>H.264 is an open standard. It was developed by a committee, standardized, reviewed by many engineers and developers for multiple companies and has been standardized for use with a multitude of containers and devices.<p>>VP8 is not a standard. It was developed secretly by a single company, and until recently, had only a single working implementation. The public wasn’t open to collaboration on the specification until the bitstream spec was frozen, including the bugs that existed within.<p>This is an interesting point. One I had never even realized.
Very good summary of the issue. I particularly like the point that <video> is, in and of itself, open and as such the establishment of a consistent baseline codec in VP8 could actually allow h.26x to flourish and innovate as the codec of choice for high-quality content.
This is a great post and clarified quite a few confusing points of the discussion for me.<p>One area that unfortunately it didn't really cover was the impact of widely available hardware and GPU-accelerated decoding for H.264. Surely the millions of non-PC devices being sold with H.264 support (even baseline) will have some effect on the outcome of the new video format war.
> MPEG LA has a royalty cap so that companies selling high-volume products know beforehand the maximum amount of royalties they'll have to pay to MPEG LA in a given year. The current $5 million cap really isn't much for a big player possibly generating many billions of annual revenues with products that include an AVC/H.264 encoder and/or decoder.<p><a href="http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-licensing-terms.html" rel="nofollow">http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/06/mpeg-las-avch264-lic...</a>
The biggest part of the 'rage' towards Google over the drop of Chrome's native ability to use H.264 in the <video> tag, is that Google is trying to spin as its for the benefit of innovation. Which is not the case. Flash has been great, but it's not needed for the distribution of video content, and the fact that WebM is a lawsuit waiting to happen does not help either.<p>Great article though!
Why is it necessary for HTML5 to specify a codec for the <video> and <audio> tag when no format is specified for <img>?<p>(I'm not being rhetorical)
I believe this is to date the sanest article related to the H.264/WebM debacle; it clearly, and with detail, brings out the fact that H.264 <i>is</i> open. However, it fails to clarify a very important detail to this discussion, surrounding the royalty issue: H.264 coding/decoding is <i>free-of-charge to implement, distribute and use in non-commercial contexts</i>.<p>Google's, Mozilla's and Opera's actions and careless, uninformed (or possibly intentionally slanderous) responses in this discussion clearly show that their issue with H.264 isn't that H.264 isn't open enough, but rather that it isn't gratis enough.
<i>>open standard</i><p><i>>incompatible with open source</i><p>Does this make sense to anyone? It seems to me the word open doesn't mean much now.