A Blog From Behind the Trenches

Originally posted by Haavard:

people who might have otherwise dismissed you as carrying on with "business as usual".

Of course on the other hand, if Microsoft ARE intent on continuing with "business as usual" and attempting to thwart their competitors at any expense, another approach would be to simply say:

Microsoft, choosing to support Theora will actively marginalise your competitor Apple, who's Safari browser will then be the only browser without Theora support.

Originally posted by lucideer:

Microsoft, choosing to support Theora will actively marginalise your competitor Apple, who's Safari browser will then be the only browser without Theora support.

Yes! That should be the the approach.

What is wrong with .YAMFB4W? (Yet Another Microsoft Format But For the Web)

IE9 is Microsoft's chance to come in from the cold, and that move should include OGG support.
Plus, otherwise Microsoft would have to licence h.264 for 60% of the worlds PC's

Whilst it is an admirable request, I think it is pointless. Until Theora encoders are on par with H.264 without the user having to find special builds, theora will continue to lag behind H.264. The steps required to make Theora on par with H.264 aren't worth the effort, especially for the guys that are uploading the videos to the web.

Theora is so bad that everyone is hoping Google releases their VP8 codec which they recently acquired via On2, but that will be another set of hoops for implementors to go through http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=292.

With Apple, Google and now Microsoft backing H.264, it's Game Over for Theora (as an HTML5 standard).

Wow haavard!, A very interesting article.
Can I copy / paste into my site?

This was pointed out on twitter

Dear MPEG-LA, 5 Million USD yearly for H.264 violates Article 82 of the EU competition law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_82#Price_exploitation

I really like how Microsoft got their act together.

They've added SVG, canvas and video despite those being competitors to Silverlight.

And they're honest about speed and quality of their implementation – showing Acid test at 55/100 and Opera as the fastest JS engine. On Microsoft's website!

In such situation Apple just rigs the benchmarks or pretends competitors don't exist (Safari's "world's most innovative" on browser ballot is shameless lie).


I've tested Theora 1.1 and it's good enough. Earlier versions made edges blurry no matter what bitrate you used, but latest version is quite competitive, and much faster to encode than H.264. I really wouldn't mind publishing in Theora if it were widely supported.

Originally posted by johnace:

Whilst it is an admirable request, I think it is pointless. Until Theora encoders are on par with H.264 without the user having to find special builds, theora will continue to lag behind H.264. The steps required to make Theora on par with H.264 aren't worth the effort, especially for the guys that are uploading the videos to the web.

These efforts aren't necessary. Theora doesn't need to be as good as h264, only good enough, and it is.

You're right, the efforts aren't necessary if the web continues to use H.264.

Originally posted by paddy2k:

Plus, otherwise Microsoft would have to licence h.264 for 60% of the worlds PC's

They already do. Windows 7 includes a H.264 decoder.

Originally posted by paddy2k:

Plus, otherwise Microsoft would have to licence h.264 for 60% of the worlds PC's

Nope, they already have a license...

Microsoft gets it for free. When you pay 5 millions yearly to MPEG-LA - you can use any of their codecs. And MS has licensed lots of other stuff from them already.

Also, only Opera and FF refuse to use H.264, so its a natural business move for them.

p.s.: i guess smaller browsers just have to accept the loss. and the rest of us, yes, prepare for some CompuServe/GIF deja-vu

A laudable attempt but i am very much afraid that google decided the outcome of this particular battle when they chose to use the h.264 codec for Youtube.

Originally posted by mgillespie:

Microsoft will support h.264 thus leveraging their position and hurting their biggest threat FireFox

If this takes off, as seems inevitable, then there'll be a way to handle it in Firefox too, if there isn't already (with the vibrant extensions community, it wouldn't surprise me if it's already happened). This would then leave Opera on the outs, reminiscent of the continuing limitation of having to click twice to play a video, except that will no longer be necessary since the videos won't play at all.

Originally posted by prd3:

These efforts aren't necessary. Theora doesn't need to be as good as h264, only good enough, and it is.

