In a somewhat (but not entirely) surprising announcement, Google is removing support for H.264 video from Chrome. This change to their implementation of the often controversial HTML5 <video> tag is both a major step by Google and a furtherance of the already complicated world of video online.
… To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
When Google released WebM (a royalty-free codec which Google acquired as part of On2), it was clear that the intention was to take on H.264 and with this move there seems little doubt that the gauntlet has been thrown down. Although, now that H.264 has such a strong base (it’s included in Flash, IE9, Safari, Mobile Safari, and Android), it really makes one wonder if Google has picked a fight that has long since been lost.
So why would Google do this?
Here’s my best guess: Money (specifically, patent licensing).
H.264 is heavily encumbered by numerous patents owned by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco, and controlled by MPEG LA, the consortium charged with turning these patents into profit (here’s the 70 page list of patents for those interested). While I’m sure many people recall that MPEG LA made a very public pledge that H.264 would be free forever, as is often the case, things aren’t quite that simple.
Peter Csathy wrote a fairly detailed post on the matter, pointing out some key details that many in the media skipped. Here’s the core of what wasn’t discussed after the MPEG LA announcement (but should have been):
But, you say, MPEG LA recently announced that it will no longer charge royalties for the use of H.264. Yes, it’s true – MPEG LA recently bowed to mounting pressure from, and press surrounding, WebM and announced something that kind of sounds that way. But, I caution you to read the not-too-fine print. H.264 is royalty-free only in one limited case – for Internet video that is delivered free to end users. Read again: for (1) Internet delivery that is (2) delivered free to end users. In the words of MPEG LA’s own press release, “Products and services other than [those] continue to be royalty-bearing.”
Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s VP of Engineering offer’s a somewhat similar take in “Free as in Smokescreen:”
What MPEG-LA announced is that their current moratorium on charging fees for the transmission of H.264 content, previously extended through 2015 for uses that don’t charge users, is now permanent. You still have to pay for a license for H.264 if you want to make things that create it, consume it, or your business model for distributing it is direct rather than indirect.
What they’ve made permanently free is distribution of content that people have already licensed to encode, and will need a license to decode. This is similar to Nikon announcing that they will not charge you if you put your pictures up on Flickr, or HP promising that they will never charge you additionally if you photocopy something that you printed on a LaserJet.
I’m just waiting for one of the licensors to reinterpret the license and claim that ads constitute a form of payment or some similar excuse to exclude them from the exception they granted. I’ve yet to get my hands on the latest licensing agreement to see exactly what it says about this, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see this card played at some point to wring extra revenue from these patents.
Given that Google owns the massive video sharing site YouTube, which uses H.264, plus whatever unknown projects relating to Google TV – it stands to reason that Google would certainly save some money by moving away from such an encumbered technology; not to mention avoid future risk should rules change. Though personally, I also have to wonder if it could be fears of a repeat of the GIF patent debacle.
Now where does this leave us?
Right now HTML5 <video> is a mess, at best. There is a war for which codec becomes the de facto standard, and there is a lot of money at stake depending on who wins. At this point there is no single codec that works across all major browsers; to get full coverage the best option now looks to be a combination of H.264, WebM, and Flash. Doesn’t really sound like the progress that was promised with HTML5 does it?
It’s worth noting though that Google isn’t the first browser developer to reject H.264; both Firefox and Opera have decided against including it in their browsers as well. As painful as the fragmentation is now in regard to who supports what, this move by Google actually does little to change the landscape. Support has been fragmented from the beginning, and all this really does it push H.264 a step away from being the de facto standard; a title that it has been very close to seizing.
Had Firefox added support for H.264, I think the fight would be over and would have made today’s announcement almost suicidal for the project. Though with such a major player holding out against it, Google’s move becomes a minor tactical shift in the short-term (though the long-term impact could be significant).
