Interesting news from Google. Personally I find the prediction API even cooler, but more generally tech-newsy is the VP8 news.
it's great news, and it's horrible news. First the bad news, and it really is quite bad: The spec sucks balls (loads of copied C code with no explanation, and the C code isn't well commented either), and if anything it doesn't steer around the gigantic patent pool of the MPEG consortium as well as Ogg/Theora does. In that sense you'd think nothing really changed. Good choices for the infrastructure (Matroshka as container format, and Vorbis as audio format), but with a crappy spec and no further technical reason to believe that VP8 is any more safe from litigation than Theora, that would seem to be the end of the road. Horrible news. But that's not actually what seems to be happening, so here comes the great news: Somehow google convinced a boatload of companies that somehow they've got a handle on the patent issues. I don't know how, but my thanks to google for showing the cojones to somehow make this work. I have no idea how they managed it - possibly by promising litigative support if any of the VP8 partners get sued. Specifically: + VP8 has been promised on 1 more browser than Ogg (IE9), which means H.264 runs on everything except Firefox, and VP8 would run on everything except Safari. Market share wise that means VP8 wins. - counterpoint: All current mobile devices cannot play VP8 and probably never will, or at least never efficiently. If you throw iPads and iPhones in the mix, that market share dynamic changes somewhat, and its much easier (and litigation-wise less risky) if you're *ALREADY* using H.264 to serve iPhone/iPad to also serve everyone else with the same codec, firefox users will have to accept flash. Also, microsoft promised WebM would work *IF* the codec is installed. If a service pack or automatically installed patch doesn't do this, that's not much help. + For *future* mobile devices Google's got AMD, ARM, NVidia, Broadcom, Freescale, *AND* Qualcomm on board. Colour me impressed. That's a big share of smartphone silicon. (Salient point: Oracle and therefore java is also on board!) - counterpoint: But not Apple's A4, or anything else Apple. With this much pressure one would think Apple can't win, but the Open Handset Alliance has already shown that the gigantic list of supporters on this page: http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/ may not be particularly engaged. Nevertheless google seems hell-bent on making this work, and if we look at Android, that is probably enough. + Technically, even though spec-wise WebM sucks, it *IS* a pragmatic format, amongst other things 'hardcoding' the video and audio codecs. With enough interest the horrible spec will be overcome by a number of open source implementations, and with enough implementations, the spec will become managable. - With a bad spec come incompatibilities. It would suck a lot if you encode a webm which works fine on your computer and your phone but it fails on another phone. Interesting times. If I were a betting man I'd probably still put my money on H.264 (regrettably!) but I'd be very hesitant. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
