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by jcranmer
408 days ago
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> Codecs. VP8/9 and AV1 broke the mpeg alliance monopoly and made non patented state of the art video compression possible. Not really. That was done more by the greed of the MPEG alliance. Back in the days when <video> was first proposed, VP8 was required to be supported as a codec by all browsers. This was removed as a requirement after Apple stated they were never going to support it, but the other browsers still implemented VP8 because it was codec free. Then Google implemented H.264 in Chrome. Mozilla only implemented H.264 in Firefox after it became clear that Google's announcement that they were going to rip H.264 out of Chrome was a bald-faced lie, making H.264 a de facto codec requirement for web browsers. Having won, then the MPEG Alliance got greedy with their next version. H.265 upped the prices on its license agreement, and additionally demanded a cut of all streaming revenue. It got worse--the alliance fragment, and so you had to pay multiple consortia the royalties for the codec (although only one of them had the per-video demand). It was in response to this greed that the Alliance for Open Media was created, which brought us AV1. I don't know how important Google is to the AOM, but I will note that, at launch, it did contain everybody important to the web video space except for Apple (which, as noted earlier, is the entity that previously torpedoed the attempt to mandate royalty-free codecs for web video). |
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