Bylund explains, “When Google released the high-quality WebM video format royalty-free to the world, digital video publishers were faced with a conundrum: Support the guaranteed royalty-free but slightly lower-quality WebM standard, or the sharper but potentially more expensive H.264 industry standard?”
The industry divided among the WebM camp, the H.264 supporters, and the true neutrals of the browser world thusly:
• WebM support only: Mozilla Firefox.
• H.264 support only: Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari.
• Both: Google Chrome and Opera.
“Now the MPEG LA technology licensing body has announced that the H.264 standard will join WebM on the royalty-free side of the fence until the end of time or until the standard becomes obsolete, whichever comes first,” Bylund writes. “This makes Google’s $133 million buyout of On2 Technologies seem like a waste of money — that’s where the technology for WebM came from, and now there’s really no need to provide a royalty-free alternative to the prevailing standard. But raise your hand if you believe that H.264 would be free today if Google hadn’t made that move. Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Bylund writes, “Of course, H.264 isn’t entirely free even now… This tricky minefield just got a little less dangerous but is by no means completely defused.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “JES42” for the heads up.]
WebM is not “guaranteed royalty-free” — there are definite patent concerns about it (even Steve Jobs has mentioned this) and there’s no “guarantee” that Google would pick up the bill if you get sued for using it.
And the relevance/significance also is the death of Flash as a media format? Let’s hope so. Flash can’t disappear from the mobile scene especially quick enough.
Mission Accomplished? So you mean in 7 and a half years nothing will be resolved and the situation will probably be worse?
He starts out by saying the war is over, but ends by saying the minefield isn’t completely diffused.
So, which is it?
@ Cannot login to MDN–
Delete an reinstall the app. I run into this same bug it seems about twice a week.
That is the only way that I have found to “fix” the problem.
@TheConfuzed1…
Jailbroken?
WebM – because as soon as Google tacked on the word “FREE” it can sell people anything.
H264 is royalty free as long as it’s being used non-commercially at the User End. Otherwise, royalties still apply to commercial providers. So even with this announcement, nothing has really changed, except perhaps clarifying the obvious.
On the other side of the fence, Google will do whatever necessary to promote WebM, even if the quality of the content is crap. Google seems to have a child-like penchant for spending $$$ in tech areas where other fools fear to tread.
The headline appears to be MDNs. Possibly a sarcastic take on Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” idiocy during the supposed end of the Gulf War.
MPEG-LA has clearly succeeded with their PR effort here.
The actual facts in the matter are different. NOTHING has changed by this. H.264 was already free of royalty payments for content providers offering content for free (such as YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and such).
Unlike Google’s video format, where you can create software that uses encoders or decoders for free, you CANNOT develop anything that will encode or decode H.264 without paying for a license.
Mozilla Firefox does NOT, and will NOT support H.264 in its HTML5 rendering because they would have to pay $5 million US every years for a license for a H.264 decoder. Unless MPEG-LA makes a very specific agreement with the Mozilla foundation that would exempt them from paying a license for H.264 rendering within Firefox, HTML5 has no chance in ever becoming a dominant method for delivery of video. Currently, only Safari and MSIE support H.264 within HTML5 (Apple and MS can easily pay $5M per year). Firefox, Opera and others can’t, so they don’t support it. Firefox supports an obscure open-source format called Ogg Theora (an inefficient codec that is a potential patent minefield), and even Google’s open-source WebM isn’t quite clear of all patent claims yet.
This is the primary reason why we now have Flash as the dominant technology for wrapping H.264 video. Practically every desktop supports it, so as a web developer, you don’t have to care if they’re using Firefox or Safari (or MSIE). With the rapid emergence of iOS devices as significant web surfing platform, web developers are now finding themselves having to develop two solutions: one with Flash (to make sure everyone on desktop can see their content) and a Flash-less, HTML5 one, for iOS devices that don’t do Flash.
This piece of news is extremely broken, and someone should notify the original authors.
To paraphrase Everett Dirksen: A hundred million here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Keep it up Google.
The writer of the article doesn’t seem to understand the difference between a license for use of H.264 codec, and royalty payments that need to be paid for every single stream of content encoded in H.264. Royalties for free content have always been, and will now always be free.
License was never free, nor it will be, at least for now. Apple, MS, Adobe, Roxio and similar are happy to pay for the license. Mozilla simply can’t afford it, which is why we’re in this HTML5 predicament now.
My take was that Google (or whoever was pushing WebM) was spreading FUD, saying that after 2015 that H.264 would start charging royalties for non-comercial use.
The H.264 announcement was just to say that things weren’t going to drastically change.
