Cisco Open-Sources H.264 Codec, Pushes WebRTC

[tga.d]

More insightful than either of the announcements (Mozilla's and Cisco's) is this analysis by Monty Montgomery, the one behind Ogg, Vorbis, Xiph, etc.:

http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html

For those who don't know, he's the one driving Daala development in Mozilla. Basically, in the post he says that this is a capitulation on the part of Mozilla, but that it is a strategic concession with the longer-term strategy of making Daala the standard in a later spec, using the same strategies they used to get Opus into the official spec (i.e. by being substantially better than everything else). Cisco has already announced that they're contributing code to the Daala project now. So while it sucks that this the end of this round, some solace can be taken in knowing this is a temporary, stop-gap measure.

I really recommend reading the full post though, he makes some very interesting observations.

[Daktyl198]

More insightful than either of the announcements (Mozilla's and Cisco's) is this analysis by Monty Montgomery, the one behind Ogg, Vorbis, Xiph, etc.:

http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html

For those who don't know, he's the one driving Daala development in Mozilla. Basically, in the post he says that this is a capitulation on the part of Mozilla, but that it is a strategic concession with the longer-term strategy of making Daala the standard in a later spec, using the same strategies they used to get Opus into the official spec (i.e. by being substantially better than everything else). Cisco has already announced that they're contributing code to the Daala project now. So while it sucks that this the end of this round, some solace can be taken in knowing this is a temporary, stop-gap measure.

I really recommend reading the full post though, he makes some very interesting observations.

^This. I can't wait for Daala

Also, to all the people complaining about why V8/9 isn't the standard, think about it. Aside from releasing the spec and implementing it in their own browser, does Google actively try and promote it elsewhere? NO. They don't even help Mozilla implement the codec. V9 probably won't be in Firefox for another year or so because Google just wants to be the one with all the fancy toys and doesn't want other people to have what they have.
Some of you will say "Well it's not up to Google to implement it elsewhere" and you're right, but seeing as Firefox is the next biggest non-IE browser, you'd think they'd at least say "Well, we want this to be the standard, right? We should probably get it in Firefox ASAP!".

Thus, I am perfectly with h.264 being standard for now, until Daala comes along and we can all collectively drool over it.

[Kostas]

While I understand (and sorta agree) with Mozilla's rationale behind their alignment with Cisco I can't help but wonder how's that going to affect Firefox. Are they going to ship Cisco's binary to simplify the support across platforms or will they stick to the somewhat more troublesome platform-specific solutions like GStreamer (FX24 and still can't play mp3s...)?

[dee.]

Software patents? Not applicable here (for now). Suck on that, MPEG LA.

[tga.d]

While I understand (and sorta agree) with Mozilla's rationale behind their alignment with Cisco I can't help but wonder how's that going to affect Firefox. Are they going to ship Cisco's binary to simplify the support across platforms or will they stick to the somewhat more troublesome platform-specific solutions like GStreamer (FX24 and still can't play mp3s...)?

FF can't ship the binary itself, that's been made clear. The license doesn't transfer from Cisco, Cisco is simply allowing their solution to be used in any product (and releasing the source, though that's useless for distribution purposes and is primarily useful for testing). Instead, when you install FireFox, it will detect whether your OS has H.264 support, and if it doesn't, it will download the binary from Cisco's servers and install it as part of FireFox. Exactly how it will interface with FireFox isn't known at this point, but it would probably be akin to a plugin (possibly more integrated, depending on whether they want sandboxing or want it to be seamless).

Firefox will automatically download and install the appropriate binary module onto each user?s machine when needed, unless disabled in the user?s preferences.

https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/ciscos-h-264-good-news/

@Sam: not preinstalled; downloaded for Firefox users whose OS lacks H.264. Firefox OS and Firefox for Android use the OS codec.

https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/cisc...#comment-17009

[Luke]

It's not end users who need this H264 codec version

H.264 is old anyways!

Better use H.265, VP9 or Daala instead.

It's distributors like Mozilla, and any institutional/business users in legally sensitive positions. Example: I distribute non-monetized videos only, and maybe a dozen clones of my personal OS varient. My OS is encrypted on top of all else. I have no assets or wages (revenue) to target in court. As a result, I can use libX264 in utter impunity. A big nonprofit with powerful corporate enemies (think Greenpeace or PETA?) would be in quite another situation due to fear that a snitch might be sent in to find any actionable issue, with software patents as good as anything. That could drive them to Windoze or Crapple, to the NSA's benefit. I've never worked in one, but I would suspect this to be the case. Mozilla at any rate can use an already-installed codec, but until not could not distribute, which with Flash on the way out could have put them at a severe disadvantate at least in the office environment.

