Linux and Open Source

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols & Paula Rooney

MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

By Dana Blankenhorn | August 27, 2010, 6:00am PDT

Summary: WebM was created as a project that could be specified within HTML5, being complete and free as in freedom. Will free as in beer trump it?

The MPEG Licensing Association will no longer charge royalties for use of its H.264 codec, when it’s put online for free.

Since the group already had a moratorium on such fees until 2015 the practical impact of this is minimal.

But the business impact could be large, if it decreases interest in WebM.

H.264 is now free as in beer, as opposed to WebM’s open format aimed at HTML5. (Free Beer from Denmark has a royalty-free recipe, and was enjoyed at the 2008 FSCONS launch party. Image from Digital-Rights.net.)

It’s not free for everyone. Those who charge for their video, whether it’s a service like Hulu, a Blu-Ray disc company, or Apple’s iTunes, which wants to charge 99 cents to see shows from free TV, will still pay. (If you’re charging for free beer it’s no longer free to you, is the idea.)

Feh, replied Mozilla, and Google too said feh. Free as in beer is not the issue anyway. Free as in freedom is the issue.

And there, MPEG LA is still spreading the FUD, claiming members of its association hold patents that would cover Google’s VP8, the heart of WebM, and any other video codec programmers might seek to create.

The issue of free as in freedom, in other words, remains, subject to litigation. Whether MPEG LA holds patents on some specific mousetrap designs, or the whole idea of catching a mouse, has yet to be determined.

It is within this cone of uncertainty that videographers now walk. The H.264 codec has been around for a long time, and while WebM offers freedom, that’s merely a declaration that has yet to be tested on a courtroom battlefield.

There is one other issue that bears notice here, namely HTML5. MPEG LA’s royalty scheme has long made it inappropriate for use as a Web standard, which by its nature wants to be royalty free. But now H.264 is royalty free, and defended by a moat of lawyers.

The current HTML5 standards document includes support code for H.264, MPEG 4 and Theora. It does not specify a format, although the group wants to specify one. WebM was created as a project that could be specified, being complete and free as in freedom.

Will free as in beer trump it?

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Dana Blankenhorn, MPEG, Royalty, Digital Video, Digital Media, Personal Technology, Consumer Electronics

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.

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Hmmm.

Somehow I doubt it. WebM has a lot of potential, and when VP8 was unleashed to the FL/OSS community, it already made astounding progress.

It's not quite up to snuff to entirely put H.264 out of the game, but I'd give that a handful of months.

The thing that's most funny is even if H.264/WebM/Vp8 prevail/lose inbetween themselves, there's a ton of people using Divx/Xvid on the sides. In equivalent terms, it's gotten to the point where you can have excellent quality at incredibly low sizes. Streaming doesn't seem to be as much an issue either anymore.
CommonOddity
27th Aug 2010
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RE: MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

@CommonOddity
DivX/XviD is the standard for most pirated content on Bittorrent, not may other places. A lot of DVD players have support for DivX just as they have for MP3, knowing full well most of the content played this way is not legit.
However, increasingly even here, for high-quality torrents, they are tipping to H264, especailly when ripping from Blue-Ray, which is H264 to begin with.
DivX/XviD are non-starters in the Streaming space, which is a big segment on the web, not just with YouTube, and will be moreso as broadband uptake and speeds increase. Hopefully we will get a National Broadband Network at around 100mbps here in Australia, it is up in the air with current political machinations even though it is currently being rolled out.
msandersen
27th Aug 2010
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RE: MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

@msandersen

Yeah, it does stand for a lot of illegitimate content. But why? The reason is because the codec is lean and efficient. Cost per megabyte vs quality is quite good.

There is legitimate content that does use Divx, ie: Blizzard's videos in games (Not all, but most, as of now).

DivX/XviD can be good for streaming. This has been proven with enough projects such as Stage6, Ninjavideo and several other websites. The bandwidth constraint is a myth. Most of the time just do a poor job of encoding the video (ie: Bitrate vs features vs resolution vs, etc).

I'm not trying to bash H.264. I think it's a great codec. But there's such a gap between technical knowledge and practical use in the realm of video encoding that it's silly.

I can understand the bandwidth constraints of sites such as youtube, so flash embedded plugins/codecs do make sense. Were you to take a look at the quality that is offered and compare the same quality from the X's (Especially XviD)- you will find that you'll generally get the same for less space used.
CommonOddity
27th Aug 2010
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DivX/XviD ?? That was last year.

The standard today is Matroska (mkv) with x264 (mp4) and ac3 / DTS audio
wackoae
28th Aug 2010
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RE: MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

WebM was created as a project that could be about it is bank that website attacked from the site support from any soldier site to the light home page is great specified
musdahi
19th Sep
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ISO/IEC Standards

It is widely believed that WebM would not standup to patent scrutiny like many open source efforts. Same for Ogg Theora which is also based on the VP8 CODEC...the W3C has said as much. Not sure what Google is trying to do with WebM but is seems like a bit of a red herring to perhaps slow things down a bit in the HTML5 area.