Good enough only satisfies the enthusiasts, not mainstream. Anyone think Firefox would've gotten its marketshare if it was 'just as good' as IE6? NBC tried Silverlight then switched back to Flash as it was inconveniencing their users. Unless a new codec comes out that blows H.264 out of the water, no one will use it for something that is 'just good enough'. H264 already has momentum (as Zotlan pointed out w.r.t YouTube), and is royalty-free for the next 5 years, so many websites can use it.

Originally posted by johnace:

...and is royalty-free for the next 5 years,...

A very conniving tactic. Lure them in with a freebie, then hit them between the eyes with the fees.
Does anyone know when the patent on h.264 expires?

Around 2025.

bah!

Originally posted by Zotlan:

A very conniving tactic.

Sure it is. However, it is something we don't worry about when we watch Youtube videos. I am all for a free codec that is on par or even better than H.264, but as that isn't happening anytime soon, we'll have to make use of the H.264 decoders that we already have installed on our (Windows) OS. The same way that IE9 is using Direct2D for graphics, can't Opera/Firefox use whatever multimedia-playback backend is Win7(/Vista?) to provide H.264 video without having to pay anyone? The 'fall-back' mechanism that will work for everyone (including the non-Windows folks) is the 'dreaded' Flash.

Originally posted by johnace:

can't Opera/Firefox use whatever multimedia-playback backend is Win7(/Vista?) to provide H.264 video without having to pay anyone?

Opera certainly can on Linux, i have no problems watching youtube with Opera here. Windows is a closed OS though, tapping into its backend might not be possible.

Originally posted by Zotlan:

tapping into its backend might not be possible

In earlier versions of Windows, hardware-accelerated multimedia playback was done through DirectShow. However, on Vista/Win7, they use Media Foundation, which would be analogous to GStreamer on Linux. Anyways, it is possible on Windows 7 atleast to decode H.264 content:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb970511(VS.85).aspx

Can someone explain why the browser vendors cannot/will not support both codecs (at a minimum). To my mind this give the hobbyist and professional (i.e. those that can afford the H.264 royalties - if they ever kick-in) video creators the "best" option.

Originally posted by wearymadness:

Can someone explain why the browser vendors cannot/will not support both codecs (at a minimum)

1)Maintenance
2)Cost vs Benefits.
You should read the article that I linked to in my first post.

I love the new IE9, but no Theora is quite a disappointment.

Originally posted by IE Blog:

In another blog post coming later today, we’ll talk about how you can best provide feedback.

I can't wait 'tilt they give us those links.

I commented for the time being: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/16/IE9-Platform-Preview-Feedback.aspx#9980034

Originally posted by wearymadness:

Can someone explain why the browser vendors cannot/will not support both codecs (at a minimum). To my mind this give the hobbyist and professional (i.e. those that can afford the H.264 royalties - if they ever kick-in) video creators the "best" option.

They could (well Opera can at least - it's more complicated with Firefox due to legal licencing issues).

However if Apple or MS don't add support for Theora, content providers will be forced to provide H.264, and forced to pay the fees - whether they're a hobbyist or not. Opera adding native H.264 support would help Apple and MS's cases not to support Theora, making this more likely.

Of course support for both would be ideal, but unless those standing to profit from H.264 (MS, Apple) agree to support both, then doing so won't work at all. The ball is in their courts, not in Opera's or Mozilla's.

Response from the IE team to me

We'll follow up with a post shortly on submitting feedback that talks about things like asking questions/general requests vs. submitting bugs. Thanks!

Good enough only satisfies the enthusiasts, not mainstream.

I should remind you that majority of people still use (not even) "good enough" IE, "good enough" OS, and YouTube became $1.65bln business with H.263 and VP6. Theora is superb high-quality compared to these.

Also it's been shown that YouTube's H.264 encoder sacrifices quality for encoding speed. Given that Theora is faster to encode, there could be no significant difference in quality at CPU time/bitrate constraints YouTube has chosen.

Originally posted by mgillespie:

Microsoft will support h.264 thus leveraging their position and hurting their biggest threat FireFox

Agree.

