TechAutos » video

Google removing H.264 video support from Chrome

admin — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:29:26 +0000

Google just announced on its Chromium blog that it will be removing support for the H.264 video codec from the Chrome web browser, in favor of supporting only its own open WebM codec (which, as we covered earlier, is based on On2 Technologies’ VP8) for HTML5 web videos using the tag.

Earlier, Microsoft, Apple, and Google had decided to support H.264 (the dominant high-definition video codec) for HTML5 web video, while Mozilla and Opera supported only Google’s WebM codec. Now, Google’s move leaves Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 and Apple’s Safari 5 as the only major browsers supporting the H.264 codec without plugins. Ironically, since the vast majority of HTML5 video on the web today is encoded using H.264, Google’s move will likely reduce the usable installed base of HTML5 video-capable browsers.

Read on for more about Google’s web video codec move.

It’s certainly a gutsy move on Google’s part. Open-source advocates point out that H.264 is not an open standard, but its patent holders have agreed to waive licensing fees for Internet video, so for the vast majority of content producers, it’s basically free today. H.264 is backed by hardware acceleration across the board, particularly in the mobile space, where non-accelerated video codecs deliver sub-par performance and eat up precious battery life. Google’s pushing for chipmakers to build WebM acceleration into their designs, but so far, its results pale in comparison to the H.264 hardware ecosystem.

Detractors point out that WebM (On2 VP8) may in many ways be an inferior codec to H.264, and even WebM’s “free” status may be in question. It’s free for now, but many (including Apple) have pointed out that there may be unknown “phantom” patents, on the basis of which patent holders could sue browser makers, web developers, and others if the codec became broadly used. These patent trolls, they say, are likely waiting for the codec to become popular, because they could then sue for significant damages.

Microsoft’s Tim Sneath responded to Google’s move with a tongue-in-cheek blog post likening WebM to the Esperanto language. Writing as the “President of the United States of Google,” he decides to change the country’s official language from English to Esperanto:

Though English plays an important role in speech today, as our goal is to enable open innovation, its further use as a form of communication in this country will be prohibited and our resources directed towards languages that are untainted by real-world usage.

This should turn out to be an interesting battle, pitting Microsoft and Apple against Google, Mozilla, and Opera. Of course, it’d be ironic if this codec fight were to stall HTML5 video’s progress as a whole in favor of content owners just sticking to Adobe’s tried-and-true Flash.

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T-Mobile HTC HD7 Unboxing & Hands-on

admin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:55:40 +0000

Here’s our unboxing and hands-on video for T-Mobile USA’s new HTC HD7 smartphone, powered by Windows Phone 7:

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more details on the phone, check out our earlier specs post, and to learn more about the OS, see all our Windows Phone 7 posts.

Google’s WebM Project: What It Means for Online Video

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 07:21:19 +0000

Google has released the On2 VP8 video codec with an open-source license, along with the WebM container format, which combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio. The company also added WebM support to its HTML5 beta version of YouTube (just add &webm=1 at the end of the video URL, in a supported browser). What is Google up to, and what does it mean for online video?

Read on to find out.

WebM

Video has continually presented a challenge to Google’s dream of a fully-indexable, searchable web. Adobe Flash continues to dominate web video, and while other technologies like Microsoft’s Silverlight offer certain advantages, they are all proprietary. Google has been a strong supporter of HTML5 video, which everyone from Apple to Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and others support as well.

The problem lies in the format of videos contained in HTML5 pages– Apple, Microsoft, and thus far Google had gone with H.264, the most widely-used codec for HD video. H.264 enjoys widespread software and hardware support, but it’s not free, and in order to include H.264 support, companies like Opera would have to pony up millions of dollars. Mozilla and Opera instead implemented HTML5 video in their browsers with support for the open-source Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats, but Theora is a dated codec with limited hardware acceleration support.

Google introduced the WebM format, which combines the VP8 video codec with Theora audio into a Matroska-based package, at its I/O developer conference

Google’s move changes everything: by open-sourcing VP8, a modern codec is now available freely for use online. The WebM project lists an impressive array of launch partners, from ARM to Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and now even Adobe. Google released a patch adding WebM support to ffmpeg, along with DirectShow filters to add playback support in Windows (Gstreamer plugins for Linux should be arriving soon). Test builds of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are available with WebM support included.

Google’s likely to run into trouble with the MPEG-LA, which is sure to claim that WebM infringes on its members’ intellectual property and requires licensing royalties. For now, though, the WebM FAQ reads, “Some video codecs require content distributors and manufacturers to pay patent royalties to use the intellectual property within the codec. WebM and the codecs it supports (VP8 video and Vorbis audio) require no royalty payments of any kind. You can do whatever you want with the WebM code without owing money to anybody.”

Microsoft tried similarly to release its Windows Media Video 9 HD format (the VC-1 standard) as a royalty-free codec but soon thereafter was forced to create a patent licensing pool.

Is it any better than H.264?