I don’t think Google needs to spread FUD about 2015. First, it is very, very distant future (technologically), by which time, H.264 may easily be replaced by something better. Second, Google’s primary advantage with their WebM is NOT the royalty-free nature of it. It is the license-free nature of it, meaning that Mozilla (or any other software developer) does NOT have to pay $5 million US per year in order to provide rendering of H.264 video in their software. This means that any iOS, Android, WebOS, Symbian, Mac OS, Windows and Linux developer out there can build a video player application that will play back WebM videos, without paying a hefty license fee for the codec.
With H.264, you simply can’t do that. The license is just too expensive for anyone but major players to do this, hence no H.264 support in HTML5 in FireFox, while Flash-wrapped H.264 works just fine.
Bylund is the tard that started the rumor that TMo had pre-sold 1.5M G1s, if you remember back that far. He’s also the tard that said Apple would be the WORST STOCK TO OWN IN 2010. Sorry for the all-caps, but that was the headline to the story he wrote for MotleyFool. He’s never retracted any of his mistakes, but continues to write the Apple-hater articles at MF.
“Cannot login to MDN on the iphone today”
and
“Delete an reinstall the app. I run into this same bug it seems about twice a week. That is the only way that I have found to “fix” the problem.”
Just reboot.
far from over, h.264 will only relevant until 2013
WebM will be beset with patent issues, and it is based on an old Theora codec (VP8) with some parts swapped out. This is an excellent (albeit very technical) review:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377
Actually, the news was very significant for content providers. I host a site with thousands of media files. While prior to this announcement, I had a free license, that was only temporary. We’re adding to our library daily an it was a very scary thought that in a couple of years we may have to pay a fee or suddenly transcode and transition off H.264 to another format. In our business plan there’s a “Potential risks and threats” item that has been crossed off last week.
While H.265 is coming, I’m not expecting the transition to be complete until *years* later. Heck, take a look at IE6 usage today and you’ll see why we’re in a era where legacy support is very significant.
Our site is now serving HTML5 based video and Flash. We’ll continue to serve both with Flash as the default if the client supports it and HTML5 video tag as a fall back.
Until we see HTML5 as more than just a “video tag” and something we can build a ready-for-primetime player around, we (and many others) are still going to want to take advantage of many of the features Flash offers (when Flash is available).
These Flash features include:
1) Playlists (programmable, fuzzy-logic, dynamic, presented)
2) Embed code, links, sharing, social bookmarking
3) Metrics (timecode flags, interactions, etc…)
Flash, from a content provider’s perspective, is still the way to go (as much as I hate Flash), as the default, and will be for some time into the future. HTML5 is best today for when Flash is not present.
Gasp! This may be the first time MicroSoft has actually backed a superior standard out of the gate! Of course it took following Apple’s lead to make it happen.
Google I don’t get. Big companies don’t spend millions for moral victories. They bought out and supported WebM but were notable in their early uptake of competing H264 on YouTube, which was arguably a tide turner in the standards “war”. Wonder what their angle is? Maybe it gives them ownership of some critical patents no matter which way it goes?
I’m glad I picked the winning horse. Every online video player I developed over the last year uses HTML5 with h.264 video, with a flash player fallback.
Even when you have to to support Flash video for a client, it’s much cleaner to code everything with web standards and html5 video. Once a website it coded to play video this way, it only takes a little bit of code to automatically replace html5 video with a Flash video for browsers that need it. It’s completely backwards and forwards compatible, and follows all the recommended web standards. Life is getting better all the time for us web developers!
@Brau,
“This may be the first time MicroSoft has actually backed a superior standard out of the gate!”
Microsoft was *very* slow in adopting H.264 and did pretty much all it could to prevent it…despite the fact that it has a lot of patents in the pool…far more than Apple, despite Apple’s push of H.264.
Despite Microsoft getting payments for licensed H.264 use because of all those patents it has in the MPEG-LA pool, Microsoft didn’t adopt H.264 for numerous uses in the past. Instead it aggressively pushed WMV and VC-1 (which it’s also in the pool for). In fact Windows Media Player didn’t support H.264 by default until Windows 7. Likewise, PowerPoint on Windows doesn’t support it by default yet.
MDN really has no idea – reminds me of FOX news.
Google I don’t get. Big companies don’t spend millions for moral victories @ Brau
——
This was exactly what America’s policies are. Politicians like to dress themselves up in high-morality clothings and in the process tie themselves up in a mess of contradictions. Google is doing the same stupid “don’t do evil” idiocy which will hound them in every thing they do. People are watching closely. At least Apple does not take the moral high ground in making money.
@vsp
“… At least Apple does not take the moral high ground in making money.”
But they do… by making the best products they can.