The ecosystem benefits of Microsoft's VC-1

I'm sick. That's an odd way to start off a blog post, but I have a fever, and feel like absolute hell. I've promised myself, though, that I will post at least two blogs a week until the four horsemen of the apocalypse come riding down highway 405 (which might delay the apocalypse a considerable amount, as anyone who has tried "driving" on the 405 would know). So, I'll push aside my sniffles, my big fluffy duvet, and the little striped men trying to explain the reason god is a softball-sized strawberry orbiting the planet Neptune (did I mention I was feverish) and make an observation about VC-1.

I spent the past two days at Microsoft's Best Practices Lab for VC-1. VC-1 is a Microsoft-developed technology for video encoding the standardization of which is almost finalized by the C24 Technology Committee of the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers (SMPTE). It's based on Windows Media 9, and competes with H.264 (a.k.a. MPEG-4 part 10). Both are the slated to replace the bitrate-heavy, but CPU-friendly, MPEG-2 standard, and both MUST be supported by HD DVD and BluRay DVD players.

The battle between the two formats is something of a horse race. VC-1 is a bit further ahead from a market standpoint as there are more products which support VC-1. That's only a slight advantage, though, in a digital video market that is still mostly oriented around MPEG-2 (for high-bitrate video, that is), and where many express support for H.264 in their transition plans to next-generation compression formats.

Theoretically, we could live in a world of two formats. As noted, all High-Definition DVD players will support both. Practically, though, two formats is costly. Encoding is hard. There's a reason why there are companies that do nothing but generate digital encodes of video media. The tricks necessary to make an encode work for one format don't often apply to another format.

Tools might support both, but when you have problems, you need to have intimate knowledge of the video formats.  Just as it is costly to be an expert in multiple software ecosystems (Linux and Windows, say), it is costly to be an expert in multiple encoding formats.

So, I expect one format will end up taking the lion's share (or at least a majority) of the market. I'm not going to debate the technical merits of either, except to say that both do a good job of video compression. Rather, consider that VC-1 is a part of the Microsoft ecosystem.

That means that Microsoft is going to ensure that EVERY device it has a stake in supports VC-1. Whether it's desktop Windows, server tools, handhelds, mobile phones or Microsoft's new IPTV system, Microsoft will ensure that VC-1 is supported. You can be sure that all of Microsoft's video-oriented software will support VC-1.

Which format will the market choose, one that can be used consistently from mobile devices (lower bitrate VC-1 encodes) to broadcast HD television (higher-bitrate VC-1 encodes), or one that will have less guaranteed consistent support across devices? In our multi-device world, I'm betting on the former...and that makes VC-1 a serious contender.

Just to head off the naysayers, it's worth reiterating that VC-1 is an SMPTE standard. That means it is fully documented, reference implementations exist, and more important, ANYONE can implement it. Someone mentioned a VC-1 plug-in for QuickTime on the Mac during the conference. That's one example, but it does demonstrate that VC-1 is more than a Windows-only media protocol. Microsoft's spreading of VC-1 throughout its media ecosystem does not equal ubiquity, but it certainly goes a long way in that direction, and partners end up taking it the last step of the way.