Even beyond the 800-lb gorilla of licensing issues, not all’s happy in WebM-land. The first in-depth technical analysis of the WebM format is quite negative. Jason Garrett-Glaser of the x264 project concluded that “Overall, VP8 appears to be significantly weaker than H.264 compression-wise. The primary weaknesses mentioned above are the lack of proper adaptive quantization, lack of B-frames, lack of an 8×8 transform, and non-adaptive loop filter. With this in mind, I expect VP8 to be more comparable to VC-1 or H.264 Baseline Profile than with H.264. Of course, this is still significantly better than Theora, and in my tests it beats Dirac quite handily as well.”

Garrett-Glaser also writes that “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.”

Gregory Maxwell wrote in to the Wikimedia developer list that Garrett-Glaser is “comparing a very raw, hardly out of development, set of tools to his own project – which is the most sophisticated and mature video encoder in existence,” and explains that “x264 contains a multitude of pure encoder side techniques which can substantially improve quality and which could be equally applied to VP8. For an example of the kinds of pure encoder side improvements available, take a look at the most recent improvements to Theora.”

“VP8 is more computationally complex than Theora, but roughly comparable to H.264 baseline,” Maxwell wrote, “And it compares pretty favourably with H.264 baseline, even without an encoder that doesn’t suck. This is all pretty good news.”

Opera’s Haavard also points out that Garrett-Glaser’s analysis shows that VP8 did quite well against H.264 Baseline, which is the only H.264 format with hardware acceleration on platforms like the iPhone (and thus the only relevant comparison for web video).

Prospects

Google has added WebM support to the HTML5 Beta version of YouTube

Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 9 will support VP8 in HTML5 video, but only if the VP8 codec is installed on the computer. While this means that IE9 technically supports VP8/WebM to the same degree that it supports H.264, Microsoft ships Windows 7 with an H.264 codec built-in, while VP8/WebM will have to be installed separately. That might be a deal-breaker for many users and, if not properly addressed, could present a serious challenge to native HTML5 WebM adoption.

Meanwhile Zencoder has added support for VP8, and video.js now offers web developers a player that can switch between h.264, OGG Theora, and VP8. On the mobile front, VP8 support for Android browsers is in progress, and an ARM blog post says that phones with ARMv7-class processors like Cortex-A8 and Qualcomm Snapdragon “will be able to take advantage of WebM” through the CPU’s NEON SIMD engine. The problem is that the phones’ GPUs and video engines currently lack native VP8 support, so VP8 video may still consume a lot more power than H.264 playback.

Apple remains the only major industry player that has yet to touch WebM. The company is quite committed to H.264 in HTML5 and has announced no plans to support WebM in Safari or QuickTime. When emailed for comment on WebM video, Apple CEO Steve Jobs simply replied with a link to Jason Garret-Glaser’s critique of the format, mentioned above.

Google is pushing hard for WebM, and as the force behind YouTube, the company does wield tremendous influence in the realm of web video. But with technical questions lingering about the format’s efficiency and concerns about hardware acceleration (particularly on mobile devices), the lack of native support (without separate VP8 codec installation) in Internet Explorer on Windows and a possibly obstructive Apple, the format still has many hurdles to clear before making a meaningful impact on the web.

Videos: Windows Phone 7 Multi-tasking, Cross-Platform Gaming

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:46:19 +0000

A couple of interesting videos have come out of the Windows Phone 7 Series demos at TechEd Middle East. The first shows multi-tasking with the phone’s Internet Explorer browser, showing the browser instantly loading a site (either having been paused earlier or loading the site in the background) and then having a site collapse into a live tile on the start page. The second shows cross-platform gaming, with a game starting on a PC, then shifting to Windows Phone 7 Series, and finishing on Xbox.

Videos after the break:

Web Browser Multi-tasking

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cross-Platform Gaming

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video: Windows Phone 7 Walkthrough

admin — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:30:52 +0000

Pirillo.com recently got some hands-on time with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Series prototype from Mobile World Congress and has posted a 17-minute video walkthrough. Video after the break:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video: Ferdinand Porsche and the 918 Spyder Hybrid Concept

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:23:51 +0000

Porsche just released a video about its new 918 Spyder concept at the Geneva Motor Show, tying it back to the very first car Ferdinand Porsche designed over a century ago, in 1900. The 918 is a parallel hybrid pairing a 500 HP V8 engine with an electric motor on each axle, adding another 218 HP on top, for 718 peak HP. 0-62 MPH time is reportedly 3.2 seconds, with a top speed of 198 MPH. That’s just about right for a modern supercar, but what’s new is that the 918 apparently gets up to 78 MPG and emits just 70 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer. Porsche’s first car, depicted in the video, was an all-electric model with motors in each wheel hub and a whopping top speed of 30 MPH.

Video after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Windows Phone 7 Series: Videos

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:02:22 +0000

Microsoft just wrapped up its Windows Phone 7 Series launch at MWC in Barcelona- here are some videos of the interface:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: MSDN Channel9 just posted a 22-minute, more in-depth walkthrough, below.

More below.

Demo video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Longer (22 minute) demo video from MSDN Channel9 (if video doesn’t show up below, click here):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a large TV-sized touchscreen mockup that previews what the experience will be like:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Think Zune HD + phone + Xbox Live + HTC Sense, and you’ll have a good idea of what we saw this morning.