--- In [email protected], Brook Hinton <bhin...@...> wrote: > > 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. > Well you know I have multiple concerns and whilst I can appreciate the joy of open and some of the concerns about h.264, I think people sometimes allow that love of open to obscure the many practical realities which could make a mess such as you describe.
I would say the format battles arent quite as complex as you fear, because although Google only recently started some Theora initiatives, I think we can pretty much forget about that format now, WebM is taking its place. And I believe Flash will support WebM so it should not complicate the picture too much but rather continue to offer solutions for browsers that dont support either h.264 or WebM with HTML5. If WebM avoids any patent ugliness then my main issue with it will be efficiency - I shall watch closely to see how much hardware-accelerated support comes out for it on both desktop and mobile, and will be extremely annoyed if the era of low-energy web video playback, which is only just coming of age, is spoilt by WebM for too many years. Cheers Steve Elbows > 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 >
