The Riddle of the H.264 Video Codec?

You've probably heard of H.264, the dominate video codec used by YouTube and just about everyone else these days. It has the backing of big companies like Apple and Microsoft, so what's the big deal surrounding this technology? Why are some people opposed to it being adopted like Mozilla (think FireFox)?

The answer to these questions is actually more complex than some make it out to be. Apple and Microsoft both have patents wrapped up in H.264 and so many have speculated that both these companies have a vested interest in keeping it around, but this is largely an over zealous exaggeration. Microsoft claims it pays out more than it brings in from patents even though it holds a whopping 75 patents on the technology while Apple actually only has 1 patent. Hardly seems like either company is make millions on it's patent holdings.

So the question remains why have Apple and Microsoft backed H.264 while much of the open source community has rejected it (like Mozilla). For open source advocates the answer is easy: it's not free or open. You have to license the technology. This doesn't effect most end users but does effect companies or vendors that want to market products that need encoders and decoders for H.264. This can include companies that produce everything from camcorders that encode the recorded video to video players that are used by browser like Mozilla's Firefox. This has caused open source pundits to develop an open source solution called Theora.

Why doesn't everyone just adopt this open source standard if its free and requires no license? Once again this comes down to patents. Just because Theora is open source doesn't guarantee that it doesn't contain technology that's patented. In fact the patent holders of H.264 have come out and said that Theora does use patented technology. If that's is the case or even if there is a chance that it's the case then it's a huge risk for a corporation to adopt a technology that infringes on these patents. It could get them tangled in expensive lawsuits and cost them a lot of money. This is precisely why Apple and Microsoft have "played it safe" and backed a standard, that while not free , "provides the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights from the many companies that have patents in this area." (taken from Microsoft's IE 9 blog when they announced H.264 support).

Now enter Google who recently purches On2 and it's VP8 codec which some say rival H.264 in terms of it's compression ratios (although this is unclear). Just int he last few days Google has opened this up (as in open source) in a project called WebM and has already started encode YouTube videos to take advantage of the technology. It's an exciting development, but it isn't clear if this is going prevail as both Microsoft and Apple will need to support it to gain sufficient momentum on the web. But Google is determined, already working with hardware vendors to get the encoders and decoders built into the hardware devices to speed it up and help in compete with H.264.

For now however we will have to live with no standard way of encoding video, especially for the web. This is perhaps the greatest hurdle standing in the way of the HTML 5 video tag and killing flash video on the web (note that I don't mean killing flash all together). It will be interesting to see how it plays out and if the web will earn a consistent video solution. It would sure save us web developers a lot of headache.

Related articles:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/know-your-rights-h-264-patent-licensing-and-you/3
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/05/03/follow-up-on-html5-video-in-ie9.aspx