Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Category: Rant (Page 10 of 10)

Google Open Sources VP8 Codec

May 19, 2010 / / 3 Comments

The press has seen a lot of commotion lately about HTML5 and its out-of-the-box video support through the new < video > tag.

Ogg Video – being the open source and royalty-free container used for the HTML5 video tag – is not favoured by the big players with commercial interests in web standards and content. There is really only one alternative to Ogg’s Theora video codec which is widely accepted: and that is the H.264 codec used for instance in Apple’s MP4/Quicktime video container.

But H264 video (also well-known because Youtube streams its content in H.264) is not royalty- or patent-free. The MPEG-LA company has formed a patent pool for H.264 and administers license fees for its use in applications and appliances.

However it was decided that creating, distributing and viewing Internet H.264 video content is royalty-free until at least the year 2015, as long as that content is being made freely available. A lot of people interpret this ruling as “H.264 is a free and open standard“… but this is not true. The patent holders (Microsoft and Apple being part of that group) maintain that even after 2015, H.264 video will stay free from royalty fees. I don’t know about you, but those two companies are among the ones I do not trust at all when they make statements like that.

So, a lot of folk kept an eye on Google after that company acquired On2, the creator of the VP8 video codec (and several more). On2 had already opensourced one of their older video codecs. This was their VP3 codec which was given to the Xiph.Org foundation and became…. the Theora codec. It was rumoured that Google would let history repeat itself and opensource VP8. And today, that has indeed happened.

Google announced that they release the VP8 video codec under a royalty-free open-source license. They have defined a new video container, called WebM, which will use VP8 for video  and Ogg Vorbis for the audio stream. Basically, WebM is a Matroska container (MKV) with some restrictions. The image quality and compression rate of VP8 is comparable to that of H.264, something which can not be said about Theora. I believe that this new video format is destined to become the true rival to H.264 in HTML5.

Microsoft had recently announced that they would only support H.264 video in their implementation of HTML5, but the company stated today that it prepares to add support for the VP8 video codec in Internet Explorer 9. IE9 will use the VP8 codec… if the user has installed it on Windows. Well, it’s a start. And Adobe plans to include VP8 in the Flash 10.1 player. They have to, after the crusade started by Microsoft and Apple to replace Flash Video on the web with H.264.

Interesting times ahead! Now, what would happen if Google decided to switch Youtube’s videos from H.264 to VP8? That would be a big statement. If they plan this, it will be like droppping a bomb in the cradle of Internet content providers.

VideoLAN’s VLC media player (one of my favourite open source projects) already has the code to support VP8 once that codec gets added to ffmpeg, the engine of so many media players. The VideoLAN foundation also hosts the open source x264 encoder which is arguably the best free H.264 encoder available. There will be freedom of choice, people! That is always commendable.

Speaking about freedom – I am praising this Google initiative of course, but I do not want to be negative about Ogg. A lot of people seem to complain about it’s shortcomings but it was – and is – a truely free video container format. If not for Google and their VP8, the Ogg format would still be the only choice for truely free content creation. I totally love Xiph.Org. Read this excellent article by the hand of its chief engineer Monty (Christopher Montgomery) in which he defends what is dear to him: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.html

And now, time for a beer.

Eric

Covert spam

August 7, 2009 / / 2 Comments

I run this blog without the illusion that it will make me any money. But I know there are many people trying to make a good amount of cash by maintaining a “popular” blog. What defines popular? Having a lot of “backlinks” i.e. other sites refferring to (linking to) your blog is a measure of how popular you are. Being popular creates income – a small percentage of visitors are likely to click through on advertisements on your site. The more visitors you get, the bigger the cash flow.

It seems that it is becoming more fashionable for other bloggers to actively work on increasing their own blog’s  popularity. How they do that? Simple: by visiting other blogs and leaving a comment there which contains a link to their own blog… thus creating these highly desired backlinks themselves.

I have found several of these comments on my own blog, and I will delete such postings if if I think they were only added here to generate income for that other web site. I hate doing this, but hey, come on!

Eric

VLC media player

September 1, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Are you one of these people who puts Slackware on a computer and then immediately follows up with the installation of another media player than Xine?

Well, I am one of these people. I have been using MPLayer a lot – it builds relatively easily and because it uses Windows codec DLL’s it supports a multitude of audio and video formats. But it is not cross-platform, and it does not give me a happy experience when I use MPlayer to watch DVD’s (the way it handles DVD menus is clumsy at best). And why do I still have to use these Windows codecs when I am running Linux??

The videolan project addresses my issues with MPlayer. Once started as a student project at the French École Centrale Paris it is now an international development effort. The videolan flagship product is VLC (it used to be called the VideoLan Client). VLC is a cross-platform media player which supports many multimedia formats as well as input- and output devices through a plugin architecture. The project went through some tough times when many of the core developers left around two years ago. Ever since, the 0.8.6.x versions have matured so that the current version is stable and great to use. Around the same time, development on a re-designed version of VLC – using Qt4 instead of wxWidgets as it’s GUI – was started.

It is probably due to the fact that the remaining developers plus those who joined the team in the past two years had to figure out VLC’s architecture that it took them so long to produce a version of the 0.9.x series that is stable enough to be useable.

I have had a package for the VLC 0.8.6 series in my repository for some time now, and have been using this alongside MPlayer. I have videos on my hard drive that play fine in MPLayer while VLC will just choke on it, so unfortunately I can not just ditch the MPLayer. The VLC developers tell me that this is a sign of a badly encoded video, and that VLC is not going to try and make the best of it like MPlayer (successfully) does. I think that is just too bad, because this philosophy prevents VLC from being the best media player all around.

Anyway… I had to give that rant a place. Let’s continue with the actual post.

Now that vlc 0.9.1 has been released as source only (the developers do not consider it stable enough to release official binary packages) I decided to upload a Slackware package for it. I have been building betas for many months now, and was not impressed at all by it’s terrible instability, hard lock-ups, and lack of media support. But surpsisingly, the 0.9.1 release shows that an enormous amount of work has been done in the past month, and this version is actually enjoyable. I invite everyone who wants to find out how well it runs, to download my package at one of these locations:

and tell me what you think of it.

Also, you may want to re-build the package in case you already have the Qt4 libraries installed – for instance when you have KDE4.x on your system. The static Qt4 library in the VLC package adds a full 8 MB to it’s size. When you want to make use of the system Qt4 instead in order to slim down the VLC package, you need to run the following commandlines (as root) to download build script and sources, and compile these into a Slackware package:

# lftp -c “open http://slackware.org.uk/ ; cd 3rd-party/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlctest/ ; mirror build”

# cd build

# STATIC_QT4=NO sh vlc.SlackBuild

Note: if any of the required source tarballs are missing from your system, the script will download them automatically. You will find the “vlc-0.9.1-i486-1alien.tgz” Slackware package in the /tmp directory after the compilation has finished.

Enjoy! Eric

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