News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Patent Troll Larry Horn of MPEG-LA Assembling VP8 Patent Pool. Parent comment

Re:Patent Troll Larry Horn of MPEG-LA Assembling VP8 Patent ... by bradleyland on Friday May 21, 2010 @10:01AM (#1367321)
Until there are a large number of inexpensive VP8 hardware decoders in the market and deployed in devices, H.264 isn't going anywhere.

The large number of H.264 decoders in the wild is akin to the large Flash player install base. The key difference is that you can't simply download a hardware VP8 chip.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Patent Troll Larry Horn of MPEG-LA Assembling VP8 Patent ... by ZeroGravitas on Friday May 21, 2010 @10:53AM (#1367485)
Of course all those hardware devices only support H.264 baseline profile, which according to the x264 developer isn't as good a spec as the WebM one. Backwards compatibility cuts both ways. Which means you ethier double your encoding and storage costs or send the same, lower quality file to everyone. This must be what Steve Jobs means by holding back the platform.

(And you can indeed "download a hardware VP8 chip" if you happen to have a Nokia N900, Palm Pre or Motorola Droid and want better quality video since they have a general purpose OMAP3 setup to do exactly this kind of thing, as already shown by Theora DSP work. And OMAP4 has already been announced by TI to have WebM built in so maybe TI themselves will do the work necessary.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Patent Troll Larry Horn of MPEG-LA Assembling VP8 Patent ... by kierank on Friday May 21, 2010 @10:59AM (#1367504)
Of course all those hardware devices only support H.264 baseline profile

No, a very large proportion of them support High Profile. It was only the very early mobile phones and iPods that used Baseline chipsets. Nowadays H.264 support is almost always H.264 High in hardware devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Patent Troll Larry Horn of MPEG-LA Assembling VP8 Patent ... by ZeroGravitas on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:44AM (#1367673)
Are we talking devices in people's pockets, or devices being sold right now? Because the former must overwhelmingly be baseline (just iPods and iPhones alone ensure that, and even the recently released iPad only does Main, not High Profile so it would be a surprise to see the upcoming iPhone 4G leapfrog it and totally fragment the platform), the latter will soon have WebM support and there will be a transition point in between.

(btw on the OMAP3 in existing devices supporting WebM, the TI rep answered someone's question on their blog with: We are working at the moment on supporting VP8 across all our OMAP products and we will contact you directly with a schedule for your products based on OMAP3.)

[ Parent | on HN ]