I’ve previously discussed the dustup over Ogg Theora vs. H.264. Today Google announced it is releasing the VP8 codec as open source. VP8 is an ostensibly patent-free codec which, unlike Theora, is said to be as good, technically, as H.264. But it won’t change much.
Most of the case against Theora didn’t come down to its technical quality, but the fact that H.264 is a standard that extends far beyond just web video on desktop platforms, and there was no way Theora plausibly had a chance in that larger world. The same logic applies to VP8.
The Mozilla Foundation and Google can implement VP8 in Firefox or Chrome or whatever. But let’s look at, say, Netflix. Right now, they can serve the same H.264 streams up to desktop platforms via Silverlight, to iPads (soon iPhones and iPod Touches), to the PS3, to the Nintendo Wii (as of this month), to Roku boxes, to the Xbox, to various Blu-ray players….
Most of those devices implement H.264 decoding in hardware, and their vendors couldn’t add VP8 decoding to them if they wanted to. And they mostly don’t want to, because H.264 licensing is pretty cheap, and they don’t care about the ideological arguments against it. It uses the same kind of licensing regime used by MPEG-2 (DVD), Audio CD, ATSC digital broadcast… the industry is very comfortable with this model.
So, what is a company like Netflix supposed to do? Keep two copies of its entire library, one in VP8, for Firefox, and one in H.264, for every other client platform in the world? Because the Mozilla Foundation has some ideological objections to software patents, and so refuses to implement H.264?
Right. Good luck with all that.
Had VP8 been around (and open source) five or six years ago, things might have been very different. But H.264 has already achieved critical mass. It simply won’t be displaced by another current-generation codec. If people want a patent-free codec to eventually emerge on top, they should start thinking about how to build a patent-free next generation codec, and get it ready for prime time before H.264′s inevitable MPEG-LA-licensed successor is ready.
