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Applesoft, Ogg, and the future of web video

Will the real open codec please stand up?

Reality bites

But licensing is regularly reviewed by the members of MPEG LA, and the current free license expires on December 31. This means the exemption could easily change.

The great fear is that once H.264 has ubiquity thanks to IE 9, Silverlight, the iPhone, and iPad, the patent holders could start charging, putting video out of the reach of ordinary web users such as bloggers. There is a precedent: GIF in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, boring systems giant Unisys held the patents on GIF, along with pioneer service provider CompuServe. Unisys decided it was time to collect and started to demand that website owners pay up to $7,000 to display images using GIF. It was a tax that would have crippled small websites, a tax that would have killed the diverse web as we know today. But the market mobilized, and PNG was created to outflank GIF and sink the Unisys web monetization strategy.

Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation - a group pushing for an open web and whose Firefox 3.6 browser only supports Ogg Theora for HTML5 video - is concerned that history could repeat itself. If it does, then the web as we know it will disappear as small websites are forced to pay hefty royalty fees to MPEG LA members like Microsoft.

He told us: "What we saw with GIF and other technologies is: offer it cheap early, get dominance, and charge large sums - from a loss leader approach to market dominance.

"We could get to that point where the people behind H.264 says fine look, you licensee this but look at those who didn't and the prices are going up and every blogger has to pay...If we don't get royalty fee code soon, we will get to that turning point."

“It's the furthest we could take it on this realistically" - Canonical director of business development Chris Kenyon on MP3 in the Ubuntu-One music store

If the open and free codecs exist, why is music frozen into MP3 and web apparently drifting irresistibly towards H.264 for video?

One answer is practical. With music, licensing MP3 is literally the price of doing business if you want the entertainment labels to give you the kind of titles you need to suck in consumers.

Canonical director of business development Chris Kenyon said that while Canonical wanted to go with Ogg on Ubuntu One, the entertainment labels the service relies on wouldn't stand for it. "It's the furthest we could take it on this realistically," Kenyon told us frankly.

"We live in a world where... we should always strive for things to be perfect. This is a leap in the right direction, [but] with the studios it was clear that was the only way we could go."

AAC upset

A decade after Ogg Vorbis surfaced, MP3 is firmly entrenched online and on all kinds of consumer devices. Released in May 2000, Ogg Vorbis is used by a handful of reference sites, including Wikipedia, NPR in the US, and Spotify. There is support in Opera 10.50 and Firefox, which means that - on paper - Ogg reaches more than a quarter of desktops through the browser.

Yet, in recent years, the biggest upset in this space came not from Ogg Vorbis or any other corner of the open-source community. It came from the world of closed source. It was when Apple picked MPEG4-AAC for iTunes and the iPod in 2003. To the delight of media labels - who Apple needed to make the iPod and iTunes so successful - AAC provided DRM.

Today, each labels has its own lists of pre-approved formats such as MP3 and AAC. These formats are proven to work. They deliver a guaranteed level of quality. And they have ubiquity, so music will play reliably "everywhere." The labels either serve music already encoded in MP3 or in allowing third parties to provide their own music services, they require MP3 encoding.

Ben Drury is chief executive and co-founder of one such third party, 7digital, the company whose service is behind Ubuntu One. 7digital is 50 per cent owned by HMV Group. It offers a library of nine million DRM-free MP3 tunes, and it boasts customers that include Adidas, Nokia, Coca-Cola, and Sony. But Drury would prefer to use Ogg.

The argument for sticking with MP3 makes little sense to Drury from a technology perspective as both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis are lossy formats - formats that guarantees quality because it dumps non-important data in a stream to keep both the compression and the file size small. That's important in a world of over-the-air delivery on wireless networks - just ask any AT&T user who mysteriously loses their network at any given point during a day. "The only restriction now is around quality," Drury asserted.

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