VP8, WebM, and HTML5 video

http://zencoder.com/encoder-blog/2010/05/19/vp8-webm-and-html5-video/

by Heff • 16 years ago

86 21 16 years ago

stcredzero• 16 years ago

I wonder if a side effect of WebM will be to push Ogg Vorbis into wider adoption? Platforms that want to play WebM will also decode Ogg, so why not support the audio-only format?

jon_dahl• 16 years ago

Definitely. Vorbis is a good codec, too, so this is a win for everyone.

naner• 16 years ago

Will this also open up Vorbis for patent suits? If MP3 is covered by over 100 patents then Vorbis is probably a ripe target.

mbrubeck2• 16 years ago

Vorbis has been around for over a decade now, and incorporated into numerous products with no successful patent threats yet. Xiph.org conducted a patent search and believes Vorbis does not infringe on any patents. And since US patents expire in 17 to 20 years, there is a shrinking body of patents that could be used against Vorbis.

jmillikin• 16 years ago

I hope it does, but believe it won't.

Much like Theora, the primary reason to oppose Vorbis is political. It's not covered by patents and doesn't support DRM, so to content providers it's a significantly worse codec than MP3 or AAC.

If Apple or Microsoft were going to support Vorbis, they'd have done so years ago.

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

Not to detract from your general point, but Ogg and Vorbis support DRM to the same degree that any other container and codec do, it's generally an orthogonal concern.

It's main problem is network effects, in cases where network effects don't apply, e.g. game audio and web streaming audio, it has longe been used by big names such as Microsoft and Spotify.

There is now no reason for it not to be the standard for web audio, since you can even fall back to Vorbis in Flash 8 via a non-native decoder. It's also likely to get a boost in the pirate video market, even when paired with H.264 as a result of WebM introduction. It really could become mainstream for a variety of uses.

The biggest drawback in the last few years has been the lack of support in iPods. It will be interesting to see if Apple chooses to prevent you playing Vorbis audio on your iPod Touch even if it caves and allows it for web audio.

zaatar• 16 years ago

The link says:

  "Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Adobe currently support VP8, and Safari and IE may at some point."

Microsoft has already confirmed that IE9 will support VP8. See: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive...

glhaynes2• 16 years ago

"when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows"...

hapless2• 16 years ago

The windows blog post only mentions the vp8 codec. No mention of container formats, webM, etc.

We don't know anything about WebM and IE9 <video> tag support.

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

I trust Microsoft about as far as I could throw them but it would be beyond perverse for them to support VP8 and not support the full package.

blasdel2• 16 years ago

Safari supports everything that Quicktime does. You can add the support yourself, just like you could with Theora: http://xiph.org/quicktime/

http://perian.org is a Quicktime Component that wraps around libavcodec (ffmpeg) that has a pretty wide install base on OS X and checks for automatic updates by default every time it's loaded in an application. Google has a set of patches for ffmpeg on their site that will surely get picked up and automatically distributed before too long.

If Apple ever ships support, it'll be with Quicktime, not the braindead approach of linking it directly into the browser. IE9 has this approach too, just with a codec whitelist. Google Chrome bundles a pared-down libavcodec that you can swap out with your own. Opera does the same but with GStreamer.

In reality, the new version of Flash with VP8 support will get %95 penetration in a couple months after it's released, and fallback to Flash will continue to be how the <video> game is played. I wonder if Google's stopped charging Adobe for VP6 as a quid-pro-quo? It seems like that (and VP7 for Skype) were On2's sole sources of revenue.

glhaynes2• 16 years ago

Just curious: do you know why IE9 uses a codec whitelist? Why not just support any codec installed on the PC? Does Safari's QuickTime usage have such a whitelist?

CoryMathews• 16 years ago

Dear Steve Jobs, Why do you not support an "open web"? O yeah I know why..

laut• 16 years ago

Do any of the browsers current support streaming with the HTML5 video tag?

So that you don't have to download the entire video before playback can start. And so that you can skip ahead and start playing something towards the end of the video without downloading the whole video.

wmf• 16 years ago

So that you don't have to download the entire video before playback can start.

That's called progressive downloading, and it would be totally stupid not to do it.

And so that you can skip ahead and start playing something towards the end of the video without downloading the whole video.

That's called seeking, which is harder. Firefox can do seeking if your Web server supports byte ranges. It looks like Chrome does the same thing but I'm not entirely sure.

VP8, WebM, and HTML5 video

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