Google open sources royalty-free VP8

[charlie]

Yep, they went and dunnit. We can breathe again:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/19/google_chrome_announcement

They're folding VP8 together with Vorbis plus a wrapper in a package called WebM:

http://www.webmproject.org

Things were worrisome for a while. Google passed on Theora, saying the compression wasn't good enough. Apple and Microsoft wouldn't touch it either, citing potential patent issues. The W3C punted on naming a codec in the specs, because nobody agreed with anybody. It looked like H.264 would prevail without a credible FOSS challenger.

Today, Google is already encoding video larger than 720p into VP8. Mozilla and Opera have WebM enabled betas in their repositories. AMD, ARM, and nVidia are onboard. Microsoft will allow VP8 in IE9, as long as the user installs the codec. Even Adobe says it'll incorporate VP8 into Flash... someday.

Apple, so far, is mum. Or as the demented trolls at The Register report it:

No word from Jobs. Somebody please send him an email ([e-mail]). He doesn't like us.

Google is confident that VP8 can weather patent challenges:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/20/google_confident_on_vp8_and_patents

So, YAY Google! You guys done good.

[RoyGBiv]

1. Well, that's good news ...

Frankly I haven't been all that worried. The noise coming out of Microsoft and Apple (especially Apple) is just that, noise ... Jobs being Jobs. And because it's Jobs, I think a few people got a little too worked up over it.

Anyway, before I go off on a Jobs rant ...

This is one of the funnier comments I've seen:

No word from Jobs. Somebody please send him an email ([e-mail] ). He doesn't like us.

In my viewing experience, Jobs ends up not liking people who can actually get the better of him. :)

[charlie]

2. Heh

Did you see the GD thread for this article?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/bill-maher-steve-jobs-wou_n_578479.html

If we're shopping for an Overlord in Chief, I'd prefer one who ordered me off a cliff at gunpoint, rather than being swept over by mobs convinced cliffdiving was "insanely great".

I know Maher's just fooling around, but a couple thought it was a neat idea. I wonder if they've heard the joke about regular expressions -- "Now you've got two problems".

[RoyGBiv]

3. No, I hid it ...

Which is to say I saw it and quickly backed away before I got myself tombstoned, which seems to be a frequent occurrence lately.

There was another recent thread asking, in some seriousness, when Apple stopped being cool. I left that one alone as well, but I wanted to reply, "1987," that being the year Steve Wozniak left. (I know he's still technically an employee and is to some extent a friend of Steve Jobs, but that's beside the point.)

Steve Jobs running a country is about the most frightening thing I can imagine, save any member of the Bush family running one. He's the J. Edgar Hoover of the technical business world and would bring the same sensibility into politics, had he the temperament to do it, which he doesn't.

And I'll stop now before I really get started ... I was one of the people who watched Pirates of Silicon Valley and found myself thinking Bill Gates was the good guy or at least the more honest guy.

[charlie]

4. I was fascinated with the story of microcomputers

for a long time and read a lot of pop histories and biographies (Hackers and Accidental Empires are still favorites of mine). Nearly everyone involved was, if not endearingly, at least entertainingly off-kilter in some way. Then there was Jobs, maelstrom of psychodrama, different in kind from the rest, with a heavy strain of visionary diva like Dior or Versace mixed with his geek purist. Still that way.

Yeah, President Jobs, answering the question -- can a high-maintenance president collapse a country with exhaustion inside of 4 years? I'll bet he could.

[RoyGBiv]

5. Hackers is in my Top 5 favorite books ...

... and that's saying something considering I have ... well let's just look ... 1217 books either in my house or in the storage area I had to rent to keep all the damn things. (I finally got them all into a library database ... Alexandria for Linux ... connects with the Amazon cloud and is excellent).

Have I ever mentioned to you I vaguely knew John Draper, aka Cap'n Crunch? This was back in the early 80s when I spent far too much of my time tying up the line on a BBS where he made semi-regular appearances to the "special" section, ifyaknowhatimean. An upload he made inspired me to make my very first 13KB download. Took most of an afternoon. :) He also posted all his phreaking DOCS there himself.

He never actually spoke directly to anyone on that board (except the SyOp Kim, who was neither a woman nor Asian), but he would post things. His reputation as an OCD, semi-psychotic freak (no pun intended, but I'll take it) is well deserved.

This is back when I coveted Apples. I had a CoCo II, the bastard child of the personal computers of the day, but a friend would occasionally leave his IIe at my house 'cause he would come over and play games that his mom wouldn't let him play 'cause they were "satanic."