Originally posted by d4rkn1ght:

I should remind you that majority of people still use (not even) "good enough" IE

You forgot to read the following sentence which defined the context

Anyone think Firefox would've gotten its marketshare if it was 'just as good' as IE6?

Meaning that it had to be a lot better. Your statement reinforced my point. Whatever the reasoning, I'm sure Youtube isn't using Theora because they wanted to snub an open video standard. There must have been a lot more benefits than a faster encode, e.g iPhone support.

Originally posted by johnace:

I'm sure Youtube isn't using Theora because they wanted to snub an open video standard.

Not sure you have to bug Google since Google owns Youtube, tho Youtube could be a big player in the final decision

@johnace @lucideer

yes, I realised that the ball is IN the court of the browser vendors when it comes to paying the royaly fee and Mozilla are (quite rightly) reticent to do so.

My real issue is that I have clients (and I'm talking corporates) that are far from willing to encode their videos to multiple codecs. So the lowest common denominator is still (and will be for the for see-able future) Flash (meh!).

I'm currently gathering requirements for a HTML5 video player and without fail the "solution" isn't H.264 OR OGG Theora.

Originally posted by johnace:

Good enough only satisfies the enthusiasts, not mainstream.

Quite the opposite. Good enough satisfies the mainstream, not a tiny minority of enthusiasts.

This is what history clearly shows:

VHS won despite having worse quality than BetaMax.

MP3 won over CDs even though CDs are better quality.

Other disc formats with superior audio quality lost to the CD.

YouTube won despite having really crappy video compared to some competitors (until recently).

And so on. Quality doesn't matter. It only needs to be good enough for the masses to use it. What matters is other things like price, usability, etc.

Originally posted by johnace:

However, it is something we don't worry about when we watch Youtube videos.

You should. As a user, you are responsible for everyone else paying the correct amount of money. If someone else didn't pay, you as a user could be sued.

can't Opera/Firefox use whatever multimedia-playback backend is Win7(/Vista?) to provide H.264 video without having to pay anyone?

Exactly. This will only make the big players bigger and keep smaller companies from competing. Great move.

As for Firefox, it still hasn't beaten IE. But it did grow because of Google's massive promotion of it, and because of IE's massive security problems.

Great letter and so true! Now it's Microsoft's turn...

Originally posted by HellbillyDeluxe:

Quite the opposite. Good enough satisfies the mainstream, not a tiny minority of enthusiasts.

When I said 'good enough', I meant in terms of cost vs benefit. MP3s allowed for CD quality audio at 1/2 to 1/11 of the bandwidth. That isn't 'good enough'; that's a whole lot!! For anything to gain traction over current standards (MP3, H.264), it must be a lot better. On the internet, bandwidth costs are a concern.

I'm not against large browsers vendors providing Ogg support, but as they are already paying $10m/yr for H.264, Theora must provide benefits with the costs of another code base to maintain.

Content providers are the ones who will make or break Theora. If a lot of providers used Theora because it saved on bandwidth bill as well as licensing, browser vendors would include native support rather than let their users require the Cortado java applet.
Dailymotion is the only large provider who has opted for Theora, Strangely enough, their defintion of Open Video is Firefox-only, so it seems they are browser sniffing. http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo

For those who are encoding in Theora, what is the difference between native IE9 support, and using the Cortado Java Applet? Java is free is it not?

Oh goody, johnace just ignored all the other examples that showed clear proof that it doesn't need to be better, just good enough.

If the M$ is decides to support Theora is not to be due to Microsoft's commitment of standards, but they're put across to the Google.

OK

VHS won despite having worse quality than BetaMax.

From what I've read, the reasoning was, VHS offered the porn, BetaMax did not.

MP3 won over CDs even though CDs are better quality.

As I already said, you can get MP3s at CD quality (320Kbps encodings) at about half the size of a CD. Thus savings. Even if Ogg Vorbis can provide better, and royalty-free, no one is checking, as it doesn't save on disk space.

Other disc formats with superior audio quality lost to the CD.

What other disc formats are there for audio besides CD? DVD Audio? Meh.

