The HTML5 video element promised to be a game-changer for internet media publishing. It provided a vendor-neutral standards-based mechanism for conveying video content on the web without the need for proprietary plugins while offering a path for tighter integration of video content on the web and broader platform support than has historically been available through plugins.

But the HTML5 video element has yet to live up to its full potential, because a dispute over video encoding has prevented the standard from being implemented consistently across all web browsers. Mozilla, which has long resisted adoption of H.264 on ideological grounds, is now preparing to support it on mobile devices where the codec is supplied by the platform or implemented in hardware.

The popular H.264 format is widely viewed as the best technical choice for encoding Internet video, but its underlying compression technologies are covered by a wide range of patents. This has raised the question of whether its appropriate for a standards-based web technology to rely on a patent-encumbered video format that requires publishers and software implementors to pay licensing fees.

The ubiquity of the web and its strength as a platform for innovation are partly due to the royalty-free licensing model that the W3C mandated for web standards. As Mozilla and other parties have argued over the past few years, the use of a patent-encumbered video format is antithetical to the principles of the open web. Critics of the H.264 licensing model have advocated the use of other video codecs, causing a split in the browser landscape.

Apple and Microsoft both support H.264 while Mozilla and Opera oppose the use of patented codecs. Google previously favored H.264, but shifted its position after opening VP8, a codec that the search giant has put forth as a viable alternative to H.264 for Internet video. Google vowed to remove H.264 support from its Chrome web browser at some undisclosed future date, but has not yet done so.

The lack of universal support for a single codec has proved problematic because it compels content creators to either encode their video in multiple formats or fail to support large segments of their audience. Building consensus around a single codec would remove one of the biggest remaining impediments to widespread adoption of the HTML5 video element.

A Change in Course

Mozilla’s strong commitment to the open web made it seem as though the organization’s position was intractable. Mozilla’s resolve on the matter appears to have cracked, however, as the organization confronts the challenge of bolstering its credibility as a mobile platform provider.

Andreas Gal, Mozilla’s director of research, announced on a public mailing list today that he wants to proceed with a plan that would enable H.264 decoding on Mozilla’s Boot2Gecko (B2G) mobile operating system. The proposed change would allow the video element in Mozilla’s HTML rendering engine to rely on codecs that are supplied by the underlying operating system or dedicated video hardware.

In addition to enabling H.264 playback in B2G, the proposed patch would also enable it in the Android version of mobile Firefox. Gal further expressed support for eventually taking similar measures in the desktop version of Firefox, with the stipulation that it would only be practical if the implementation ensured support for virtually all users.

Modern versions of the Windows operating system expose an H.264 codec to third-party software, but Windows XP does not. Gal said that he’d favor supporting H.264 in Firefox on the desktop if a means could be identified for ensuring that XP users (which represent a very significant portion of Firefox’s audience) aren’t left out. This is a radical change of policy for Mozilla, one that could have significant ramifications for the future of video on the web.

Despite the pragmatic concession, Gal says that Mozilla’s ideological position in favor of open codecs remains unchanged. The organization is still hopeful that an unencumbered codec will eventually prevail.

“We will support decoding any video/audio format that is supported by existing decoders present on the system, including H.264 and MP3. There is really no justification to stop our users from using system decoders already on the device, so we will not filter any formats,” he wrote. “I don’t think this bug significantly changes our position on open video. We will continue to promote and support open codecs, but when and where existing codecs are already installed and licensed on devices we will make use of them in order to provide people with the best possible experience.”

The option of using system-provided codecs is an obvious solution that would allow Firefox to play H.264 video without having to ship the code itself. We’ve discussed (and endorsed) this approach in some of our previous coverage, but Mozilla has historically rejected it on ideological grounds. In the past, Mozilla’s position was that it didn’t want to take any steps that would legitimize or encourage the use of a patent-encumbered codec. The organization is no longer maintaining that argument.

Google’s major investment in advancing its unencumbered VP8 codec gave open web advocates hope that H.264 could still be displaced, but it hasn’t happened. The lack of follow-through from Google on its promise to remove H.264 from Chrome has eroded faith in the search giant’s ability to popularize VP8. Gal says that it’s no longer feasible to wait for the open codec to gain additional traction.

“Google pledged many things they didn’t follow through with and our users and our project are paying the price,” he wrote. “H.264 wont go away. Holding out just a little longer buys us exactly nothing.”

