Shadowlessness

I don’t know if I’ve written about the sorry status of digital video (in web sites and other places) before or not (I think I have, but it’s almost 11AM and I haven’t slept yet, so forgive me if I’m misremembering!)
Anyways, the state of things up to a few months back was that we had quite good standards for WORM media distribution (Blurays and whatnot) but who actually uses those anymore?! If you wanted to rip video and archive them, you had a few choices.
You could go with MPEG4 (Xvid) and MP3 or AC3 inside AVI, to get the best compatibility (noob-owned PCs, standalone video players, etc.) but Xvid is not the most advanced technology these days and AVI is plain obsolete; not to mention the fact that support for AVI and said codecs is very limited on handheld and portable devices.
You could pick stupid and unwieldy containers like MP4, which might or might not be playable on this or that device. You could throw all your data down a bottomless well of Microsoft’s (or another corporation’s) fancy sounding but virtually unusable formats (codecs and containers) which I won’t even mention here.
You could go with cool and quite free containers like MKV (or OGG) which are (currently) only playable on PCs (with non-noob owners!) This fact is really sad, because and MKV file with x264 and AC3 is a mighty force to be reckoned with, for storing all kinds of video, from small to UD (Ultra Definition, whenever that in invented and becomes trendy!)

On the web, the situation is quite simpler and more equal. Everybody were being fucked by Adobe Flash (and still are.) With occasional fingers thrust in by Windows Media and Apple Quicktime. All these have their own codecs (or variations of codecs) and all are proprietary. (If I had gods, I would thank them for making RealMedia defunct!)

But HTML5 has its own audio and video support, and HTML5 is being picked up by virtually every browser maker (yes, even Microsoft, but I can’t imagine why anybody still uses their piece of shit, except to download Firefox or Opera or Chrome or SeaMonkey or Safari. The really cool guys don’t even do that and FTP down the usable browsers directly!) The problem with HTML5 standard is that it doesn’t (didn’t?) mandate the container format and codecs (video or audio) that should be used! Obviously, this is not good for anybody. Of course, the situation could have been worse if the standard had specified a patent-laden or proprietary format, but still this under-specification means Morphy’s Law applies and web-developers and web site administrators get fucked even more than usual. Not to mention lusers.

A viable option for free audio and video was (and always is) of course Vorbis and Theora, and I quite like them, but people might argue that they (specially Theora) are not state-of-the-art codecs (not out-dated though, just not quite on the bleeding edge.)

Anyways, a few months back Google bought a company named On2 which held (presumably and hopefully) all the patents for a video codec (format) named VP8. At the time many people (including me) speculated and hoped that Google would put the patents in public domain (or whatever the term is that means make the use of the technology available to everyone, everywhere without charge and limitations for all time.) A couple of months back Google did the exact same thing and the WebM project was born. It’s defines a container format that hosts VP8 video and Vorbis audio, with no applicable patents in private control and liberal opensource-compatible licenses on all the software and libraries. Already most relevant browser makers have declared support for WebM (Mozilla, Opera, Google (obviously) and I think even Microsoft (but these days they just have to do anything the leaders of industry do, because they are not part of them anymore!)) and there are 3rd-party implementations of it. In short, I think the state of video on the web is starting to look good.

(This post has no links and it needs 100. I apologize for the inconvenience of having to copy+paste.)