I'm not sure the reasons why youtube became popular, but I know that on slow internet connections, bandwidth is an issue; youtube buffered less than its competitors, and even if its quality was worse, what would you prefer: stuttering at perfect quality, or lower quality streaming?

The examples you listed are not exactly apples-apples comparisons with Theora vs H.264 debate.

Originally posted by johnace:

From what I've read, the reasoning was, VHS offered the porn, BetaMax did not.

Regardless: Quality = not relevant.

As I already said, you can get MP3s at CD quality (320Kbps encodings) at about half the size of a CD.

MP3s are almost always way below that quality. And it was fine! It didn't need to be better. Just good enough. Other things than quality were important for MP3.

What other disc formats are there for audio besides CD? DVD Audio? Meh.

Super Audio CD, for example! Again, proof that quality doesn't matter.

I'm not sure the reasons why youtube became popular, but I know that on slow internet connections, bandwidth is an issue; youtube buffered less than its competitors, and even if its quality was worse, what would you prefer: stuttering at perfect quality, or lower quality streaming?

Exactly! Quality didn't matter. Thanks for confirming that.

The examples you listed are not exactly apples-apples comparisons with Theora vs H.264 debate.

The point is: Quality doesn't really matter. It only needs to be good enough.

Yes, good enough for the user, but at what cost to the content provider? You are looking at it from the standpoint of having to pay for a license, but what is the benefit of providing royalty-free video if your bandwidth costs surpass them?

The YouTube guys have said last year:

Comparing Daily Motion to Youtube is disingenuous. If yt were to
switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube
quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the internet...I will say that the best thing that can
happen to Theora recently was firefox's support of it, though, but
even better would be substantive codec improvements or some great
advance in Dirac encoding efficiency.

I guess your argument is: We loved it when you were using H.263, go with Theora!!

Moving from H.263 to Theora would have been nice (if Flash supported it), but moving from H.264 to Theora appears to be a step backwards.

All I'm saying is that Theora has to bring something to the table besides being royalty-free to gain widespread usage. Linux is free, yet most computers online use Windows or Mac (non-free OSes).

I've read a recent review comparing H.264 to Theora, and it concluded:

So my conclusion isn't that Ogg is a bad codec; it's that producers seeking the optimal balance between data rate and quality will find H.264 superior.
I also acknowledge that at least for some folks, the Ogg vs. H.264 debate isn't about quality, it's about availability, specifically that Ogg is superior because it's unencumbered by patents. That's a political debate that's irrelevant to what I'm trying to show here, which is strictly a qualitative comparison of the codecs.

If IE9 supported Theora, do you think the few users who are aware of this debate will be able to coax content providers to use it? I doubt it. What content providers are waiting for is a better encoder. Until then, this argument is moot.

Originally posted by johnace:

The YouTube guys have said last year

And they are wrong, as comparisons showed.

Moving from H.263 to Theora would have been nice (if Flash supported it), but moving from H.264 to Theora appears to be a step backwards.

Again: No. Theora is good enough.

All I'm saying is that Theora has to bring something to the table besides being royalty-free to gain widespread usage. Linux is free, yet most computers online use Windows or Mac (non-free OSes).

What does HTML, CSS and JS have to bring to the table? They are free and open. Just like Theora. Free and open is the cornerstone of the web.

Originally posted by prd3:

And they are wrong, as comparisons showed.

As recently as 3 weeks ago, Ars Technica wrote

Comparing 468 kbps clips, one can detect a very noticeable difference in quality between the two codecs. Even the 1mbps Ogg Theora clips are not on par with the 468 kbps h264 clips.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/ogg-theora-vs-h264-head-to-head-comparisons.ars

A video codec implementer wrote on his blog:

How can a refined version of an old and crippled MPEG-4 derivate come anywhere close to a format that incorporates (almost) all of the the latest and greatest of video compression research?
http://keyj.s2000.ws/?p=356

So no, it appears the YouTube guys were quite right, Theora is just not 'good enough'. This is why free software proponents have written an open letter to Google to release their VP8 codec to the community.

What does HTML, CSS and JS have to bring to the table?

The same thing Flash, Java, and other proprietary formats have brought to many of the sites we all use everyday: a great web experience.