H.264 AVC is an ISO/IEC standard and this pedigree offers the consumer a level of protection that open source lacks. This is why you will never see an open source CODEC as a standard in something like DVDs. Once something gains primetime market adoption out come the patent claims. With no standards body behind it it will soon be a feast for lawyers.

There are reasons royalties are in place. You pay an MPEG 2 royalty every time you buy a DVD player. It protects those that invented the thing to those that buy it. To allow no royalties for free H.264 content in perpetuity is remarkable. WebM probably didn't have a chance for wide scale adoption anyway but this H.264 news has affectively killed it. Why would anyone support a format that is proprietary, owned and controlled by one company? Free or not, that is madness!

Remember, the only free cheese is in a mouse trap.
CowLauncher
27th Aug 2010
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RE: MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

Uh oh, here comes the paid MPEG-LA employees commenting to make them look good.
infectiouslogic@...
27th Aug 2010
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MPEG LA's commercial terms are actually quite OK

Since this is about issues and not a popularity contest, I'll spell out what I concluded months ago (even before the extension of the free web video license was on the agenda): MPEG LA's commercial terms seem pretty reasonable.

I looked at some aspects of MPEG LA's AVC/H.264 licensing terms a couple of months ago and concluded that there really isn't a financial reason for which, for instance, Google or the Mozilla Foundation shouldn't simply pay them royalties:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-licensing-terms.html

I don't want software patents, and without them, we wouldn't have to worry about royalties. But I want to be realistic about the business implications of what happens with those patents.

If one wants to look for serious patent problems, MPEG LA isn't the place to search. One may consider the 20-year-monopoly that each of their patents represents to be unjustified; one can definitely argue that patents reward the first one to register something, but hurt others who make independent creations; but all of that is separate from the question of commercial fairness and reasonableness.

The real problem is strategic exclusionary use of patents as demonstrated by Apple vs. HTC and IBM vs. TurboHercules:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/harmfulness-ranking-of-ways-to-use.html

Even Google appears to be an exclusionary user of its search engine patents, refusing to grant licenses to others.
FlorianMueller
27th Aug 2010
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RE: MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

I'm not sure what I think of H.264/WebM; I just want a good high-quality standard. The royalty questions has been a thorn so far; if it goes away for free content, good. There are all sorts of issues in this, like where does it leave ad-supported sites like Youtube? Or more importantly smaller ad-supported sites. We want our free porn after all! :P
Personally I'd like to see the better format win which is freely available. From what I gather, the better format is clearly H264, which has traction in the marketplace and hardware. Whether WebM can get traction at large remains to be seen; Google will no doubt use YouTube and Android as a vehicle to push it. Just as they push straight H264 to iPhones, might they not push WebM to all Android phones? Well, assuming manufacturers can get hardware-accelerated decoding, which won't be for some time, so maybe not yet... in the meantime, H264 has the upper hand in hardware including all mobile devices.
And then of course there are those pesky patents... the debate over software patents will have to resolve those, but one of the lead developers on the X264 project was quite clear on his belief that WebM is infringing in a number of key areas which there are no way around, despite various cludges to do so in other ways, meaning it has to use more inefficient means. Scrap software patents, and the problem goes away, but until then, it does seem WebM is encumbered.
There are plenty of free content creation tools like ones using X264 (eg Handbrake) for it not to matter to most people.
For me, Free Beer is good enough, never mind the ideology.
msandersen
27th Aug 2010
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RE: MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

@msandersen That's what MPEG LA is betting on, that your principles can be bought off with free stuff. Since they weren't going to get money off free Internet videos anyway, the concession costs nothing.
DanaBlankenhorn
27th Aug 2010
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Problem with WebM is that IT SUCKS

Both the VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio provide a hell of a lot less quality than H.264. In fact, the combo barely achieves the same quality as good old MPEG-2 (DVD).
wackoae
28th Aug 2010
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RE: MPEG LA tries free as in beer against WebM

@wackoae
Your comment is so untrue that I guess that you're just trolling, but I just have to set the record straight.
From the latest serious and independent comparisons (see here: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/First-Look-H.264-and-VP8-Compared-67266.aspx, here: http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2010/appendixes.html#Appendix_8, and here: http://www.quavlive.com/video_codec_comparison), we can conclude that RIGHT NOW H264 offers slightly better quality than VP8 at the same bitrates. But remember that VP8 is much younger than H264 so it hasn't been optimized as much as H264 has. My bet is that in a year's time, both codecs will offer the same quality at comparable bitrates.
city_zen
28th Aug 2010
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How is it trolling when your own links back me up??

All of them show that VP8 sucks compared to H.264. That is not trolling. Good enough is by no means great. The noise level is still high.

Now, about it being young .... that is complete BS. VPx codec series existed way before H.264. So the VP8 codec is by no means young. It is an evolution of the VP3 codec developed in the late 90's. The only young part is the irrevocable permanent license (pledged by Google) to the patents and the source re-licensed as BSD.
wackoae
29th Aug 2010
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