This is pretty far off topic, but letting fud sit around is never a good idea.

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 2:08 AM, Hay (Husky) huskyr@gmail.com wrote:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377

Apparently the codec itself isn't as good as H264, and patent problems are still likely. It's better than Theora though.

You should have seen what VP3 was like when it was handed over to Xiph.Org. The software was horribly buggy, slow, and the quality was fairly poor (at least compared to the current status).

Jason's comparison isn't unfair but you need to understand it for what it is— he's 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. 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: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/theora/demo9.html

Even given that, VP8's performance compared to _baseline profile_ H.264 is good. Jason describes it as "relatively close to x264’s Baseline Profile". Baseline profile H.264 is all you can use on the if you actually want to be compatible with a great many devices, including the iphone.

There are half research codecs that encode and decode at minutes per frame and simply blow away all of this stuff. VP8 is more computationally complex than Theora, but roughly comparable to H.264 baseline. And it compares pretty favourably with H.264 baseline, even without an encoder that doesn't suck. This is all pretty good news.

On the patent part— Simply being similar to something doesn't imply patent infringement, Jason is talking out of his rear on that point. He has no particular expertise with patents, and even fairly little knowledge of the specific H.264 patents as his project ignores them entirely. Codec patents are, in general, excruciatingly specific — it makes passing the examination much easier and doesn't at all reduce the patent's ability to cover the intended format because the format mandates the exact behaviour. This usually makes them easy to avoid. It's easy to say that VP8 has increased patent exposure compared to Theora simply by virtue of its extreme newness (while Theora is old enough to itself be prior art against most of the H.264 pool), but I'd expect any problems to be in areas _unlike_ H.264 because the similar areas would have received the most intense scrutiny. ... and in any case, Google is putting their billion dollar butt on the line— litigation involving inducement to infringe on top of their own violation could be enormous in the extreme.

On 20/05/10 16:28, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

Codec patents are, in general, excruciatingly specific — it makes passing the examination much easier and doesn't at all reduce the patent's ability to cover the intended format because the format mandates the exact behaviour.

I always assumed there would be patents on the software processes for encoding and decoding. It seems to me that you could patent novel parts of an encoder, even if the format is 20 years old. Then you could sue anyone who tried to build an encoder using similar techniques.

I would have trouble believing that all of the companies involved are too benevolent to try this.

-- Tim Starling