I could go on for pages about what works are where we are now, but Mark Pilgrim (an infinitely better writer than I) sums it all up here: “Dive into HTML5: Video on the Web” – well worth reading if you want to really understand what’s going on.
So in summary – video needs to be encoded to multiple formats, which today’s announcement does little to alter due to the fragmentation that was already in place. In the long run, WebM may be better for the community due to its license, though many of the internet’s biggest players have a vested interest in H.264. So when you factor in politics and propaganda between competing companies, distrust, and possible patent claims that haven’t been addressed yet; this all leads me to an even simpler summary:
Yesterday, HTML5 <video> was a mess; tomorrow it will still be a mess.
So here we go again – my 4th hosting company since I started this blog. Maybe I’ll have better luck this time? For those interested, here’s the rundown of which hosts I’ve used, and what I’m doing today.
Radical Vision – Lasted 4 years
Radical Vision was once a great host, though as time went on I had more than a few issues with them. I tried to give them a chance (several chances, actually). During the first year or so, they were great about updating software and keeping things on the cutting edge – by the end, they were using a known vulnerable version of PHP and behind updates on pretty much every major piece of software in use.
After broken promises and many unanswered support tickets, I decided to close my account, that’s when the worst came. It took me two months of emails, support tickets, phone calls, and even contacting the company that owned the data center they were located in before I was able to close my account.
As I was fighting to close my account they were bought out by another company, I hope things have gotten better since the buy-out.
HostingRails – Lasted 1 year
After being with a host that was so far behind, HostingRails was a breath of fresh air – everything was cutting edge, latest version of everything. Support was great, servers were nice & fast, really good host.
I was quite happy with them – with one exception: server load. Normally I would expect to see high loads on servers that are oversold, but I don’t think this was the case as the normal load was quite low. The spikes on the other hand, were anything but low – by the time I switched, it wasn’t uncommon to see load jumping to 20+ and on a few occasions the load exceeded 50!
It may have just been a matter of me being unlucky in having another person on the sever that was abusing the system, but either way it was getting old. I’d like to do business with them again, though next time I’ll go VPS instead of shared.
Servage – Lasted 6 months
Servage provides budget hosting with a nice set of features, quick support, and a fairly impressive control panel. If you are looking for a low-cost hosting company with a few nice extras – Servage does quite well. Though soon after switching I ran into a familiar issue – server load. While it seems that their web servers are quite fast – the database servers are often bogged down.
After getting yet another database connection error, I decided it was time to look for another option.
DreamHost – Current
I’ve heard many good things about DreamHost – including from a few start-ups running their projects from the normal shared hosting package. If it’s good enough for them, should be more than enough for me.
These people have just completely wowed me so far – the best control panel I’ve used, the most features I’ve seen from a shared host (especially in this price range), extremely fast servers. The best for me, is the SSH access – as it seems fewer and fewer shared hosts are allowing this type of access.
For now, if you are looking for good, low cost Linux hosting – DreamHost gets my vote.
Once again, I’ve decided to switch email clients; this time from The Bat to Gmail, or more specifically, to Google Apps. After some recent issues with The Bat (mostly relating to a recent update), I decided to make another go at switching to Gmail; but this time trying the Google Apps version.
After my last attempt, I was informed that the Google Apps edition of Gmail doesn’t suffer the Sender issue that so plagued me before. After almost a full day of work, the transition is complete. And I couldn’t be happier.
The only downside is the expense – all in all, it cost $78.95 to go through this process. This was spent on two tools that made the process possible:
- Aid4Mail – A key application used for converting the various mail-storage file formats.
- gMOVE – Used for importing PST files into Gmail.
The process itself was simple, once I had found the software I needed, which took some doing. Here’s an overview, and some notes if you happen to try something like this (this assumes that you have Outlook installed).
- Export messages to mailbox format. (If you are moving from Thunderbird this isn’t necessary as it already is stored in that format.)
