As a person who deals in video on the web, they want to instantly double my cost to encode video by fragmenting the near ubiquity H.264 currently offers.
As an iOS device and xBox owner they want to obsolete my hardware.
As a Chrome user, they want to force me to use the crappy Flash player to view H.264 content.
I don't understand why they can't promote and improve WebM and maintain H.264 compatibility. Which browsers stopped rendering GIFs when it became an issue?
This is a short term thinking. Let's go back and time, say before December 24, 1994. A time when GIF is used for majority of graphics on the web and PNG is just a blimp. You would have used exactly the same reasoning to say that GIF is just fine, PNG doesn't benefit you right now and PNG supporters just want to force unnecessary work to convert GIFs to PNGs.
And then on December 24, 1994 "Unisys stated that they expected all major commercial on-line information services companies employing the LZW patent to license the technology from Unisys at a reasonable rate, but that they would not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services".
And then "In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing practice, announcing the option for owners of Billboard and Intra net Web sites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of $5000 or $7500.[18] Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs."
Before Unisys decided to start enforcing the patent, everything was fine with using GIF and there was no need to do the work. But after they did decide to start enforcing it, potentially every person using GIF to publish images on the web was liable for GIF licensing fees. Web luckily survived that one without major disruption and after the fact PNG is now the standard used.
WebM is a defensive weapon to make sure that the history won't repeat itself, this time with video format.
The tactic used by Google is risky but on the other hand if no one takes a stand, we will never get rid of h264 as de-facto dominant standard and we'll get a GIF-like money grab.
You have just told us that you're only interested in short-term convenience even if it'll cost you big time in the future. That's understandable and most people will act exactly the same.
Which is why the only way to replace proprietary h264 with an open, royalty-free technology is to make it inconvenient for people to use h264 and more convenient to use WebM. Google is doing exactly that.
I'll repeat my question, which browsers stopped rendering GIFs when it became an issue?
I'm all for WebM. Let me know when consumers can use it and until then it's in your user's best interest to support H.264 because that's what the content I want to watch today is encoded in.
Seconding this. I'm running 2.2 and it seems any application (for instance Google reader) coming across a animated GIF, gets just that: An animated GIF.
I don't think the GIF story is proving what you think it's proving.
The problem with GIF is that everyone thought it was open and free, and then Unisys turned around and started enforcing the patents.
Paying MPEGLA up front for indemnity is precisely the type of thing a company would do to avoid being sued by people who hold submarine patents on video encoding.
If there's a lesson to be learned from GIF, it's: don't use encoding formats with questionable IP.
Whether you or I think WebM is patent free is, quite frankly, irrelevant. Not many companies, besides Google apparently, are going to be willing to take that risk, precisely because they remember the GIF fiasco.
WebM has zero chance of replacing h264 as the dominant video standard. The time it would take to do that is longer than the remaining lifetime on the h264 patents, and once the patents expire there is no reason for anyone to use WebM.
Really? You're guaranteeing zero chance of any event happening in IT until 2028? 17 years from now? In the same industry in which 17 years ago it was 1994 and Yahoo! wasn't called Yahoo! yet? In the same web space in which 6 years ago it was early 2005 and Youtube wasn't created yet?
May I borrow your crystal ball for a couple of minutes, please?
> Sorry, should I have used VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray as examples instead?
All examples of a technology being replaced (or partially replaced) by a better technology. WebM is not better than H.264 technologically. At best, it is almost as good as the lower H.264 profiles.
H.264 might conceivably be replaced as the dominant de facto video standard, but the replacement will not be WebM.
(BTW, I don't necessarily accept the 2028 number for when the relevant H.264 patents expire. That's when the last of the patents expire, but many of the patents are on the more recent enhancements to H.264. We only need the patents that cover the main profile to expire).
World is ripe with examples of technology being replaced by a challenger due to non-technical factors. The rise of MP3 and other lossy standards in favour of CDs is an obvious example. Early LCDs were not as good in terms of image quality as contemporary CRTs. It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be good enough technically and attractive for other reasons.
Widespread support of WebM is likely to influence the chance of H.265 (the next one) either being royalty-free or at least having a royalty-free profile (and if not, then having a royalty-free competitor in the form of WebM version 2 or 3 in the early stages of its adoption). If Chrome uptake continues and Flash hurries up with their WebM support then a royalty-free subset of H.264 isn't entirely out the question, they've already softened their licensing once in response to competition.
"Short-term thinking" can easily mean five or ten years on the web. Should I be happy as a user when Google makes my situation worse to make it better five years later?
Why does it double your encoding cost? Support the majority of the market first, then the minority if you can squeeze it in in your cost structure. iOS devices are the minority devices, they naturally come second.
Supporting some single or low double digit market share at the expense of the vaster share doesn't make any sense. It's like owning a fuel station that only offers electricity and hydrogen and then complaining that it'll increase your costs to stock regular old petrol and diesel.
As a person who deals in video on the web, they want to instantly double my cost to encode video by fragmenting the near ubiquity H.264 currently offers.
As an iOS device and xBox owner they want to obsolete my hardware.
As a Chrome user, they want to force me to use the crappy Flash player to view H.264 content.
I don't understand why they can't promote and improve WebM and maintain H.264 compatibility. Which browsers stopped rendering GIFs when it became an issue?