Well! Since this matter re-appeared some weeks ago, I have been BURIED in this topic. First the disintegration of ban-zombie's remarks.

(Quality: If Sony had allowed porn, we would be using betamax. Plain CDs were never replaced by newer media, because they had a massive install base and their simple inline streams were more reliable for portable playback. For that matter cassettes won over 8-track for practical/cost reasons too. MP3 later took over from CD, because you could burn them disc for most modern players OR listen to them on PC or in a solid-state device. It was also easier to create custom playlists, and eminently more portable in general. AAC should be the next logical step, even though WMA's quality/rate trades were better than MP3 long before AAC's introduction. Youtube's metric was "better quality than realplayer, less buffering than windows media/quicktime, low hardware requirement". They accomplished this. Even their new h264 is low-profile, no psychovisual optimizations, minimal hardware requirement. However it still codes faster than Theora, uses less data rate, seeks better, and mostly looks the same.)

To the topic of this specific post, then: Opera does not seem to be very serious about its Theora support. The company's "Big Buck Bunny" example page contains a file in .ogv format. Unfortunately this content-type is not defined for any other normal function of the browser. ogv is not in the new cache filters, but mp4 and flv are. Opening an ogv file in Opera, results in a "download"/"open with" prompt. That's terrible. If Opera only does ogv, and only within "video" tags, that's just not worth having.

Luckily with GStreamer, Opera could (in theory) add any extra formats needed. With a proper driver, we could all be on YouTube after a minimal testing cycle. Openness may be fine, but even VP8 looks like crap and codes slowly. On2's own site could not show a convincing comparison, and we haven't heard much good news about platform support.

More aggressively, Opera could try to place h264 decode-only logic into Vega itself. With h264 offering better color-still-image efficiency than JPEG or PNG, it could even be used as a method for displaying pictures with the "image" or "embed" tags. I truly believe that if decoding is free, it should be included to the fullest possible extent.

If the HD vs Blu nonsense taught us anything, it's that the market for video is still chaotic. Eventually Blu won because the landscape that killed Beta is no longer present. Modern scales of distribution have drastically altered the needs of the consumer; in a letter to Microsoft, it would have been better to urge for a permanent relief on all h264 DECODING functions. Just like so many other products, the trend is for consumer-related expenses to be subsidized at the upper distribution level. Opera is free to users, but the company still makes money. Why can't h264 be free, privately developed, and still compelling for users?

Originally posted by johnace:

As recently as 3 weeks ago, Ars Technica wrote

"Based on a comparison that is specific to the encoding parameters and bitrate used by YouTube, Maxwell found that Ogg Theora was competitive."

LOL.

Also:

"Some of the specific parameters that Ozer used for encoding may have negatively impacted the Theora results."

Oops!

If you read the second sentence in my first post, you would have seen:

Until Theora encoders are on par with H.264 without the user having to find special builds, theora will continue to lag behind H.264.

Maxwell also said the following:

Theora development isn’t on Theora trunk, never has been except for release candidates. Current development is theora-ptalarbvorm...The temporal RDO feature in current x264 provides a pretty big performance boost which is independent of the profile used. An analogous feature has been on the TODO for Theora for a long time. x264 has about as many lines of x86 assembly as the entire size of the libtheora encoder’s C code— it’s still simply a more advanced encoder, regardless of the format qualities.

Everyone is waiting for a better Theora encoder. Until then, arguments justifying why it is being slaughtered by H.264 aren't going to improve the situation.

.....I just had this awful thought. What if Google bought On2 for its multithreaded ARM decoding logic? Is it possible that VP8's main potential is on phones and smartbooks running Android (and perhaps ChromeOS)?

Originally posted by John:

From what I've read, the reasoning was, VHS offered the porn, BetaMax did not.

It was because it could fit a little more video on it. That is why VHS won that battle.

Originally posted by johnace:

arguments justifying why it is being slaughtered by H.264

It isn't. For YouTube, Theora is more than good enough. Not that quality really matters, as I have proven to you.

H.264 is superior codec to ogg. Hence microsoft will go wit former even though it may cost more .