Sun, 02 Aug 2009

Codec Hell

In my professional life, such as it is, I develop video products. Alot of my time is devoted to skirting around or otherwise trying desperately to avoid patents, copyrights, licenses and fees associated with video codecs, or to produce compliant implementations without incurring additional license fees. It gets mighty frustrating for all involved. There should be a better way, and there was a brief glimmer of hope in early June with the HTML 5 spec under consideration by the W3C, and the forthcoming <video> tag.

Alas, such hope was short lived. Below are some links to the whole sordid saga - taken together they offer some serious insight into the rather arcane world of video signal processing ...

Fear Of A MiKrosVft Planet

Now I know that most people don’t really care about the mechanics behind playing video files and I can’t say that I blame you for caring more about your content than the technology behind it. So while this post will get into some of the more mundane mechanics of the codec industry, I ask that you stick with me because behind the scenes a war is being fought for control of your very television. This particular codec battle has been going on for over 10 years now.

(link) [Zata Not Funny]

Decoding the HTML 5 video codec debate

The HTML 5 video element has the potential to liberate streaming Internet video from plugin prison, but a debate over which codec to define in the standard is threatening to derail the effort. Ars takes a close look at the HTML 5 codec controversy and examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of H.264 and Ogg Theora.

(link) [Ars Technica]

Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs

Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>.

(link) [Slashdot]

/Technology | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time