We all know that I have my issues with Google. They’ve got a top-notch search engine—though Ask is tolerable, and Cuil is improving nicely—and I do have a gmail account, because their POP3 and SMTP servers are extremely permissive, and they’ve been pretty good to me considering that I don’t pay them anything. (Though I suppose I drive their ad revenue indirectly, though I don’t click on any ads.) Still, Google is miles better than evil Adobe, and certainly many miles better than evil Microsoft. So I try to cut Google some slack for these issues, even though I won’t participate in its impending plan for world domination.
As many of you probably know, however, Google owns Youtube, which streams more video than anyone else. It does so in an often proprietary format (H.263 for lower quality, and the patent-encumbered H.264 for higher quality). Granted, Google didn’t invent Youtube, so this isn’t entirely their fault. One would wish that they’d transition to a more open format, like Theora, but maybe they just haven’t gotten to it yet.
Why care? Because the Internet is about open standards. The whole point is that there should be a huge, worldwide database of information in forms that everybody can access, not in forms that are controlled by private interests. That’s why HTML, the bedrock of the Web, is a cleartext format; anybody can read it, anybody can write it, anybody can write programs that perfectly accurately parse it, because it’s clearly defined and published to the entire world.
Well, HTML 5 is slowly coming into its own, such that Firefox 3.5 betas already support the and tags, allowing video and audio to be included directly in a web page without requiring the user to download an independent plugin or player. In other words, Youtube won’t need you to have evil Flash installed anymore.
This is wonderful news! Thanks to Adobe’s constantly-moving target of Flash, video on the Web has long been incredibly difficult for anyone who doesn’t have Adobe’s own proprietary plugin installed. These videos are essentially black boxes to search engines; they are not open, their content is not clearly encoded, and it’s incredibly difficult to write a competent free player for them. In theory, this development in HTML 5 allows every browser to implement an open video standard, once again making the Web a place of open standards where everyone is a player and where everyone has access to all the data, whether or not he’s willing to pony up and play dead for some enormous corporate interest.
However, it appears that Google isn’t making Youtube compatible with open standards. Rather, they’re testing their own browser, Chrome, only with H.264, a patent-encumbered format that is anything but open. This is despite the fact that Mozilla Firefox, a great partner of Google, is supporting Ogg Theora, an open format.
However, it’s been proven pretty conclusively that Theora is just as good, if not better than, H.264, in addition to being free and open instead of proprietary and closed. Greg Maxwell, a Theora developer, has posted a comparison of the two formats recently, which indicates that Theora competes well with or even exceeds H.264 in quality and bandwidth usage. Maik Merten, another such developer, has confirmed these results. So why would Google prefer H.264?
There are encouraging signs here that Google is not being evil, though their commitment to free software could be greater. Chris DiBona, in the original email thread that gave rise to the dispute, appears to be reasonable, and is carefully considering the arguments brought by the Theora people about why to support Theora.
This is even more important than the normal imperative to use free rather than proprietary software, however. H.264 isn’t just patent-encumbered; it’s also time-bombed. The codec is “owned” by MPEGLA, which has a rather convoluted licensing scheme; however, it appears that the following passage is the one that applies to H.264:
In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010), and after the first term the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.
In other words, MPEGLA isn’t charging royalties for using H.264 until 2011. Then the floodgates open.
Why does the ordinary user care? It’s still the developers of browsers and such that will have to pay, not users like you and me. And that’s true. However, only large and well-funded developers will be able to pay these licenses. That means that browsers like, say, Firefox are going to have a much harder time paying for these licenses than, say, evil and lousy Internet Explorer. So FOSS—free and open source software—browsers and other players will be at a severe disadvantage when using this format, and well-funded programs written and owned by large corporate behemoths will have the better end of the field, again. That’s bad.
So please, Google, don’t go evil. Stay good; support a free and open Internet.
Praise be to Christ the King!
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