Yes, there are apparently big time issues with not just functions but out and out code shared with h.264, and with some inefficiencies in the current implementation. But it's early.
I'm actually not all that happy about this announcement. If I had any confidence that VP8 would be quickly, universally adopted as the future by all concerned (and that we could rest assured that it would soon be at h.264 quality and have the long term ability to surpass it) I'd be thrilled. But for now it's yet another codec entering the wars, open source or not, patent free or not, that are in my mind bringing us back to having to encode everything in multiple formats just to insure browser compatibility. Yuck. HTML5 video holds so much promise, and its just so depressing seeing it hobbled by all of this. Best case scenarios to hope for in the short term: 1. Apple and MS welcome VP8 with open arms, not necessarily as THE HTML5 codec, but fully supporting it with the HTML5 video tag in their browsers. And/or: 2. The consortium controlling h.264 releases it free in perpetuity as a goodwill gesture. Alas, I don't think either have any chance in hell of happening. Instead I fear we're entering into a competing, non-interoperable proprietary era, where open source is forced into being non-universal by default. So my pessimistic take on the news is: now instead of h.264 vs. Theora, and html5 vs. flash, we have h.264 vs. Theora vs. VP8 complicated by flash, with various parties siding with one or two but never all three, and Adobe, Apple and Microsoft playing politics with the good name of "open standards". I desperately want to be wrong and hope all the optimists are right. Brook On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 11:15 AM, elbowsofdeath <[email protected]> wrote: > > > It always takes some time for developers to work their magic and create > stuff that end-users can use. I expect there to be a good mix of free & > low-price encoders, along with integration into many existing tools. > > Its very early days, and the lack of encoders isnt much of a problem at > this stage where there arent too many people with suitable browsers either. > > However it would be good to start experimenting with encoding settings and > seeing what sort of filesizes are achieved, so I will try to see if there > are any options out there. > > Meanwhile apparently someone that knows a bit about the tech of video > codecs had an initial look at VP8 and was quite concerned about some > similarities in certain functions to h.264. This leaves the door open for > patent woes for WebM, although it is far too early to tell if that will > become an issue at some point. At the very least we should not get too > complacent about WebM, its future is not completely assured, but hopefully > it will all work out ok. > > Cheers > > Steve Elbows > > --- In [email protected] <videoblogging%40yahoogroups.com>, > "stanhirson" <shir...@...> wrote: > > > I'm getting concerned that although VP8 is open source, it is not > accessible to the unwashed content creators (videomakers) but only to > corporations and developers. At some point there may be some trickle-down, > but it won't be free. > > > > Stan > > > > Stan Hirson > > http://PinePlainsViews.com > > http://hestakaup.com > > > > > -- ____________________________ Brook Hinton Moving Image and Sound Maker www.brookhinton.com Associate Professor / Assistant Chair Film Program at CCA California College of the Arts www.cca.edu/film [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
