A few years ago, The Linux Hater made the following poignant observation regarding Linux driver support:

Drivers are only just the beginning… But for some reason y’all like to focus on the drivers. You know why lusers do that? Because it just happens to be the problem that people notice first.

And so it is with the HTML5 video codec debate, re-invigorated in the past week by Google’s announcement of dropping native H.264 support in their own HTML5 video tag implementation. As I read up on the fiery debate, I kept wondering why people are so obsessed with this issue. Then I remembered the Linux Hater’s post and realized that the video codec issue is simply the first problem that most people notice regarding HTML5 video.

I appreciate that the video codec debate has prompted Niedermayer to post on his blog once more. Otherwise, I’m just munching popcorn on the sidelines, amused and mildly relieved that the various factions are vociferously attacking each other rather than that little project I help with at work.

Getting back to the “first problem” aspect– there’s so much emphasis on the video codec; I wonder why no one ever, ever mentions word one about an audio codec. AAC is typically the codec that pairs with H.264 in the MPEG stack. Dark Shikari once mentioned that “AAC’s licensing terms are exponentially more onerous than H.264′s. If Google didn’t want to use H.264, they would sure as hell not want to use AAC.” Most people are probably using “H.264″ to refer to the entire MPEG/H.264/AAC stack, even if they probably don’t understand what all of those pieces mean.

Anyway, The Linux Hater’s driver piece continues:

Once y’all have drivers, the fight will move to the next layer up. And like I said, it’s a lot harder at that layer.

A few months ago, when I wanted to post the WebM output of my new VP8 encoder and thought it would be a nice touch to deliver it via a video tag, I ignored the video codec problem (just encoded a VP8/WebM file) only to immediately discover a problem at a different layer– specifically, embedding a file using a video tag triggers a full file download when the page is loaded, which is unacceptable from end user and web hosting perspectives. This is a known issue but doesn’t get as much attention, I guess because there are bigger problems to solve first (c.f. video codec issue).

For other issues, check out the YouTube blog’s HTML5 post or Hulu’s post that also commented on HTML5. Issues such as video streaming flexibility, content protection, fullscreen video, webcam/microphone input, and numerous others are rarely mentioned in the debates. Only “video codec” is of paramount importance.

But I’m lending too much weight to the cacophony of a largely uninformed internet debate. Realistically, I know there are many talented engineers down in the trenches working to solve at least some of these problems. To tie this in with the Linux driver example, I’m consistently stunned these days regarding how simple it is to get Linux working on a new computer– most commodity consumer hardware really does just work right out of the box. Maybe one day, we’ll wake up and find that HTML5 video has advanced to the point that it solves all of the relevant problems to make it the simple and obvious choice for delivering web video in nearly all situations.

It won’t be this year.

This past week, the internet picked up — and subsequently sprinted like a cheetah with — an unsourced and highly unsubstantiated rumor that Google will open source the VP8 video codec, recently procured through their On2 acquisition. I wager that the FSF is already working on their press release claiming full credit should this actually come to pass. I still retain my “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude. However, I thought this would be a good opportunity to consolidate all of the public knowledge regarding On2′s VP8 codec.

Pictured: All the proof you need that VP8 is superior to H.264
Update: The preceding comment is meant in sarcastic jest. Read on

The Official VP8 Facts:
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week brought us a lot of news in the web browser space: Mozilla released Firefox 3.6 (nice fullscreen video, BTW, especially on Linux); YouTube and Vimeo grabbed headlines by announcing HTML5 video support for their video sites.

I resolved a few months ago to not bother reading so many tech news sites since they consist of 99% misinformed drivel, and I’m a happier person for that decision. But when there’s big news that can be seen as tangentially related to what I do at my day job, it gets hard to resist.

From everything I read, there was surprisingly little Flash hatred in the wake of these announcements. Really, the situation just erupted into an all-out war between the devotees of Firefox (and to a lesser extent, Opera) and supporters of Google (and to a lesser extent Apple and their Safari browser). It gets boring and repetitive in a hurry when you start reading these discussions since they all go something like this:

As you can see from the infographic, at least both sides can agree on something. I would also like to state my emphatic support for Mozilla’s principled, hardline stance against the MPEG stack for HTML5 video. Please don’t budge on your position. Stand firm on the moral high ground.