Funny how this started out as a thread about VP8. I am the master of tangents. :)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

6. Don't you diss the CoCo.

It was a marvelous 8-bit machine that saw a tiny fraction of the success it deserved.

I worked with it in the 80s in Brazil. Or, rather, with a shady clone.

[RoyGBiv]

7. I'm not dissin' ...

...but it *was* the bastard child of the computing world at the time.

I used mine from the time I was 14 until I bought a IBM clone at the age of 18. I *hated* the IBM clone *so* much. It couldn't do half the stuff my CoCo could, but the CoCo had a disc drive that wasn't compatible with any of the ones they had at college, and it was running on a power supply I had had to fix with a paper clip.

It was cool that I *could* fix it with a paper clip. :)

But anyway, yeah, it had some really good internals for the day, and the things you could do with color via artifacts/taking advantage of a television monitor were quite amazing, especially in comparison to Apples with their monochrome monitors or their fucked up 4 color monitors that just plain sucked. I preferred the green and black actually. But Apples had all the *cool* games, and then there was Load Runner. There was a version of it for the CoCo, but it sucked. Actually every version of it for every platform since the IIe has sucked, imo.

[charlie]

8. C64 representin'

Angels descended and dropped one into my lap one day.

Actually, my sister mailed me a box with a note that said something like, "I don't want this anymore. YOU do something with it." My first computer, a tape drive, and a ring bound manual as thick as a phone book, stuffed with low level hardware info.

It was the most arcane, byzantine thing I'd ever dived into, the distance between doing stuff and actually grokking it was often months. 16 colors from a 32-color palette, programmable sound chip, sprite handler, and a luxurious 64K RAM -- it made me ache with potential and possibility I'd only felt with my first guitar.

Of course, the C64 was just cheap crack to get me jonesing for the hard stuff, the coming Amiga. And with the Amiga, I boarded the rocket to the Brave Shiny World of the Future......... HAH! What a miserable tale of woe that turned out to be.

[ConsAreLiars]

11. The Amiga was a promising future killed.

Me too, went from "before," PDP10? and Fortran 1V? and punched paper storage to a C64 to an Amiga 1000. That machine incorporated everything that the computer tech promised or even imagined at that time. (C64 before then, it was fun, but the Amiga was magic.) The shared libraries and the (very international) community were similar to the Linux environment in terms of design and philosophy, but there was also greed at the top, so the hardware/software geniuses at Amiga never had a chance to join with their natural allies in the Linux communities.

[charlie]

9. 1217

A remarkably precise number :)

I'm laughing because I remember when a computer in the home was a staple of every futuristic scenario. They KNEW we'd have them, but no one had the first idea what we'd possibly DO with them. Store recipes! Set reminders for appointments! Catalog your hi-fi albums! Do it with a hulking desktop-bottom-side-underbelly as big as a Buick!

And when the PCs did come, you couldn't waste cycles and storage on something as frivolous as a personal book inventory.

Now here we are. It only took a few decades, but The Future (cue Switched on Bach soundtrack, put on turtleneck and paisley pants) has finally arrived. Store recipes, etc. :)

Cap'n Crunch! Wow. That's kind of creepy, a storied (and strange) figure like him lurking incommunicado in the dark aether of a BBS. But, it's kind of fitting, I guess. A BBS's otherworldly vibe seems right for a guy like Draper, rather than the sanitary, well-lit Web.

Hackers is one of my favorite books, too. So inspiring, and a rollicking GREAT story. (Who could've imagined from the sad coda that Stallman's lonely crusade would become a force that changes the world? Free software? Hacker ethic? Nuts!)

BTW, have you seen this?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_hackers/all/1

It has 2 pictures of a guy I'd never seen before, Richard Greenblatt. I'd always pictured him as Roger Ebert gone fungoid. He doesn't look like that at all. He's not terribly overweight, he's combed, and he's clean!

[RoyGBiv]

10. No I hadn't ...

Thanks for that. Very interesting article. Levy has a remarkable ability to capture these people and make them seem like humans, a weird version of humans sure, but humans. In the mainstream press, they more often than not come across as robots with a few circuits loose.

I love the term milliblats ... one wonders just how clean he is. Some geeks of that generation especially had a remarkable ability to appear a lot more hygienic than they were. :)

As for the rather precise number ... heh, well, I was just so proud of myself for not only having gotten Alexandria to work properly with Amazon's cloud service so that I could take a stack of books and just start inputting ISDN numbers, but also had actually done had enough discipline to sit down and do the data entry once the fun part was over. The data entry bit always trips me up.

I'll never be without books. When I'm old and homeless and eating out of garbage cans, I'll have a box of books in my shopping cart, digital readers be damned.