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• WebM Cabal

  8 octobre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — On2/Duck, VP8

  I traveled to a secret clubhouse today to take part in a clandestine meeting to discuss exactly how WebM will rule over all that you see and hear on the web. I can’t really talk about it. But I can show you the cool hat I got :

  
  
  Yeah, you’re jealous.
  

  The back of the hat has an Easter egg for video codec nerds– the original Duck Corporation logo (On2′s original name) :

  
  
  

  Former employees of On2 (now Googlers) were well-represented. It was an emotional day of closure as I met the person — the only person to date — who contacted me with a legal threat so many years ago. He still remembered me too.

  I met a lot of people involved in creating various Duck and On2 codecs and learned a lot of history and lore behind then– history I hope to be able to document one day.

  I’m glad I got that first rough draft of a toy VP8 encoder done in time for the meeting. It was the subject of much mirth.

• Stop doing this in your encoder comparisons

  14 juin 2010, par Dark Shikari — Uncategorized

  I’ll do a more detailed post later on how to properly compare encoders, but lately I’ve seen a lot of people doing something in particular that demonstrates they have no idea what they’re doing.

  PSNR is not a very good metric. But it’s useful for one thing : if every encoder optimizes for it, you can effectively measure how good those encoders are at optimizing for PSNR. Certainly this doesn’t tell you everything you want to know, but it can give you a good approximation of “how good the encoder is at optimizing for SOMETHING“. The hope is that this is decently close to the visual results. This of course can fail to be the case if one encoder has psy optimizations and the other does not.

  But it only works to begin with if both encoders are optimized for PSNR. If one optimizes for, say, SSIM, and one optimizes for PSNR, comparing PSNR numbers is completely meaningless. If anything, it’s worse than meaningless — it will bias enormously towards the encoder that is tuned towards PSNR, for obvious reasons.

  And yet people keep doing this.

  They keep comparing x264 against other encoders which are tuned against PSNR. But they don’t tell x264 to also tune for PSNR (–tune psnr, it’s not hard !), and surprise surprise, x264 loses. Of course, these people never bother to actually look at the output ; if they did, they’d notice that x264 usually looks quite a bit better despite having lower PSNR.

  This happens so often that I suspect this is largely being done intentionally in order to cheat in encoder comparisons. Or perhaps it’s because tons of people who know absolutely nothing about video coding insist on doing comparisons without checking their methodology. Whatever it is, it clearly demonstrates that the person doing the test doesn’t understand what PSNR is or why it is used.

  Another victim of this is Theora Ptalarbvorm, which optimizes for SSIM at the expense of PSNR — an absolutely great decision for visual quality. And of course if you just blindly compare Ptalarbvorm (1.2) and Thusnelda (1.1), you’ll notice Ptalarbvorm has much lower PSNR ! Clearly, it must be a worse encoder, right ?

  Stop doing this. And call out the people who insist on cheating.

• Changes to the WebM Open Source License

  4 juin 2010, par noreply@blogger.com (John Luther)

  You’ll see on the WebM license page and in our source code repositories that we’ve made a small change to our open source license. There were a couple of issues that popped up after we released WebM at Google I/O a couple weeks ago, specifically around how the patent clause was written.

  As it was originally written, if a patent action was brought against Google, the patent license terminated. This provision itself is not unusual in an OSS license, and similar provisions exist in the 2nd Apache License and in version 3 of the GPL. The twist was that ours terminated "any" rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible. Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do.

  Using patent language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses, in this new iteration of the patent clause we’ve decoupled patents from copyright, thus preserving the pure BSD nature of the copyright license. This means we are no longer creating a new open source copyright license, and the patent grant can exist on its own. Additionally, we have updated the patent grant language to make it clearer that the grant includes the right to modify the code and give it to others. (We’ve updated the licensing FAQ to reflect these changes as well.)

  We’ve also added a definition for the "this implementation" language, to make that more clear.

  Thanks for your patience as we worked through this, and we hope you like, enjoy and (most importantly) use WebM and join with us in creating more freedom online. We had a lot of help on these changes, so thanks to our friends in open source and free software who traded many emails, often at odd hours, with us.

  Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google.