The Attack Against Ogg Theora or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Proprietary Web

December 11th, 2007

Leading up to the w3c video meeting tomorrow there has been a flurry of activity on slashdot and elsewhere, focusing on nokia resistance to a key component of the html5 video spec stating that video tag “should support Ogg Theora”. This key piece of the html spec has been removed from the latest draft. With proprietary web beneficiaries recommending a codec agnostic approach to the html5 video tag they would have us all stop worrying and love the proprietary web. Fortunately a lot of us think otherwise. Here is a short essay responding to some of the arguments against having the w3c recommend the theora codec.

Update: Check out Xiph’s press release, Digital Citizen’s “who benefits” essay, bluish coders comments (the theora for ff developer), about baseline video codecs and html5 by ginger of annodex & finally: the html 5 wars and why you should avoid them by spread open media

Theora is not widely used and has “lost” in the marketplace, the w3c has no place recommending a new not-widely supported codec. Let us rewind to October, 1996, here the w3c recommend a little used patent-free image format. How many png images where used on the web before it was a standard? Where there other proprietary image technologies of course, but adopting them or recommending an agnostic image tag would have crippled the “Full Potential of the Web” and today web sites benefit tremendously from png images even as companies such as Microsoft dragged their feat on full support for almost a decade.

theora quality is too low Work is being done to improve theora. But the key thing to keep in mind is theora is the best free codec which what matters for free software interoperability.

MPEG (h.264 mpg4 etc) have less patten risk since the mpeg group is behind them. Ogg theora is a submarine patent minefield One of the most common arguments against theora and is particularly unfounded. First off Xiph has conducted patent searches and the pattens covering vorbis and a irrevocable free license to the VP3 codec (which theora is based on) has been negotiated. But given how the patent system “works” in the US, all software is subject to submarine patents so the patent argument is essentially “theora is software”. The same argument Microsoft uses against Linux. Key to this argument is that you never point to any actual patents, rather try to create confusion in the marketplace to bolster your products position.

Subsequent arguments include no-big company has exposed themselves to distributing theora which I guess does not include Red Hat, Canonical, Novell and pretty much every linux distributer has been distributing ogg theora for years.
And Last but certainly not least is that licensing the mpeg technologies DOES NOT ELIMINATE YOUR EXPOSURE TO SUBMARINE PATENTS. In fact case history shows much more litigation on mpeg usage than theora. Multimedia Patent Trust v. Microsoft Corp., Qualcomm Inc. v. Broadcom Corp., SanDisk Corp. v. Audio MPEG, Inc. etc. In Lucent Technologies, Inc. v. Gateway, Inc. for example:

Lucent had not made any representations that its patents would be licensed through MPEG LA; to the contrary, Defendants such as Gateway were informed that they would need a license directly from Lucent. Moreover, the MPEG LA sublicensee agreement explicitly warns that the MPEG LA pool does not necessarily include all the patents necessary to practice the technology and that sublicensee signs the agreement aware of such risks. (Blackburn Dec. Ex. 20 §§ 4.2, 4.3.)

If a company really was concerned with submarine patent risk they should prefer ogg theora as it has a much better legal track record.

theora does not support DRM I suppose they should also propose a html DRM and a Image DRM “standard” at the same time. DRM is wrong for lots of reasons, DRM is not functional concept in free software nor is it a desirable technology by anyone but the old content industry. Either way it has no place in web standards recommendations.

mpeg is a non-discriminatory standard, “free does not matter” we don’t have a widely used free web video format now and things are “ok”
The fact that MPEG as a “standard” and non-discriminatory (can’t charge company A more than company B) is irrelevant. Being free is all that matters for interoperability with free browser distributions. Ogg theora is on the other hand perfectly compatible with being distributed in a proprietary system.

A codec agnostic implementation of the video tag is next to worthless. A simple javaScript library could accomplish the same thing. Codec agnostic video tag represents no significant difference from the object/embed tags that we already have today. If web developers can’t count on a given codec being supported the video tag is likely to go nowhere fast. If that approach is taken video will remain a second class web citizen wrapped up in proprietary encapsulations. The whole point of the w3c is to promote/develop interoperable technologies. In the current browser environment non-free implementations are simply not interoperable. The w3c would be going against their own position and obsoleting themselves in the process if they take the codec agnostic approach.

The drive for codec agnostic video tag is a well orchestrated effort to put a proprietary wedge into web video distribution platform. Codec agnostic video support lets proprietary technology providers squeeze hugely profitable wedge into the web platform. This represents a new, undesirable, untested and unhealthy direction for the web. With the exception of a few key sites such as wikipedia and others we are already quickly going towards proprietary web video. A proprietary web applies artificial scarcity to distribution costs and limits decentralization by pushing people towards service providers that can afford to make your message available. Pushing individuals away from meaningful control of the distribution and reception of their messages is a dramatic shift from what has made the web so powerful up until this point. These second degree consequences are only starting to be felt.

Key to the current environment is Adobe/On2 very lax in enforcing their proprietary codecs. They insure their IP proprietary is competitive with free codecs by very limited IP enforcement. (many sites today getting away with using ffmpegs flash video encoding for “free”). But we should be cautious and forward thinking and not give away ownership key portion of the web platform to a single corporation or industry group. Doing so is antithetical to what the web platform is and limits the Web full potential.

Entry Filed under: html5