The amusing thing is that it was actually a good review, as the author is too smart to actually lie about it (though he does make a few minor technical blunders). Just the surface layer of nerd rage over a core of deeply technical nit-picking leads everyone to believe otherwise and link to it as if it revealed anything we didn't already suspect, or indeed hope for.<p>I mean he says it's better than H.264 baseline. If you're watching it on an iPod or iPhone then that's the only profile they support. In other words Android phones will have better maximum quality video than Apple's. Is that part getting overlooked somehow?<p>To reiterate, if you only want to create one file for all your web viewers then H.264 baseline is your best option, and VP8 beats that.<p>Another general theme is that it's very similar to H.264. If you put your armchair patent lawyer hat to one side for a moment, isn't "similar to H.264" a really good thing to say about a codec? Personally I think it's good for H.264 to be knocked off its pedestal. Just because Steve Jobs mentioned it in a keynote it seems to have attained the same mystical halo that surrounded PPC, Altivec, AAC or Firewire, untouchable by mere mortals with their X86, MMX, MP3 and USB2 when really they're all just fairly standard technologies with pros and cons and susceptible to external market forces like any other tech.<p>All the flaws he finds are unquantified in their impact, much like the recent attack piece on Ogg by his colleague where fatal flaws were later revealed to save 7-bits per media file or be 0.1% less efficient than MP4. Maybe they are real problems that annoy software encoder purists, design flaws or actual bugs that can't even be fixed until a spec revision but do you actually care as a customer? (Again was H.264 handed down from God or is it just a committee written spec like most other technologies. Are we claiming it perfect or flawless just because it's the incumbent?)<p>About the only one that he quantifies is lack of B-frames. (Actually left out because of patents, yet this still gets criticized by someone who thinks they're also careless about patents) But B-frames have costs as well as benefits, something clearly shown by the fact that they were left out of H.264 baseline as well. If they're all sunshine and lollipops then why leave them out? Like many things in codecs and software generally, it's a tradeoff, more decode power for extra compression which may make sense on a destkop but not a laptop or mobile device.<p>Finally, note how often in this (and his preview article) he says VP8 will not be a serious challenger <i>unless</i>(!) they adopt psy optimizations that make x264 so much better than the other H.264 implementations. You'd think this was either impossible, or unthinkable, but it's not. It's only a matter of time and at least the Xiph guys have experience of doing exactly this on a similar codebase and they've been working on VP8 for weeks already.
The technical analysis is sound -- technically, WebM is not as good as H.264. But considering it's mostly for cat videos, it doesn't really matter.<p>The super high quality stuff will take an extra minute or two to download, but you won't have to pay a licensing fee for it. The movie and the hardware and software that play it will be much cheaper. A compromise, yes, but not a really difficult one.
I doubt that anything is really final in google's hands. just look at how fast android is changing and evolving. Google will do what it needs to do to reach their goals, even if it means that they need to break backward compatibility. This is a company with so much resources it can probably design its own reference hardware implementation of vp8 at whatever stage of its evolution, regardless of backwards compatibility - and also persuade chip makers like TI and Qualcolm to include it in their product line at a moment's notice ie within 4 months or so. In this respect, I think the "finality" is overrated - the reviewer / x264 developer is thinking too small.
> Another problem with Jason's analysis is that he is comparing a new and "raw" video format to an established and mature encoder like x264.<p>VP8, and the libvpx codebase, is older than x264, as it said in the original article.
From the entry on opera.com:<p>"The x264 developer's analysis is certainly interesting, but I don't think it is the final word on "WebM vs. H.264". Not only is WebM doing well compared to the H.264 baseline profile, which is what's relevant to HTML5 video, <i>but I think WebM will continue to improve both quality-wise and performance-wise.</i>"<p>From the x264 developer's article:<p>"Update: it seems that Google is not open to changing the spec: it is apparently “final”, complete with all its flaws."<p>Mhm.