Google’s Open-Source Video Codec Faces Hurdles
ADOTAS – With 80 sessions and 5,000-plus developers, the Google I/O 2010 conference is well underway in San Francisco. While many are excited about the imminent release of the “Google TV” platform, which will use set-top boxes on TVs to offer Internet access and more interactive features via Android tech, interactive ad industry people — especially you tech junkies — might be more interested in WebM, Google’s open-source competition for the H.264 codec used in online video.
Google bought On2 Technologies in February and built WebM atop the firm’s VP8 technology, tapping Ogg Vorbis audio technology from the Xiph.Org Foundation. At I/O yesterday, the company released not only the source code but also an SDK and a license guide.
Chrome, Firefox and Opera are all adding WebM support for the royalty-free codec. In addition, As part of its HTML5 testing, Google announced that all uploaded YouTube videos 720p or larger will now be encoded in WebM.
H.264 is the power behind Flash, which is technically a third-party plug-in; HTML5 is codec-neutral, but according to CNet’s Stephen Shankland, Mozilla and Opera prefer VP8 to H.264 while Apple and Microsoft are in the other camp.
The drag about H.264? High-licensing fees, as well as software that’s not open-source — no wonder Apple likes it!
H.264′s edge? Hardware support — chips are able to decode video directly rather than using software, which slows the process dramatically. Such support is a possibility for WebM, but first the codec must show its value.
Which could be an issue — there are some vocal critics of VP8 that suggest its not on the same playing field as H.264. Also, an e-mail response from Apple CEO Steve Jobs to an open letter on the website of Hugo Roy of the Free Software Foundation Europe suggested that codec patent holders were mulling a lawsuit against their open-source cousins.
“Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others’ patents,” Jobs wrote.
Still, Brightcove, Digital Rapids and several online video platforms announced their support of WebM. As online video gains prominence — and mobile increases its relevance as a video source — Developers generally prefer open-source software because they’re natural-born tweakers and Google has shown itself as a compadre through Chromium, the open-source project supporting the Chrome browser. The era of the closed system may have just hit a new decline.
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