Hmmm. I don't know exactly where this is going or how productive it is...
Patents suck. Established industry players have long dominated this space, with closed, completely proprietary standards. MPEG-2 software encoders were thousands of dollars, and hardware encoders were tens-of-thousands. MPEG-4 ASP first (thank god for XviD), and then later MPEG-4 AVC changed all that. It is too bad, I suppose, that the entire MPEG stack isn't as open as it could be in some kind of utopian dream scenario. But... Utopian open standards with no patent encumbrance that are well supported by hardware and software vendors and high quality are like unicorns. Pretty to imagine, but not so easy to find or make in the real world.
But where I don't get it is the direct this therefore that relationship to Apple (and Flash and Google all mixed up in there). The success or failure of the H.264 standard is, at best, contributed to by Apple, not because of them. It was well underway when Apple adopted the standard (well before the iPhone). There were hardware decoders, in silicon. They worked, and used little power (and getting less, and less expensive, every year).
More importantly, there was a whole ecosystem of hardware encoders. It was being adopted widely across the video production industry: BluRay, AVCHD, a swath of high-bitrate pro codecs.
I won't sit here and argue that Apple has done everything right. They were definitely playing hardball with Adobe a bit with their sluggish response to Adobe's needs with the Multimedia APIs. I agree. On their side, they were behind Microsoft in part because of OpenGL, which isn't as nice as Microsoft's (hmmm, closed) DirectX API stack. But, it comes down to this: letting web content render OpenGL shader programs is crazy-pants without a whole swath of very challenging developments unless you just don't care about security at all. So, they had an excuse. Did they also intentionally drag their heels because screw you Adobe? Yes. Certainly. There's a history there. Adobe was also pissed that they ditched Display PostScript, and Apple was skeptical because Adobe was singing the same "just hardware accelerate it" song as they sang with DisplayPostscript, so the antagonism (and failed promises) went back on both sides for a long time.
I was highly critical of Apple before they removed DRM from their iTunes music store, and I do not buy any content from them from their video store because of the DRM. I'm not a big fan of the completely locked-down iPhone model, and where it takes the industry, long term, in a theoretical sense. Though, I also see the alternative as deficient in substantial ways. In any case, Apple and I certainly do not always see eye to eye.
But really... That's neither here nor there.... How is widespread H.264 adoption and the general failure of FOSS alternatives Apple's fault exactly? They didn't invent the H.264 standard. The MP4 container is certainly based off of the Quicktime MOV container, but the H.264 working group had little to do with the container format. It was headed by a guy from a videoconferencing vendor, later Microsoft. There was already widely available H.264 encoding and decoding
silicon when the first iPod that could play video came out. That's
why the first iPod that could play video came out. It had been embraced by Sony, Panasonic, JVC, chip vendors, GPU makers. Apple certainly helped popularize the format, but it was well on its way to popularization well before that. The standard was being finalized when Apple was selling audio-only iPods that only worked with Macs. Well before they were anyone's iOS-sized behemoth. H.264 had already won the war.
And all of this was years and years before suddenly Google switches sides and has this new format they seemed to have cobbled together from some decent FOSS stuff and a company they bought with a codec not as good as H.264 was years earlier. And they have dubious patent claims about its magical "open-ness" (which later they paid licensing fees for), and they say they're going to remove H.264 from Chrome (which they never did).
Adobe giving up on their own proprietary codecs and container was a big deal. The consumer-facing Flash player was not how they made money, you know. Their streaming server had become industry standard, and was not cheap to license at all. Giving up that battle was a big blow to that business, because now we have Wowza, and Red5. One less mark in Premiere's favor (they must be thanking the stars that Apple screwed up Final Cut Pro). There were a variety of repercussions to that move. And sure, Apple had something to do with it probably (they go way back, those two) but they gave up because of the facts on the ground (largely in the hardware codec game). Adobe and Microsoft, were never the standard's cheerleaders, though, that's for sure. Surrendering on FLV was the first real chink in Flash's armor, but they had to, because they were widely regarded as having terrible video quality online. Flash was easy to use (way better than Quicktime Streaming or Windows Media) for the end-user, and users preferred that experience in their browser. But the quality was dismal for
ages, compared to a wide swath of alternatives.
So, it was a big surrender, and led to more-open alternatives succeeding. And now those more-open alternatives aren't open enough. Sure, I guess. But facts on the ground.
So... I'm confused about the entire direction this conversation has taken, and how it became about Flash and H.264 and why... Blah blah blah. I just thought that anecdote was relevant and interesting, I guess. But, of course, I don't have the source, and I'm remembering something I heard a few months ago on a podcast. Or maybe misrembering it. But I thought it was interesting.
Projects like FLAC, and FOSS alternatives to other standards, just have significant hurdles to widespread adoption for a wide variety of reasons. I remember how next year was going to be the year of Linux on the desktop, and we were going to get rid of Windows 98 once and for all, darn it. I'm glad that, in many ways, the present is substantially more open than the past.
Utopian dreams are often just that.
