Hacker News Reader

Comment by vetinari | Hacker News Reader

Not really. The upcoming generation of mobile devices will have hardware support for VP8 and the users upgrade these devices very often.

View on HN

Why would a hardware vendor add VP8 Support? I can think of two reasons not to:

   o They run the risk of patent infringement
   o H.264 is already playable everywhere, universally, 
     either natively (and with hardware support) or with Flash.

Well, the tegra2, which is the reference platform for Honeycomb, has vp8 support in hardware. Texas Instruments announced full support for vp8 in all their future DSPs and media processors and Imagination Technologies, the people who make the GPUs on the iPhone have committed to vp8 support in their next generation GPUs. It is very likely that for the iPhone6, apple will be able to add webm support at little extra cost to itself, and no patent threat, since they are already MPEG-LA licensees. Same goes for all the other manufacturers- they are already MPEG-LA licensees and safe from the vast majority of patent threats. Other than that, I would love to see a patent troll try and go after TI or Nvidia.

That's very good point.

Same goes for all the other manufacturers- they are already MPEG-LA licensees and safe from the vast majority of patent threats.

So all those implementing WebM still needs to license H.264 to be safe from patent threat, and all those implementing WebM almost all have implemented H.264. WebM is only an addition to H.264. So the question for Google is always why dropping H.264 and never why adding WebM (since it is always there).

I'm not sure how you can say that with such confidence. Hardware support for a particular codec comes from a high level of demand for use of that codec. Demand comes from content producers and consumers. If Microsoft, Apple and the other consumer hardware vendors are committed to H.264 and the only major producer that is serving VP8 (YouTube) is also serving H.264, I'm not seeing where this demand is going to come from.

Very often? Have you seen how many people are still using iPhone 3Gs (not 3GSs!) That's about two and a half years old.

I still am. I know a couple people who still are too (the 3G iOSv4 wouldn't have needed an update if the market share weren't significant).

I'm still using my iPhone 2G and 3G

Reply on news.ycombinator.com