The proposal to support H.264 in mobile Firefox has generated a tremendous amount of controversy among Mozilla developers. The critics include Mozilla employees and independent contributors. Mozilla’s Joe Drew characterized the proposal as “capitulating on Free codecs” and expressed concern that the mobile-centric rationalization amounts to pushing an ideological compromise through the back door.

Firefox developer Justin Dolske also expressed some concerns. He pointed out that the possibility of enabling support for system codecs was discussed once before in relation to Fennec on the Nokia tablet devices and that it was rejected at the time for ideological reasons. He asked that the issue receive further discussion, specifically some clarification about what circumstances have changed that necessitate a reversal of the previous policy.

“The state of HTML5 video started off from a bad place, and to be fair still isn’t in a good place. So reassessing Mozilla’s stance is not unreasonable. But I think if Mozilla is going to do an about-face on open video standards (and it is an about-face), then there should be some serious discussion about it. Certainly more than than a few terse words saying it’s hopeless and obvious,” he wrote. “We spent a lot of time and made a lot of blog posts about why H.264 was bad for the web. Leaving those who advocated for us suddenly high-and-dry doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.”

The debate has continued on the mailing list. There is also some preliminary discussion from certain participants in the debate about whether it would make sense at this point to simply license the codecs and ship them directly in the browser. Such a move, which would be a step further than merely supporting external codecs where available, would ensure support for Windows XP users but would detrimentally impact downstream distributors of Firefox code.

The outcome of the debate is unclear, but it currently appears probable that the plan to support system-provided codecs will be upheld and carried out. There are already some patches that have been hashed out, which means it can be practically implemented without much difficulty. The questions about how to proceed on the desktop and whether to license and ship the codecs are more tentative in nature and will likely take more time to be resolved.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

MPEG LA, the self-styled one stop shop for motion video patent licenses, says that 12 different companies have come forward with patents “essential” to the VP8 algorithm championed by Google as a royalty-free compression standard. The organization met with these companies in June to discuss the formation of a patent pool, though there has not yet been a decision to determine whether a pool should be formed, or what its terms and conditions might be.

The organization started the search for VP8 patents in February, with the initial call for companies to come forward ending in March. That deadline came and went without comment from the company, so streamingmedia.com interviewed a spokesman by e-mail to find out what the current situation was. MPEG LA did not disclose which 12 companies held patents it felt to be essential to VP8, nor did it say how many patents there were in total. The group also did not say how many patents had been submitted for evaluation only to be deemed inessential.

The VP8 video codec is an integral part of WebM, the video file format that Google first proposed last May. WebM is marketed as a royalty-free format, in contrast to the widely used royalty-incurring H.264 codec. These royalties prevent H.264 from being incorporated into specifications such as HTML5′s native video support, as W3C, the group that governs the HTML standard, has a policy of only accepting royalty-free technology. Google maintains that although VP8 is patented, all the relevant patents were owned by On2, the company that originally developed VP8. Google’s purchase of On2 was finalized in 2010, and the search giant has since offered perpetual, royalty-free licenses to the patents.

With so many companies submitting patents of their own to MPEG LA, formation of a patent pool becomes much more likely, and the chance that WebM will retain its royalty-free position shrinks accordingly. That isn’t yet a foregone conclusion, however—though the companies have come forward and made initial submissions, they may decide that it’s not worth forming a patent pool for some reason. Even if they do, the decision to enforce their patents against VP8 users is separate; MPEG LA doesn’t enforce patents (it has sued companies, but for breach of contract, not patent infringement), and so it would be up to the individual members of the pool to take legal action against infringers.

Though the lawsuits could be brought against individual companies using VP8, rather than Google itself, it’s plausible that Google would get involved, to defend the value of its $100 million purchase of On2—though VP8 users will no doubt be reluctant to assume that such assistance will be forthcoming, as victims of Android lawsuits have had to fend for themselves. Indeed, with VP8 integrated into Android, those companies already being sued for Android patent infringement may yet find themselves on the wrong end of more legal action.

When asked for comment, Google’s response to streamingmedia.com was substantially the same as it always has been when asked about VP8 and patents; MPEG LA’s patent pool discussion is “nothing new,” that the “vast majority of the industry supports free and open development,” and that Google is “firmly committed to [...] establishing an open codec for HTML5 video.” The company also referenced its own effort to create a royalty-free patent-licensing initiative. However, if the 12 companies that have come forward aren’t members of that initiative, its value could be negligible.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

YouTube has announced it will begin offering HTML5 videos in the WebM codec to web browsers that support it. So far YouTube says that it has encoded 30 percent of its videos in WebM, which accounts for 99 percent of all traffic to the site.

