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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of whether Google "won" or not, it does look like VP8 will be a much more approachable codec thanks to being open source, and because it doesn't require video makers to pay MPEG-LA license fees whenever they want to make money from their videos. I'd think at the very least professional camera makers would be interested in supporting it. From that point of view, I think the article is right.

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>it does look like VP8 will be a much more approachable codec thanks to being open source

How is VP8 'open source'? It is a standard. There exist open source implementation(s). However there are open source implementations of H.264 decoders and encoders as well, it even has a reference implementation [1] that anybody can use[2] (patent issues aside, but (understandably) very few open source projects offer the users patent indemnification).

Is it any wonder that most non-tech people are confused about these issues when even people in the tech community don't seem to understand the differences between standards and implementations, between 'open source' and 'free as in beer' and between secret proprietary formats and open standards? Sadly we seem to be at a point where 'open', 'standard' and 'free' are just words thrown about to mean 'something I like'.

[1] http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/download/ [2] http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/download/COPYRIGHT_ISO_IEC...

thanks to being open source

Something can be open source and still have patent threats.

That's one of the big differences between patents and copyright. If I go into a room and don't talk to anyone and independently write some software, then no-one can sue me for copyright infringement, but they might be able to sue me for patent infringment.

The real win will come if Google is able to have VP8 adopted as an MPEG standard, like the article states.

Even better, given that the issues raised by (iirc) Mircosoft and Apple against webp becoming the HTML5 standard video codec (and thus mandatory to support for HTML5 compliance) was that of 'patent uncertainty', with this agreement we can finally get a really great royalty free standard codec which can be used with any browser which is HTML5 compliant.

Same goes for WebRTC, which should now be on the fasttrack to be accepted as the standard for RTC (currently supported by Chrome, Mozilla and Opera).

I think having open and royalty free standards for such integral parts of what is likely to be the 'future of the web' is extremely important to foster innovation, thanks to VP8/VP9 and Opus we now have technically competitive offerings which anyone can implement free of charge across all platforms and for whatever interesting solutions they can come up with.

> the issues raised by (iirc) Mircosoft and Apple against webp becoming the HTML5 standard video codec

"webm" is the video format (and uses VP8). "webp" is a related image format.

[webp is not very compelling as an image format on its own, but maybe the relationship with webm confers some advantage...]

yes, that was a spelling error, but given the context of the discussion (standard video codec) I doubt anyone failed to understand that I meant webm.

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