[opendtv] Re: News: Is Apple Planning A Move Against Ogg Theora?
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 08:18:23 -0400
At 8:26 PM -0400 5/3/10, Albert Manfredi wrote:
I think the point of the article, and the subject line, suggest that
both Microsoft and Apple plan only on the H.264 codec for the
future. For whatever reasons, and apparently the reasons are
different, all of those other options that the flexibility of PCs is
supposed to support, with no problem, become moot. So, ATSC
originally went to MPEG-2, and Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe, 20 years
later, go to H.264. And oh, I forgot, so does ATSC, for M/H.
There are two major reasons that major players in the video codec
market are moving to h.264:
1. Reasonable licensing terms for computers and new mobile devices;
2. Widespread industry support for GPU hardware acceleration of h.264.
One can look at the licensing terms for h.263 (MPEG-2) and h.264 and
easily see why the computer industry is moving to h.264. For MPEG-2
the license fee dropped this year to $2 per decoder and $2 per
encoder with no cap on total. It is worth noting that MPEG-LA says
that the new licenses will run until the patents expire. For h.264
the cost for a computer for an decoder AND encoder is 25 cents with a
cap of $5 million per year.
h.264 was developed in an essentially "open" standards process and
there are well established licensing terms from MPEG-LA. I would also
note that Apple was instrumental in getting the more reasonable terms
for licensing of h.264 from MPEG-LA; they have IP in the standard and
used that sabre to negotiate more favorable terms for large scale
deployments on PCs and other computing devices. Hence, both Apple and
Microsoft, and now Adobe are paying the $5 million per year to
license h.264 for their platforms and/or applications.
Far more important, at least to Jobs, is power consumption,
especially on mobile platforms. After issuing the Thoughts on Flash
letter, Jobs noted in an e-mail that running h.264 using the
hardware GPU in the iPad will provide about 10 hours of video
playback time from a single battery charge; running the same video
using the Flash h.264 software codec on the CPU reduces the time that
video can be played to five hours.
I'm not sure how Mozilla and Opera can hope to compete. Do they
expect all web sites to be accommodating of them?
It is not an issue of the web sites, although MPEG-LA does offer a
license for streaming web sites as well. The issue is how h.264 is
decoded. If Mozilla and Opera were to include a software h.264 codec
in their browsers, they would be liable for the $5 million annual
license fee. If instead they call an OS level API that runs the codec
on hardware, then the OS vendor and GPU vendor pay the license fees.
The new Apple API for h.264 playback on GPUs allows the browser
developer to get around this problem. I suspect that Microsoft will
provide a similar API, if in fact they have not already done so.
As the article states,
"Ironically, this position puts Apple and Microsoft hand-in-hand, as
both companies are backing H.264--and that codec only--for HTML5
video rendering. To Microsoft, H.264 video represents a broad,
standardized solution that allows users to benefit from
hardware-based video acceleration. As well, adopting other codecs
like Ogg Theora could put Microsoft in shakier legal territory
versus the more centralized ownership and licensing of H.264."
[ ... ]
"... Instead of locking people into some proprietary solution it
created, Adobe has spent millions of dollars to enable use of a more
standard format."
Yes, Adobe is supporting h.264, but they have not given up on their
proprietary codec. I think it is likely that Adobe will increasingly
move to h.264, probably using hardware acceleration when available.
In reality, Adobe is still in a very good position to exploit HTML5
as they move away from Flash. They already have the attention and
support of the creative community; all that is required is that they
optimize their tools for HTML5 rather than FLASH output.
Regards
Craig
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