I agree about the openness shortcomings of VP8 but suggest most are to do with it being a last-ditch attempt to get something out to compete with H.264 in time rather than conscious decisions taken by Google to minimize openness and maximise control (though some have portrayed it as such).
I guess the big question is whether H.265(6,7) could be argued to be more open than VP9(10,11). I get the feeling the former will continue down the patent route and the latter will be more likely to be a well-engineered open source success story (hopefully emulating the Opus codec effort, who by the way, opted for the code as specification route too), but you never know.
MPEG has made (I think) the right choice in splitting off a track for royalty-free web video (WebVC/IVC) while continuing their traditional generational codec development (HEVC). The former allows them to utilize expired patents from their long history as well as use their weight to negotiate royalty-free grants for current tech, in order to set an unrestricted baseline. Making this a separate effort rather than enforcing those conditions on the main standardization process allows them to continue evaluating the state of the art for all other use cases.
I think this is as close as we'll get to having our cake and eating it too while patents on algorithms are still recognized.
Comments
I agree about the openness shortcomings of VP8 but suggest most are to do with it being a last-ditch attempt to get something out to compete with H.264 in time rather than conscious decisions taken by Google to minimize openness and maximise control (though some have portrayed it as such).
I guess the big question is whether H.265(6,7) could be argued to be more open than VP9(10,11). I get the feeling the former will continue down the patent route and the latter will be more likely to be a well-engineered open source success story (hopefully emulating the Opus codec effort, who by the way, opted for the code as specification route too), but you never know.
MPEG has made (I think) the right choice in splitting off a track for royalty-free web video (WebVC/IVC) while continuing their traditional generational codec development (HEVC). The former allows them to utilize expired patents from their long history as well as use their weight to negotiate royalty-free grants for current tech, in order to set an unrestricted baseline. Making this a separate effort rather than enforcing those conditions on the main standardization process allows them to continue evaluating the state of the art for all other use cases.
I think this is as close as we'll get to having our cake and eating it too while patents on algorithms are still recognized.