[XorEaxEax]

^This. I can't wait for Daala

Be prepared to wait as it is poised to compete (if it can) against whatever comes AFTER HEVC and VP9, as such it's FAR OFF in the future.

NO. They don't even help Mozilla implement the codec.

What is this, do you have anything to back this claim with? Not that Mozilla would necessarily need any help but I'd like to see anything indicating that Google would not help Mozilla in this regard, particularly since they've jointly worked on implementing VP8 based WebRTC across both Firefox and Chrome.

V9 probably won't be in Firefox for another year or so because Google just wants to be the one with all the fancy toys and doesn't want other people to have what they have.

Are you retarded? The VP9 stable decoder is already out in the latest ffmpeg, Mozilla can support it in Firefox whenever they want to. If you have to wait a year then it's because Mozilla won't implement it.

The source code is available, ffmpeg devs downloaded it and implemented it, so can Mozilla, or are you telling me they need some dev from Google to come over and help them?

Some of you will say "Well it's not up to Google to implement it elsewhere" and you're right, but seeing as Firefox is the next biggest non-IE browser, you'd think they'd at least say "Well, we want this to be the standard, right? We should probably get it in Firefox ASAP!".

What are they supposed to do, hijack the Firefox git server? They have made the decoder available for anyone to implement, again Mozilla can implement it whenever they want.

[Kostas]

FF can't ship the binary itself, that's been made clear. The license doesn't transfer from Cisco, Cisco is simply allowing their solution to be used in any product (and releasing the source, though that's useless for distribution purposes and is primarily useful for testing). Instead, when you install FireFox, it will detect whether your OS has H.264 support, and if it doesn't, it will download the binary from Cisco's servers and install it as part of FireFox. Exactly how it will interface with FireFox isn't known at this point, but it would probably be akin to a plugin (possibly more integrated, depending on whether they want sandboxing or want it to be seamless).

Skimmed over that part. Thanks for clearing it up.

In that case it definitely seems more like a political decision in view of the upcoming vote rather that technically driven one.
Edit: ^not that that's necessarily a bad thing

[xeekei]

Good idea for a stop gap I guess. Let's make sure it remains a stop gap.

Daala + Opus in a Matroska container will be the way I store my videos in the future.

[smitty3268]

The thing with the internet is, no matter through where your data go, as long as it is correctly encrypted, it's secure.
As long as end-to-end encryption is used, it doesn't matter in whose hand the internet is.

Thus, the best point of attack wouldn't be the actual internet traffic (The privacy conscientious people would be using ZRTP/SRTP to transfert the video over an encrypted channel). As the encryption it self, if done correctly, can't be broken, it's much more easy to attack communication at steps en either side of the encrypted channel itself.
Compression and decompression are points where the video data is in clear and are potential attack points.

A binary-only codec could either be compromised or simply be broken.

In Cisco's case, at least we can check the source-code to make sure there are no exploitable bugs in there.
But then we need a way to make sure that the downloaded binary matched the audited code.

Otherwise, no matter how many layers of encryption you stack underneath, there's no point in it if the codec leaks data before encryption.

That simply doesn't make any sense. How exactly is the codec going to leak information? Is it simply going to pipe everything from your machine to an NSA IP address after it decodes on your machine? Do you really think people aren't going to notice the GBs of data flowing out of their network? Or is it going to do some kind of fancy visual recognition AI code that tries to figure out what's going on and translates that into a small text file somehow? That's probably even more ridiculous. All this stuff would get caught the second it happened to anyone. The point of breaking encryption is that they can just record what goes over the channel without you noticing. Putting something in the codec does NOTHING. If it did, codecs would include encryption already. They don't, because that's not what codecs do.

If you truly want to be secure, you need an air gap between your machine and the network. Nothing else is 100% effective. I guarantee you the NSA has a full handbook full of undisclosed flaws they've found in linux and OSS software that they can exploit against any target they want, just like they have 0 day exploits for windows and proprietary software.

It's kind of amusing actually - what you are asking for is DRM, isn't it? Some way of preventing an outside source from copying your private video. lol