Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexkcd | Hacker News Reader

WebM is an inferior codec to h264. As much as I'd like a patent-free alternative, it's unlikely that consumers will be willing to take a step back in video compression/quality. The fact of the matter is that large companies can afford to pay royalties, and end users don't have to. There's very little incentive to move to something new, let alone inferior in quality and of dubious future.

Now imagine a patent-free codec came along that had substantially better quality per bit-rate and was at least as efficient as h264. You wouldn't need lobbying to move us over. The pirates would embrace it first, and everyone else would follow. At the end of the day, moving forward is the only way we know. Sadly, WebM is leading in the opposite direction.

View on HN

WebM is an inferior codec to h264.

One of the most important properties of my media formats is it's accessiblility.

The fact that h264 is heavily patented by these creeps makes it inferior for my purposes by a large measure.

What business wouldn't pay a slight file-size penalty (to maintain the same quality) in order avoid being bound to some per-seat licensing agreement with all its associated administrative and reporting obligations?

Drive space is most-rapidly-decreasing cost in the world and bandwidth isn't too bad either. Patents take twenty years to expire. Do the math.

"One of the most important properties of my media formats is it's accessiblility."

Great! H264 is what you want then. It's not only supported, but also hardware accelerated, on most devices out there. WebM isn't, and won't be for a long time.

"What business wouldn't pay a slight file-size penalty (to maintain the same quality) in order avoid being bound to some per-seat licensing agreement with all its associated administrative and reporting obligations?"

Every business that would rather pay royalty fees than for extra bandwidth required by a shitty codec. You probably also want the majority of your customers to actually be able to view your content. So there's also that "minor" inconvenience. But aside from that, what business wouldn't go the WebM route, right? :P

"Do the math."

Actually, I'll let you do it.

Every business that would rather pay royalty fees than for extra bandwidth required by a shitty codec.

Seriously, how much of a bandwidth increase are you alleging for a similar quality?

Great! H264 is what you want then. It's not only supported, but also hardware accelerated, on most devices out there. WebM isn't, and won't be for a long time.[...]You probably also want the majority of your customers to actually be able to view your content. So there's also that "minor" inconvenience.

Device adoption is certainly a good point. Based on the viewing habits I see of the kids, over the long term I'd bet on whatever YouTube is moving to over whatever remnants of IP the old television industry is trying to keep restricted.

> it's unlikely that consumers will be willing to take a step back in video compression/quality

If mp3 is anything to go by consumers as a whole actually seem to care surprisingly little about the quality / size equation. I suspect if either 10% more bandwidth is used or video is 10% worse the vast bulk of users couldn't give a hoot for the vast bulk of video they view on the web. There might be special cases (streaming HD movies, perhaps), but we don't need the general standard for web video to cater to every special case, just be good enough and robust enough for a wide variety of common cases.

Actually, mp3 is widely used because that's what the pirates chose back in the dial up days, when a lossy codec met their needs perfectly. You might still remember a time when mp3 was not supported by many players.

H264 meets the pirates' needs perfectly now. It has the best quality per bit-rate out there. And pirates don't care about royalty fees.

All your arguments below, about WebM not being supported and hardware accelerated on every device, apply equally to your hypothetical better than H.264 codec. So it's a bit simplistic to say only quality matters, and Google's has created more hardware (and software) support for WebM than I thought possible.

It's likely that getting that support was aided by being clearly patent-free so certain compression techniques and wide support are probably linked.

Of course, a better than H.264 codec isn't hypothetical. THere is H.265 and VP9 coming, neither of which has hardware support or patent royalty demands or wide usage by pirates. The level of support for VP8 is likely to influence how those things pan out in the future.

I'm interested in knowing where you get this idea what H.265 won't be subject to patent royalties?

There's an implicit "yet" in my sentence that I should probably have put in. As in, the MPEG(-LA) plans for H.265 to be widely supported (by hardware manufacturers, pirates, and everyone else) and plan to charge royalty fees on it. But widespread use of VP8 and a credible threat from VP9 (or 10) could force them to choose between making money and being the defacto standard.

Yes all my arguments apply to my hypothetical codec. Where did I imply otherwise?

If you want your codec to be adopted despite lack of hardware/software support, you really need to offer something worth the hassle. Notably reduced buffering wait times for consumers, and lower bandwidth costs and ease of distribution (encoder/decoder) for pirates would be such needs worth the hassle. WebM is worse in all these cases. Very few people care about royalties, so it's simply not enough to ask everyone to swap out all the hardware and other infrastructure for mostly ideological fluff.

You actually need to make a better codec. And so far there is nothing out there (H265 and VP9 don't have a usable encoder/decoder).

My point was that Google is providing the software and hardware support[1], in conjunction with every big name you could mention, with a short list of notable exceptions, therefore overall it is as strong as another hypothetical royalty-free codec which is technically better, but which has less hardware, software or industry support.

In short "better" codec means more than just compression efficiency and asking people to switch out their infrastructure for a quality improvement is as tough as for a cost reduction. It only happens now because the whole industry acts in concert to make it happen. There's no reason why the industry couldn't coalesce around a free codec next time if the "idealogues" and "hippies" have laid sufficient groundwork, either with no business case or one that only works in certain niches. This is how it has worked in many other free software or free content success story.

[1] this doesn't seem to be widely known. If you google for WebM then one of the twitter results is Joe Hewitt asking smugly when Google will announce hardware and Youtube support for WebM, something they'd done about a year previously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com