WebM/VP8 and Handheld Devices. Ti Already On The Ball.

If you haven’t been following the to-and-fro related to video codecs and HTML5, let me give you a quick update. There’s been a fight over whether H.264 or OGG Theora should be used as the video codec and two problems exist. H.264 is currently free to use but it has to be licensed. In 2015, those license may (or may not) cost money. OGG Theora on the other hand is open-source and will remain free. The problem with OGG Theora is that there are questions begin asked about whether it uses patented methods. If those methods are challenged and proven to be patented at a later date, adopters could face problems. Mozilla wants to take the risk with OGG. Apple wants to go the HTML5 route. [Good article here at ARSTechnica goes into more detail.]

Google have another solution. Back in Feb they acquired ON2 Technologies. ON2 have a codec product called VP8 and Google have today announced that they will open-source the codec and offer it free, along with a new container (a subset of Matroska) and the OGG Vorbis audio codec under a new project called WebM. Naturally the first question that arises is ‘will VP8 stand up to a patent challenge?’ Having a company like Google behind it means that it will be an attractive target but it is likely that Google have done a fair bit of homework here and given that it is coming with wide industry support, someone is going to have to think carefully about how they challenge. The same question is considered in this interesting and detailed post about VP8 performance.

Obviously we won’t see a big change overnight so there’s no need to worry about your hardware video decoder at the moment but over time, everyone in the video game is going to have to think about implementing encoders and decoders in hardware because what just happened today is great for online video and is likely to take root quickly. A major player, the owner of the worlds largest online video archive is putting all it’s weight behind a good quality, open-source, license-free video codec, audio codec and container.

Ti have already announced that VP8 hardware decoding is part of their next-gen OMAP4 platform and I’m sure we’ll see other announcements soon. In the meantime though, we have to think about software decoders. Apparently there’s a Windows DirectShow filter already available, FFMpeg already has patches available and Gstreamer support (used in WebOS, MeeGo and many other Linux-based distributions) is coming soon via Google. [More information at OSNews.] We’re likely to see software support for it in Android (3.0?) and support will be built into Flash too although I expect this will be software-only for the time being meaning it probably won’t come to ARM-based platforms for a while. It could be a few years before we see hardware-decoder support in flash.

In summary then, feel good about the announcement today, don’t worry about hardware decoding support for the time being (H.264 will be around until at least 2015 and following this announcement we could see a counter-move by the MPEG-LA Consortium) but look out for announcements from your favorite platform manufacturers over the next year because decoding video in hardware is critical for battery life on handheld internet and media devices. Intel aren’t included as in the list of supporters but as a company that prides itself on the full internet experience, they’ll have to do something. It will be a good question to ask them at Computex in a few weeks.

Google announcement.