Okay Geek Farm
Google's New Video Codec WebM - Is it really needed?
Nick Mahar
WebM is a sad excuse to say “screw you Apple” - I have been making movies, short films, and music videos since I was 6. I use all the most widely used programs and I know what video codecs look good and what doesn’t. H.264 has been the standard of video for a long time, and there is a codec for every type of situation and yet somehow there is another one now? Last time I checked video online was working smoothly and looks amazing with all the new HD cameras using H.264 and HTML5.
Jason Garrett-Glaser, who worked on an open source H.264 encoder project, is one of the experts on video. Wondering what he thinks about it? Jason says:
VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. Until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be extremely cautious.
He’s basically saying that the best WebM quality doesn’t even compare to the video H.264 pumps out. I personally don’t even see the point of adding this new video to the online video war. I realize that Flash is on its way out and HTML5 really is the way to go, but I dont see where WebM fits in. I have been using many sites that run HTML5 and it works perfectly, like Vimeo and Youtube, and the only problem I see with Google being the ones to introduce this is that they will completely change YouTube to this new format. Blarg!
This will be very interesting to see how everything turns out and if Apple’s Studio Editing Collection conforms to the emerging standard. Compressor, Apples compressing program for video, would have to adapt the codec, even if other Apple Products didn’t, and if this rolls out, it could add some major weight to the delicate balance of online video.
