After originally pledging to support both H.264 and WebM content, Google has decided it will ditch the H.264 video codec from Chrome and go with its WebM format instead.
H.264 video is widely used, currently being the de facto industry standard for encoding digital video. It is used with Blu-ray disc and is supported by a wide variety of consumer electronics devices. However, H.264 technology is patented and adopters pay royalties to the MPEG-LA group.
Google acquired On2 Technologies in 2009 to gain access to the VP8 codec. It opened op the VP8 codec and created a new royalty-free media format called WebM. WebM gained support in the Firefox, Opera and Chrome browsers, but Apple and Microsoft declined to officially support WebM (although WebM support can technically be added to Internet Explorer).
The growing split on the Internet between H.264 and now it’s growing royalty-free competitor WebM is likely to cause problems for content producers looking to use HTML5 to display video content on the Internet.
It is unclear how Google’s removal of H.264 from Chrome will affect Google’s other web services, particularly YouTube.
Result for: MPEG
Syabas has announced July 23rd as the shipping date for the highly-anticipated Popbox media player.
Pre-order began in May with a July 4th tentative release date. The company decided to delay the launch to work on some final tweaks for the Popbox software.
Among the first Popapps to ship with the box are Picasa, YouTube, Photobucket, Twitter, Next New Networks and Revision3.
The interface also includes a cover-flow-esque visual thumbnails selection for videos, music and other data, as well as universal search.
More notably, the interface can handle Flash, Java and QT meaning Netflix will be available eventually. Also available in the future is Hulu, CBS and ABC content, which can now include the in-video ads required for playback. Facebook Shoutcast MP3, and other Popcorn Hour content will rollover to the new box eventually, as well.
For video, full 1080p at 100Mbps is now supported, along with the standard MPEG formats, H.264, VC-1, WMV, MKV, XviD and other containers. The player can also support most subtitle files, including Microsoft’s proprietary one. For streaming, the Popbox can recognize iTunes via Bonjour, and DLNA and UPnP sources.
At launch, the device will cost $130 for a wired version, or $150 for a Wi-Fi version.
Result for: MPEG
NEC has announced today that its video content identification technology will be supported in the upcoming MPEG-7 video standard, meaning content owners that release videos with the standard can “detect illegal copies” uploaded to the Internet almost instantly.
The company says each frame has its own unique signature, meaning that doing any editing to the file or analog or camera copies will completely alter the overall signature of the original video.
NEC says “these developments are expected to significantly reduce the time and cost of manual content inspections as well as improve the scale and accuracy of content assessment.”
Among the features of the video content identification technology are:
Accurate detection of copied or altered video content
Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.
A high detection rate and low false positive rate for all video contents
By estimating confidence of signatures generated from each frame and using the confidence for sequence identification, the technology achieves a high detection rate (*6) with a very low false positive rate (*7). These technologies achieved an average detection rate of 96% at a very low false alarm rate of 5ppm (5 in one million) through tests conducted by the international standardization organization.
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