Lacking DRM, WebM May Lose Out to Flash
Google on Tuesday released VP8, a Web video codec that the company will provide to the industry as part of the WebM Project, an industry collaboration. But the video codec, as well as the HTML5 video tag itself, currently lacks any sort of digital-rights-management wrapper to protect content.
SAN FRANCISCO—Google on Tuesday released VP8, a Web video codec that the company will open source and provide to the industry as part of the WebM Project, an industry collaboration with Mozilla and Opera, among others.
But the video codec, as well as the HTML5 video tag itself, currently lacks any sort of digital-rights-management wrapper, leaving Google executives to suggest that using Flash may remain the default Web video format for the time being.
In a at the Google I/O conference here, Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product managementcalled VP8 Google's "gift to the Web." The technology was acquired as part of Google's in July of 2009.
Google has been a proponent of HTML5 since the company's 2009 Google I/O developer conference, when it first announced plans to support the technology. But while the technology includes a "video" tag that promises to simplify Web page coding of embedded video, it also fails to specify what codec to use, leaving developers with the choice of a wide variety, including Flash and H.264.
WebM includes three components: the VP8 video codec, a Vorbis audio codec, and a container format based on the Matroska container.
For users, Google's Chrome, Opera, and Mozilla have all announced support for the technology, and browsers supporting WebM are or will soon be available from all three developers. Beginning on May 20, users can download a Chromium build that will support WebM, and a nightly Firefox build will support WebM as well. Opera, for its part, is making a WebM version of its Opera browser available via its Labs development unit. YouTube video can be played back by visiting the WebM site and adding "&webm=1" to the end of any video found via a search result.
Microsoft and Apple have yet to officially support the new WebM format. Apple representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Google enlisted a number of hardware and partners to support WebM, including: ARM, Broadcom, MIPS, and Texas Instruments, plus Brightcove, Skype, and Sorenson.
Logitech will be using WebM in the next release of its video calling service, Vid HD, while Skype said that it had launched its video calling service in 2005 with VP7, the predecessor to VP8. Brightcove, for its part, said it would provide H.264 and WebM as standard encoding options for Adobe Flash and HTML5 video experiences to its 1,500 media publisher customers worldwide.
Peter Csathy, chief executive of Sorenson Media, said in an interview that WebM is a "game changer. It's a big deal, it's a very big deal indeed," he said.
Csathy said that the company had been working with the WebM SDK for months, and it had been one of the first to optimize its products. Sorenson said it had created a VP8 version of its Web site for Squish and Squeeze, its encoding applications, that support the new format.
But there's also a potential issue: as it stands, Google executives said, the VP8 format lacks any sort of DRM wrapper, meaning that content providers won't be able to protect the streams from being copied. Mike Jazayeri, group product manager at Google, told reporters that "there is no DRM with WebM," noting that "a better question is how you use DRM with the 'video' tag."
"Things like the video tag struggle with DRM," added Linus Upson, vice president of engineering at Google.
By contrast, Flash solves a lot of capabilities in these areas, Pichai said at the press conference. "We want to see HTML5 get better, but there are many areas where we rely on Flash to do the things we need, so I don't think there will be many changes there."
The solution? Potentially continuing to use established technologies such as watermarking or fingerprinting, which embeds an identifying mark inside the audio or video shown on the screen. "Watermarking is still possible with WebM or any codec," said Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder.
"Watermarking and fingerprinting have been somewhat effective in keeping content safe and disincentivizing people from making unauthorized copies," Brin added.
Jazayeri said that he didn't believe there would be any patent issues surrounding the VB8 codec, which is why the company is open-sourcing it. Both Csathy and Google executives said that they're being careful not to position the technology as "Google VP8", or something that would tie the technology to Google.
Pichai said that in the past year or so, browser manufacturers have dramatically improved their capability to process Java, and that he expected that browsers would improve their video performance at the same pace. "We hope to start an arms race," he said.