Google announced a new A/V coded/container today, which is great news on many fronts. Here's a VERY complete analysis of the codec/container:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377 Interesting statement on the spec: "But first, a comment on the spec itself. AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code — up to and including TODOs, “optimizations”, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone." His final takeaway: "Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise. The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264. Of course, this is still significantly better than Theora, and in my tests it beats Dirac quite handily as well." Unfortunately, there's patents: "Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem." I hope this works out, because another open competitor to H.264 would be a good thing. Oh, and btw - did you see that Microsoft said the IE 9 will support the new codec if users have installed it (it won't be built in to IE 9 like support for H.264 will)? One more thing - it's pretty funny how Google & others are now disparaging OGG for being sucky now that there's something better. Kinda validates what many others have been saying about the Theora codec for a while. Scott -- R. Scott Granneman [email protected] ~ www.granneman.com ~ granneman.tel Full list of publications @ http://www.granneman.com/publications My new book: Google Apps Deciphered @ http://www.granneman.com/books "Gay marriage should be between a man and a woman." ---Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a radio interview with Sean Hannity, New York Daily News, 8/29/03 -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
