso.net> wrote:
>> > James Salsman <jsalsman at talknicer.com> schrieb am Wed, 19 May 2010
>> > 14:58:38 -0700:
>>
>> >> > Container will be .webm, a modified version of Matroshka. Audio is
>> >> > Ogg Vorbis.
>>
>> > You mean Vorbis. </pedantic> ;)
>>
>>
>> *cough*
>>
>> x264 don't think much of VP8, they think it's just not ready:
>>
>> http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
>>
>> OTOH, that may not end up mattering.
>>
>>
>> - d.
>
> Given that the main reason against Theora was the fact that hardware devices
> supported baseline profile H.264 (which looks terrible compared to the other
> profiles), I think VP8 may be fine. VP8 already has hardware decoder chip
> support, so that isn't an issue. Patents aren't an issue, since Google has
> dealt with that.


Apologies, but how has Google dealt with patents? They make the ones
they bought from On2 available for free - which is exactly the same
situation as for Theora. They don't indemnify anyone using WebM.

However, I do appreciate that for any commercial entity having to
chose between the patent risk on Theora and the one on WebM, it is an
easy choice, because Google would join such a courtcase for WebM and
their massive financial status just doesn't compare to Xiph's. ;-)


> Nevertheless, Firefox already has support for it in the trunk, Opera
> released a labs build that adds a GStreamer plugin for WebM to their builds,
> and Chrome trunk added support for it.
> Adobe announced support for VP8 in a future version of Flash, and probably
> Silverlight will have it too. Whether they'll include complete WebM support
> is unknown, though.

I think with the weight that Google have in the market, they may well
be able to push WebM through - in particular with the help of Adobe
(ironically). We may yet see a solution to the baseline codec and it
will be a free codec, yay!

Cheers,
Silvia.