YouTube’s move to WebM is no surprise; Google has already dropped the competing H.264 codec from its Chrome web browser and it was only a matter of time before YouTube began moving to WebM as well.

The WebM Project, a partnership between Google, Mozilla, Opera and dozens of other software and hardware makers, provides web developers a way of embedding video and audio in HTML5 pages without plug-ins, and without the need to pay the expensive licensing fees that surround the competing H.264 codec. Currently WebM video works in Firefox 4, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer (via a plugin). The other main HTML5 video codec, H.264, works on all Apple devices and in Internet Explorer 9.

While YouTube is adding WebM support, it isn’t following Chrome’s lead and dropping H.264. The site will continue to serve up H.264 video to those browsers that support it (in other words, Safari, Mobile Safari and Internet Explorer 9).

Despite the new WebM support, YouTube still isn’t serving up HTML5 videos by default. If you’d like to get in on the new WebM fun, you’ll still need to sign up for the opt-in HTML5 player.

See Also:

• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
• YouTube: HTML5 Video Is No Match for Flash
• Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser [Updated]
• On Web Video Support, Safari Now Stands Alone

MPEG LA, the one-stop shop for motion video patent licenses, yesterday announced a call for patents essential to the VP8 video compression algorithm — the algorithm that is fundamental to Google’s WebM video format. MPEG LA is asking organizations that hold patents believed to cover integral, unavoidable parts of the VP8 algorithm to come forward and submit those patents to the licensing company. The patents will in turn by analyzed by MPEG LA, and those deemed to be relevant will be pooled together. The pooled patents will then be available to license as a single convenient bundle.

In its promotion of WebM and VP8, Google has insisted that all the relevant patents were developed by codec company On2, which Google purchased last year. The patents can be licensed from Google without payment of any royalties or any restrictions on usage. Google has been heavily promoting WebM for use with the HTML5 <video> tag, which allows plugin-free video to be embedded in webpages, and the royalty freedom is a key part of WebM’s value proposition.

Competitive codecs such as the open and industry standard H.264 require royalties to be paid by software and hardware developers. Companies like Opera and Mozilla, as well as the W3C group that is developing the HTML5 specification, deem these royalties be an unacceptable impediment to their usage. They have no such qualms about the royalty-free WebM.

If MPEG LA is successful in assembling a patent pool, that royalty freedom could come to an end. The company is soliciting patent submissions until March 18th. Once the submissions have been made, it will determine which patents are essential to VP8; only those patents that are unavoidable can form part of the patent pool. The owners of those selected patents will then decide on the license conditions they wish to impose, and these conditions could include royalty payments.

Whether this will happen, of course, is the big question. MPEG LA might fail to form a patent pool altogether: it may receive no relevant patent submissions, in which case the patent pool process will likely end. Such an outcome still won’t mean that WebM is in the clear — a company may feel that it’s more lucrative to avoid a patent pool and allow WebM usage to become more widespread before asserting claims — but it would probably imply that there aren’t dozens of potential claimants just waiting to come forward.

This sort of outcome might well see Microsoft’s current neutral stance towards WebM (it will work in Internet Explorer 9, just as long as a suitable third-party codec is installed) become more overtly positive. Redmond might start shipping a WebM codec of its own, for example.

If MPEG LA does form a patent pool, the license terms will be critical. MPEG LA exists to monetize patents, however, so it’s unlikely that any patent pool would permit the kind of indiscriminate royalty-free license that Google currently offers. More likely, they would choose terms similar in kind to those of H.264; Web video may be free, but decoders still incur a royalty. This would put WebM implementors in a difficult position — either drop WebM support, pay up, or risk going to court to fight a patent infringement suit.

An infringement suit is an unappealing prospect: even if you win, the drain on your financial resources can mean that ultimately, you lose. This is especially problematic for organizations like Mozilla, since Google offers no indemnification for users of WebM — if Mozilla gets sued, Google won’t step in to help. As such, the safest, most conservative option for Opera and Mozilla would be to drop support. Google has deeper pockets and can better sustain a legal attack, but even there, the company has to weigh its options carefully. A lost court case could cost tens of millions of dollars. Paying up just to avoid the problem may very well be the better option.

