Or was it Ki-Ora? Anyway, a good discussion about HTML 5 and Theora and why H.264 maybe the safer route to go...

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/05 ... ought.html

I'm curious as to what will happen to VP8, now that Google has bought the company and apparently plans to "open source" it.

Don't hear much about it these days, but it could be the perfect solution?!

Did you read the article? VP8 suffers from the same problems as Theora. Currently, it is a minor player, so hasn't been carefully analysed. Like Theora, it should at least be compared to the nearly 1,500 patents in the H.264 collection, to see if it breaks any patents. Until either Theora or VP8 do that, there isn't any guarantee that either of them won't come back to bite the users of these codecs.

Due diligence is the key here, and comparing the codecs to the patents in H.264 is the minimum that needs to be done, before either can be declared as "reasonably sure" of being free of patent infringements. As the article points out, even with the 1,500 patents, the MPEG LA can't guarantee that H.264 is 100% patent infringement free - but that nobody has come forward until now is a pretty good indication, given its popularity and increasing ubiquity.

I did indeed - my question was kinda "pie in the sky". They're all going to be patent encumbered - the H264 option comes with a $5m buy-in for the likes of Mozilla, so there has to be a better option.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Google buy out a company that had a HD codec, which they then open-sourced, just so the likes of Google and Mozilla don't have to use H.264?

The bugger is that if you need to use the HTML 5 video tag, you need to supply at least two versions of the movie now:

H.264 - for Apple/Safari/iPad/Quicktime stuff
Ogg - for Firefox, Chrome, etc.
H.264 - for iPhone (uses a lower bitrate/profile than that used by the desktop Quicktime and iPad)
gprs - if you want to support mobile devices like the iPhone over gprs networks

Fallback content - for browsers which do not support HTML5 (though this could be one of the above, OR a Flash video player).

It is a bloody mess. You need up to 5 versions of each movie to cover the bases. I see no need for more than two - desktop/netbooks & phones.

No, you are right, but that is vp8.

1. I just don't see the advantage in moving from one patent-encumbered format (flash) to another (H.264)

2. I strenuously object to moving IP video to a format with a multi-million dollar buy-in - the internet is supposed to be free.

The question is, are Theora and VP8 patent-unencumbered? They claim they are patent free, but nobody has ever checked them against even the H.264 patent portfolio, so they can't actually prove it.

I would guess, that today, it will be almost impossible to create a video codec that doesn't encroach on some patent or another. I hope the Theora team have found a way, but unless they can prove it, or at least show due diligence that they have checked to see if they have encroached on any patents, I can't see it being taken on as the standard codec.

That is H.264's advantage. It might not be free, but at least the consumer doesn't have to buy a licence and the developers taking it onboard don't have to worry about being sued.


And Flash? JPG? GIF? PNG was made, because it was supposed to be an IP-free format, but it never took off - mainly because IE up to & including version 6 never properly supported it.

You could at least force IE6 to handle PNGs correctly. It was the underlying OS that did or did not support PNG rendering - so any fixes employed were dependant on the host version of Windows having the necessary PNG rendering code in place. IIRC, the PNG format should also have supported animations, like GIF. I think most people use it now for the 8-bit alpha channel.