Is MPEG LA's "Call for Patents" for Google's VP8 a sign of weakness?

Yesterday, MPEG LA, the agency that licenses patents related to MPEG-4/H.264, issued a "Call for Patents" for Google's VP8 video codec. VP8 is the video codec incorporated in Google's WebM format, which Google is licensing at no charge. MPEG LA wasn't asked to round up potentially applicable patents by Google. Instead, MPEG LA sees an opportunity to make money, in much the same way that attorneys around the U.S. advertise on late-night television to find users of various medications or workers in particular industries who might have been harmed.

Update, March 3, 2011: PaidContent reports that the U.S. Justice Department has begun an investigation of MPEG LA's actions related to VP8 to determine if they violate antitrust laws. The article suggests that MPEG LA itself may not be the real target of the investigation, but rather, one or more members of MPEG LA who might have reason to sabotage Google's open video efforts. 

The interesting thing is that executives from MPEG LA have been claiming that VP8 infringes its MPEG-4/H.264 patents since last summer, when VP8 was first made available for free by Google. If that's the case, why do they now have to go out and find patents that cover VP8? Didn't they already know which patents were being infringed when they charged that VP8 was "undoubtedly" infringing their existing patents? And, if they examined their existing patent pool and decided that nothing they've got covers VP8, what are the chances that they're going to find anything now?

This move, which is being seen by some observers as a threat to WebM, looks to me more like a statement of weakness by MPEG LA. To this observer, it looks as though they don't think that they can prevail with their current patent pool, and they're desperately looking for a "submarine" patent somewhere that will stand up against court challenges.

I would have taken MPEG LA's threats much more seriously if they had filed suit for patent infringement against Google using the patents they already represent. At this point, Google is in a much stronger position than I thought they were.

New WebM/H.264 Comparison

A new comparison of VP8 (the video codec in WebM), H.264 and XviD has been published by the Moscow State University's Graphics & Media Lab. The comparison is an addition to a comprehensive review of codecs. The team that performed the comparison makes it clear that it didn't do as extensive a test of VP8 as it did of the other codecs, since the study was apparently virtually completed by the time that Google announced that it was open-sourcing VP8 and including it in WebM. Nevertheless, the team came to a number of conclusions:

For movie encoding:

Comparing VP8 to XviD, VP8 is 5-25 times slower with 10-30% better quality (lower bitrate for the same quality). When comparing VP8 and x264 VP8 also shows 5-25 lower encoding speed with 20-30% lower quality at average. For example x264 High-Speed preset is faster and has higher quality than any of VP8 presets at average.

For HDTV:

Comparing VP8 to XviD, VP8 is 5-20 times slower with 10-20% better quality (lower bitrate for the same quality). When comapring VP8 and x264 VP8 shows 5-20 lower encoding speed with almost the same quality, excluding x624 High-Quality preset.

The source material that the team used for the Movie testing was clips from the films "Ice Age 3", "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Enemy of the State" and "Up". For the HDTV test, the team used video shot in the Amazon taken from a Microsoft site, the trailer from "Iron Man 2", a close-up video of a calendar and a clip from the movie "Troy."

The WebM team responded to the Moscow State University results, admitting that a lot of work needs to be done to VP8 in order to improve its encoding speed. However, they contend that VP8 would have provided better-quality output had the source material not previously been encoded (only one sample, the calendar, was uncompressed.) Here are their comments:

We've been following the MSU tests since they began and respect the group's work. One issue we noticed in the test is that most input sequences were previously compressed using other codecs. These sequences have an inherent bias against VP8 in recompression tests. As pointed out by other developers, H.264 and MPEG-like encoders have slight advantages in reproducing some of their own typical artifacts, which helps their objective measurement numbers but not necessarily visual quality. This is reflected by relatively better results for VP8 on the only uncompressed input sequence, "mobile calendar.

Even with this limitation, VP8 delivered respectable results against other encoders, especially considering this is the first time VP8 has been included in the test and VP8 has not been specifically optimized for SSIM as some other codecs have.

To date, WebM developers have focused on the VP8 decoder performance and are only starting to optimize the encoder for speed. The WebM project has only been underway for three weeks, and we believe that our encoder speed will improve significantly in the near future.

The WebM team's comments about the source material have some merit, but in the real world, video that's previously been compressed is often included in projects. It may be difficult or impossible to get uncompressed source material--for example, AVCHD camcorders and some DSLRs output video using H.264. Therefore, the performance of VP8 on previously compressed video is important.