That graphic is just the beginning; there are so many problems with HTML5 video that it’s hard to know where to even begin. That’s why I need to remember to just laugh gently at its mention and move along. I only get a headache trying to understand how HTML5 video could ever have the slightest chance of mattering in the grand scheme of things.

However, a pleasant side effect of this attention is that more and more people are actually being exposed to the video tag. One nagging detail people invariably notice is that the video tag performs exceptionally poorly, likely because browsers have to deal with the exact same limitations that the Flash Player does, namely, converting decoded YUV data to RGB so that it can be plopped on a browser page. And if you try to claim that you can just download the media and use a standalone player, you continue to miss the entire point of web video.

Another aspect I have to appreciate about the debate surrounding HTML5 video is the way that it brings out the positive spirit in people. Online discussions are normally overwhelmingly negative. But advocates of the HTML5/Xiph approach truly believe this could all work out: If Apple decides to adopt the Xiph stack, and if some benevolent hardware company would churn out custom ASICs for decoding Xiph codecs, and if those ASICs were adopted in next quarter’s array of mobile computing devices and netbooks, and if Google transcodes their zillobytes of YouTube videos to the Xiph stack, and if Google throws the switch and forces the 60% of IE-using stragglers to either change browsers or go without YouTube, and if Google thereby forgoes many opportunities to monetize their videos, then absolutely! HTML5 video could totally unseat Flash video.

Okay, that’s it for me. I’m going to go back to ignoring the insular, elitist tech world at large except for the few domains in which I have some influence.

See Also:

• The last time I put any effort into evaluating the HTML5 video tag

I have been studying multimedia technology since 2000. It has been a pretty chaotic technological landscape. People who wanted to publish video on the web wondered what format to use (and occasionally sought my advice). Various fiefdoms arose around Microsoft, Apple, and Real, all hoping to claim the mantle of the standard web video format. Somewhere along the line, Macromedia “accidentally” established a standard web video format via the Flash Player (now Adobe’s).

A few years ago, Adobe (my employer, BTW) upgraded the video support in Flash Player to use the same video format that happened to sit at the top of QuickTime’s codec heap: QT-MP4/H.264/AAC. A few days ago, Microsoft announced the beta of Silverlight 3, which contains support for the same formats. After absorbing that information, it took a few days for the next thought to coalesce in my mind:

We have a standard multimedia format.

All the big players support the same multimedia stack (I think even Real Player supports the same stack). I know that’s dismaying to certain elements of the free software community who insist that Xiph’s multimedia stack is the “standard” (really! there are blessed RFCs to back it up and everything); you may not like it, but that’s the way it is:

• QT-MP4 is the standard container format, not Ogg
• H.264 is the standard video codec, not Theora (or dirac)
• AAC (and also MP3, for historical purposes) is the standard audio codec, not Vorbis

Sure, you may, in principal, have to send a dollar or 2 over to the Patent Illuminati (though highly unlikely). But it’s either that, or, you know, not have a standard video format. (And remember, the HTML5 video tag is not coming to save you.)

At least the free software enthusiast can take comfort in knowing that open source (L/GPL) efforts such as FFmpeg and x264 aim to create the very best tools that anyone can possibly use to create these formats.

Addendum: Now that I think about it, I don’t necessarily know if Silverlight 3 will transport H.264 and AAC inside of a QT-MP4 container or somehow pack it into an ASF file. That would be interesting to find out, though I have read (possibly uninformed) blog chatter excited about being able to stream the same file through Flash and Silverlight.

Discussions of the proposed <video> tag in HTML5 invariably make my ears perk up, maybe because it could be perceived — under the right circumstances — as alleged competition against what I do at my day job. But I’m still interested in all topics concerning multimedia technology, and this sounds like a big one. Plus, Mozilla recently announced that it would donate 100 grand to Wikimedia to help improve Ogg and Theora.

Quick glossary/refresher on key terminology: Vorbis = audio codec; Theora = video codec; Ogg = container format that wraps and delivers Vorbis, Theora and several other types of media.

So, the video tag is supposed to be the promised land of video on the web (just like SVG is supposed to be the open answer to Flash). I’m looking at this from a purely pragmatic perspective. Here are 2 big questions about media meant for delivery via the media tag:

1. How do people create the media?
2. How do people consume the media?

I want to ponder these questions. Read the rest of this entry »