I’ve been spending quite a bit of time pitching h.264 lately and have ended up developing a stump speech (more of an elevator pitch really). If you’re in the same boat and are looking to develop or refine an h.264 pitch of your own I’ve made a generic version of mine available below (runs 1:45).
The obvious question is why is this necessary? The answer is twofold really. First, the various platform vendors (the big 3 specifically — Windows Media, QuickTime and Real) attempts to lock users into their proprietary stacks have made everyone extremely leery of video formats in general. Second, there just hasn’t been a vendor neutral codec / format capable of meeting the majority of the video use cases that exist. That’s why h.264 is such a game changer — it gives the power back to content creators and takes it out of the hands of vendors who seek market domination for their product stacks.
Adobe made an absolutely huge move by walking away from their own proprietary file format (FLV). Microsoft needs to do the same and walk away from their paper standard (VC-1). Make the business model align with the needs of the customer instead of forcing the customer to fit your needs — it’s that simple.
If you’ve got other arguments, counter arguments I’d love to hear them.
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In your video you ask why use anything else then h264, and one answer could be: FLV is free and doesn’t contain any patent or licensing restrictions, while H264 requires you to pay royalties for every video. From Wikipedia: “In countries where software patent regulations are upheld, the vendors of products which make use of H.264/AVC are expected to pay patent licensing royalties for the patented technology that their products use”
@Thijs - the last time I checked On2 held patents for the vp6 codec that flv uses. FFMPEG has an implementation of the h.263 codec, but that doesn’t mean its unencumbered (Macromedia licensed h.263 aka “Spark” from Sorenson). So, I’m not certain you can assert flv is free.
Maybe someday, there will be a killer, patent free, open source codec for video, but I’m not holding my breath (Sun announced their intent to work on just such a thing recently, but their media track record stinks…remember JMF).
Naturally there are many codecs which are free , look at OGG theora, or dirac.
Excellent post, and I agree.
How did you embed the video? It showed up in my feed reader as just a regular MP4 embed that you could download. I thought it was a nice touch to have the visible Flash movie and the H.264 download so I wondered if you had to do anything special.
Love the blog, it’s becoming one of my favorites.
=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com
Great post, Brooks. I agree H.264 is a game changer. I can’t wait until the H.264 chips start showing up in laptops and other components for hardware decoding/encoding.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070308_001806.html
@Ryan - Thanks for the props. I’m using the Kimili plugin for WordPress to do the embedding, but I don’t believe that has anything to do with the enclosure showing up in the feed. Because of the popularity of podcasting / blogging hybrids, WordPress is pretty good about sniffing out podcast formats and writing the enclosure tags into the feed. Anytime you reference an .mp4, mp3, .m4a, .m4b, or .m4v file in a post WP will do the work for you.
This is one of the reasons why I was a bit bummed to see Adobe moving forward with the f4v naming convention. I believe I understand some of the reasoning, but it means you won’t leverage the existing interoperability there is right out of the gate. I definitely want to hear more color from you guys about this decision.
@Trav - Great link bro. Hardware is definitely more of an issue now that there’s increasing emphasis on battery life in laptops and smaller form factor mobile devices. On the desktop front it was completely reasonable to rely on pure software decoding since CPU speed increases were a given and power was an unquestioned constant.
I’m definitely looking forward to more chip driven decoding and looking to vendors to have the hooks / APIs that allow 3rd party software to directly pipe the decoding / encoding to the dedicated hardware. Content creation apps are going to be getting significantly richer which is great news.
Brooks - you’re singing to the choir here, but MS has a lot of influence across the various parts of the puzzle. Is it realistic to that the big 3 (Microsoft, Adobe and Apple) will all concede and centralize around the same format? Perhaps a better way to phrase the question is can we really expect big business to make a play for the greater good of the consumer and that seamless experience we all think is nirvana at this point?
@Tony - Do I expect Microsoft to drop VC-1? No.
Do they risk continuing to be irrelevant in the video space as long as the go it alone? Yes.
Should we expect big business to cooperate for the greater good? Yes. In fact, in the video broadcast industry they’ve been doing this for a very long time. I think you’ve seen the video industry as a whole recognize that no one is going to own the entire stack (MS is about the only one refusing to recognize this at this point) and that competing formats hurt vendors and consumers. While format competition still flairs up from time to time (BluRay vs HD-DVD) there’s tremendous pressure for consolidation to occur — the paralysis of multiple distribution formats is just too high.
I would argue we’re well past the tipping point on the web video front (Adobe bringing h.264 to Flash was the nail in the coffin). Everybody, except for MS has conceded and is backing / supporting h.264 and MS isn’t even a legit player in the web video playback market (Flash Player has 95% market share). This is why I see the burden being on MS rather than on everyone else (if they were talking from a position strength — 95% market share — it would alter the discussion a bit). It’s up to MS to make themselves relevant.
Is that you’re voice on the video? Doesn’t sound like you.
Sounds like you doing a video narrator voice…which I guess it is.
@Bill - Yep, that’s me, but thanks for making fun. ;-)
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