The Moscow State University comparison provides useful insight into the performance of VP8, and points out some of the areas that Google and its partners need to work on.

First WebM (VP8) to H.264 comparison published

Streamingmedia.com has published an initial comparison of Google's VP8 open-source video codec (part of WebM) and H.264, run by Jan Ozer, who's done many such codec and compressor comparisons over the years. In summary, at almost exactly the same bitrate (438kbps for VP8 vs. 439kbps for H.264) and the same resolution (480 x 360), H.264 provided slightly better overall visual quality, especially in clips with higher motion. However, Ozer states that the difference won't be noticeable in most applications.

Keep in mind that the tests were done at SD resolution and at one bitrate, so more definitive testing will be required to understand how the two codecs compare over a range of conditions. However, at first glance, VP8 seems to be well in the ballpark with H.264.

WebM might be a big deal after all

Earlier today, I wrote a post that said that Google's announcements at the I/O Conference this morning weren't all that exciting. But, the WebM announcement, might--might--just be a Big Thing. Google not only signed up most of the web browser leaders except for Microsoft and Apple (and after today's announcement, Microsoft said that it would support WebM in Internet Explorer 9 if the user installs the codecs themselves); it signed up just about all the major players in hardware encoders and decoders. They signed up almost all the major players in mobile phone chip sets, including ARM, Broadcom, Freescale Semiconductor, Marvell, MIPS Technologies, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm. They got many of the leaders in high-end video encoders, including Harmonic, Telestream, Digital Rapids, ViewCast, Inlet and Anystream. And, they got both of the leaders in GPUs, Nvidia and AMD.

These companies are important because it costs a lot to build hardware encoders and write tight, high-performance firmware. The fact that Google got all these players to sign on indicates that they see real potential in WebM. This represents a big problem for MPEG LA, the consortium that licenses patents related to H.264. Steve Jobs and MPEG LA executives have been doing more than hinting that both Ogg Theora and VP8, which is the video codec in WebM, infringe on MPEG LA's patents. But, I strongly doubt that these companies would expose themselves to potential liability to support an infringing codec. Google may well have agreed to indemnify at least some of these companies should MPEG LA, one or more of its consortium members, or a company with separate patents such as AT&T, takes legal action.

WebM isn't going to have any impact on Blu-Ray, which supports H.264 and Microsoft's VC-1 codec. Nor will it have much impact on cable, satellite or IPTV service providers; they're already heavily invested in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. It's very unlikely to have a big impact on camcorders, because so many of the major camcorder manufacturers also contribute a large share of MPEG LA's patents and have cross-licensing agreements with each other to keep costs down.

Where WebM is likely to have its biggest impact is on the web, both in desktop and mobile applications. Acquisition--getting video from a camcorder into a digital form--probably isn't going to change, but the chain from encoding video after post-production to decoding it on your PC, tablet, phone or Internet-enabled set-top box can now be royalty-free.

The big "if" is whether or not WebM/VP8  is actually a good replacement for H.264. Is it in the same ballpark as H.264 for video quality, bandwidth efficiency, encoding and decoding speed and CPU utilization? Google claims it is, but we won;t know for sure until there's been third-party testing of a variety of VP8 encoders and decoders. If VP8 can stand up to H.264, it has an excellent chance of becoming the new standard for video on the web.

Google to open source VP8?

NewTeeVee is reporting that Google will announce plans to make On2's VP8 codec open source as early as next month's Google I/O developers' conference. The move is no big surprise, and it's likely to dramatically increase adoption of VP8, which On2 claims is significantly more bandwidth-efficient than H.264. Adobe Flash currently doesn't support VP8, although given Adobe and Google's closer partnership, future support is likely. NewTeeVee reports that both Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox will add VP8 support once Google makes its announcement.

VP8 could provide an alternative to H.264 for developers and content providers who are concerned about future changes in MPEG LA's licensing policies, and to Ogg Theora for those who believe that Theora requires significantly more bandwidth than H.264 for the same level of quality. (Google is also helping to fund an implementation of Ogg Theora for ARM processors.)

The bottom line is that VP8 and Ogg Theora would provide a solid base of royalty-free alternative video codecs, in much the same way as PNG served as a royalty-free alternative to GIF.