- Use Aid4Mail to convert the mbox files to PSTs
- Load PSTs into Outlook and cleanup as necessary (remove duplicates, cleanup directory structure)
- Launch gMOVE and use it to import the messages from Outlook to Gmail
There are a couple major differences in this attempt, compared to the last. A few things annoyed me about the way things worked after the last time, not the least of which is that by using Gmail Loader you loose all meaningful timestamps. So you don’t know when a message was sent or received.
gMOVE eliminated that problem. It sends the messages to a special POP3 server, and automatically configures your Gmail account to use it. That way, they can control the timestamps, and set them to what they originally were 1.
So after all is said and done; I think I’m happy with this system; much better than last time. I simply can’t justify using a desktop based email client anymore. It just leaves you too out of touch.
1). There is a security issue here, so I wouldn’t do this with anything containing sensitive information.
Well, it was a while back that I said I would start writing again – that just never quite happened.
Much interesting has happened in these months, a few co-workers left the company, a few new faces came in; there was also a promotion and a number of new projects. Oh, and there’s a new relationship, and a fair bit of time now going to my old profession and now hobby of photography. Between all of these, spare time isn’t something I have much of – if any.
With all this in mind, many people would give up and walk away – but I see this as being important enough to fight for. It’s a matter of priorities and time management. For a developer, being active in the community is important; it’s easy to be left behind once you find yourself outside the loop. So, I’ll simply have to make community involvement a higher priority than it’s been. As for time management though, the story isn’t so simple.
I’ve been using Tasks (which I highly recommend) for a while now to keep track of what I’m working on, and for that it is quite effective. For time management though, I need to reevaluate how I work completely; find a method that allows me to be as productive as possible. I’ve seen a number of articles, guides, and books on the topic, so I believe I’ve a fair bit of reading in front of me. As I go through this process, I’ll write about my findings, and share any solutions I find.
If anybody has advice on how to make time for everything, I would certainly like to hear it. Hopefully, this time when I say this blog is coming back to life, it actually will.
Later this week I’ll start the process of closing my start-up, aDeVIX Software. After months of planning and development, the decision has finally been made to call it a day. It was a great idea, but time and money conspired against us, with great effect.
We had a great product in mind, just not the resources to make it happen. I do believe that it would have been quite a success, but it takes a fair bit of time, and even more money to launch a commercial product aimed at mid-size businesses. It’s not a simple thing to sell software costing more than $10,000 per install; and being a company with no reputation, it’s almost impossible.
We planned the design, the marketing, the budget (even allowing for snacks & drinks), covered every detail, but when you don’t have the time to write code, or the money to pay people to write it for you; no amount of planning will help. We then delayed, then came up with smaller, simpler products, then scrapped all that and went back to the original idea.
Months of work, thousands of dollars in various expenses, and not a single dime as income; much effort, no reward. Many thousand lines of code, a few websites, countless meetings, and enough notes to account for the clearing of a small forest; but no money, no assets of value, nothing. It’s a bit painful to think about all the effort, and see that it was all for not.
It’s certainly possible to make an ISV work, it’s just a matter of being honest with yourself. Can you afford the expenses? Do you have the time? Will you be able to support the product yourself until it brings in enough money to hire people?
In some ways though, I’m happy that this is done, as it now leaves me free of any potential conflict of interest when it comes to pursuing future opportunities.
Well, it was about a month ago that I wrote commenting on being sick, and letting you all know that I would be getting back to my normal writing schedule. That didn’t happen. Work happened.
All my time since then has been spent managing between 2 and 5 developers, and trying to get a project that would end up weighing in at almost 50,000 lines of code completed and to production. Seeing as we started without specs, and made the deadline, I’m quite happy about how it went. I learned some interesting things on this project, if I can find a way to write about it without breaking my confidentiality agreement; you may see more about it soon.
There are more projects, with similar near-impossible deadlines ahead, but hopefully I’ll be able to keep my head a bit more above the water.