But paying up is problematic too. VP8 is, for most purposes, inferior in quality to H.264. H.264 is much more widespread in software tools, hardware accelerators, and so on: it’s enormously widespread already. If VP8 loses its key feature — royalty freedom — implementers may very well decide that, since they have to pay anyway, they’d be better off paying for the superior, more widely used H.264 license, and abandoning WebM entirely.

Whatever happens — and it will probably be many months before we find out — this is bad news for WebM. The formation of a patent pool directly undermines Google’s claims about the codec — and yet, even if MPEG LA fails to create a pool, question marks surrounding the codec will remain.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

See Also:

• Microsoft Puts H.264 Video Back in Google Chrome, Considers WebM for IE
• Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser [Updated]
• MPEG LA Extends Web Video Licensing Moratorium Until the End of Time
• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project

Microsoft has announced a plug-in for Google’s Chrome web browser that allows Chrome on Windows to play H.264 web video through the HTML5 <video> tag. The new plug-in comes on the heels of Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome and focus on the company’s competing WebM video codec.

You can grab the new Chrome plugin from Microsoft. Microsoft previously released a similar H.264 plugin for Firefox, which also only supports WebM video.

The video move is the latest sign of a collision between the two tech giants, who now compete directly in search, courtesy of Microsoft’s Bing initiative and mobile, where Google’s Android is taking market share and the new Windows Phone 7 is struggling for a foothold. Google has also launched various cloud-based applications that take aim at Office. This week, the two threw punches over search, with Google claiming Microsoft copies its results, and Microsoft complaining the Google perpetrated a sting worthy of a spy novel.

Now the two are sparring over web video. Google has thrown its weight behind the WebM codec, which the company owns, while Microsoft supports H.264. However, Microsoft says that, provided Google makes some changes, it may be willing to support the WebM codec as well.

While HTML5′s video tag promises a native way to watch video in your browser, video codec support among browsers is divided. Firefox, Opera and Chrome support the WebM codec while Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s IE9 support H.264. As it stands there is no “it just works” solution, which means most websites still use Flash video players.

Microsoft’s H.264 plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome are part of the company’s attempt to be pragmatic — since Windows includes native support for H.264, users should be able to watch H.264 video even if the browser doesn’t support it. On the other side of the coin, Internet Explorer 9 will be able to play WebM video through a similar third-party plug-in.

However, while Microsoft isn’t including native support for WebM in the next version of IE, it doesn’t appear to totally rule out the idea. As part of the plugin announcement, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, outlines some of Microsoft’s problems with the WebM codec. The main problem is that Microsoft is concerned about WebM’s potential patent risks.

Google insists that it owns all of the patents covering WebM and the VP8 video codec. But the company offers no indemnification for costs incurred should a patent lawsuit arise. That means that anyone distributing WebM/VP8 could be on the hook for any patent-related fees that might come up.

Some have dismissed Microsoft’s patent worries as an example of Microsoft spreading “fear, uncertainty and doubt” about WebM, but Microsoft does have history on its side in this case. As Hachamovitch points out, such patent lawsuits often don’t arise until a technology is in widespread use. So just because no one is suing over WebM now, doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Hachamovitch cites the JPEG photo compression format, pointing out that JPEG was around for ten years before the first patent lawsuits appeared. Eventually the patents in question were ruled invalid, but not before millions of dollars were spent defending and licensing JPEG.

Of course the same patent threats potentially hang over H.264, but the MPEG-LA consortium — the governing body that oversees the patents surrounding H.264 — provides a kind of legal buffer between H.264 licensees and any lawsuit.

Surprisingly, Hachamovitch says that, if Google is willing to indemnify WebM users against patent lawsuits, “Microsoft is willing to commit that we will never assert any patents on VP8.” Of course that doesn’t mean other companies won’t, but it would be a huge step forward for WebM if Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon. Google did not respond to a request to comment in time for this story.

For now at least Microsoft has chosen a pragmatic approach — plugins. There will be a WebM plugin for Internet Explorer and H.264 plugins for Firefox and Chrome. In the end, Windows users will be able to watch just about any video on the web regardless of which browser they’re using. It might not be an ideal solution, but it is one that, from the user’s point of view, just works.

See Also:

• Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox
• Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser [Updated]
• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
• Microsoft Says Web Video in IE9 Is All About H.264