WebM Project Blog

Direct link to 1.0.0 spec (PDF): https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-spec/releases/download/v1.0.0/av1-spec-v1.0.0.pdf

Unofficial working copy (HTML): https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-spec/

Source (of spec): https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-spec/tree/v1.0.0

AV1 is a video codec developed by a consortium of companies, broadly descending from Google's VP9 while incorporating significant enhancements from Cisco and Xiph.Org. The participant companies are numerous and include big chipmakers and content delivery networks, banding together to perpetuate a royalty-free video codec that mounts a competition against MPEG's efforts, whose rules don't exclude techniques that are patented.

This is news because previous for previous codecs in this bloodline, like VP8 and VP9, the bitstream has never been frozen [1][2]. This wishiwashiness didn't preclude hardware implementations, and certainly not software implementations, but was very much a departure of the orthodox, old-hat practice in the standard-speccing space. With AV1, they're trying an approach that competes more directly with the MPEG specs, by having a bitstream that's not a moving target and is more formal than just a document embarrassingly marked as draft [2].

[1] http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/06/future-of-vp8-bitstream.html [2] https://www.webmproject.org/vp9/#draft-vp9-bitstream-and-decoding-process-specification

Question about hardware: http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html, http://mashable.com/2010/05/19/vp8-webm-support/

Your patent FUD: any software can be potentially sued for patent infringement. You can't prove the opposite. See Oracle vs. Google on Java patents and a number of other examples.

Pointing that out about WebM software specifically is not insightful. You can make the exact "but can you prove it doesn't infringe patents" statements about any software product.

There are, however, reasons to believe that WebM does indeed avoids patents.

1. It's a technology that has been created and commercially licensed by On2 for years. In all those years no one sued On2.

2. On2 licensees (including Adobe) were confident enough about the technology being patent-free to pay good money for the license.

3. Google, presumably, is not stupid and didn't pay hundreds of millions of dollars without doing a technology evaluation, including potential patent issues.

4. Even if someone sues WebM, Google has a better chance than most to defend it.

So while no one can ever satisfy people demanding impossible proof of WebM being safe from patent threats, there are very good reasons to believe it is indeed safe.

"Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post."

This has been discussed on the WebM blog:

"The WebM/VP8 hardware decoder implementation has already been licensed to over twenty partners and is proven in silicon. We expect the first commercial chips to integrate our VP8 decoder IP to be available in the first quarter of 2011."

http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html

"They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms."

Incidentally, months ago they've also blogged about why they'll keep YouTube using Flash, rather than HTML5:
http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html

FWIW, everyone and their dog (nVidia, AMD, ARM, Qualcomm, etc) announced support for VP8 when WebM launched in 2010 too (http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-web-media-project.html). Yet, hardware accelerated decode is basically non-existant still, and accelerated encoding doesn't exist at all. Even though lots of companies did demos of hardware acceleration.

Part of the problem is that within 3 years Google had already basically dropped VP8 and moved onto VP9. That kind of churn doesn't go over well in the hardware space typically. For a variety of practical reasons, codecs aren't the type of thing you usually replace every few years. It takes more than a few years for really good quality optimized encoders (e.g. x264, LAME, etc) to be built.

From this page (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/16/html5-video-update-webm-for-ie9.aspx) they say,

"IE9 supports HTML5 video using WebM for Windows customers who install third-party WebM support."

From (http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/03/introducing-webm-in-internet-explorer-9.html) the WebM team says,

"Microsoft collaborated closely with us to make the components fully compatible with HTML5 in IE9, so features such as the <video> tag and its canPlayType method are fully enabled for WebM. Our thanks go out to the Microsoft engineers who provided technical assistance and hosted our team in Redmond last month."

Does this sound like a company that opposes it?