VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.
59-603: Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Google acquired On2 Technologies. Google provided an irrevocable patent promise on its patents for implementing the VP8 format, and released a specification of the format under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license . That same year, Google also released libvpx ,
118-476: A trade secret . Software can be made available with fewer restrictions on licensing or source-code access; software that satisfies certain conditions of freedom and openness is known as " free " or " open-source ." Since license agreements do not override applicable copyright law or contract law , provisions in conflict with applicable law are not enforceable. Some software is specifically licensed and not sold, in order to avoid limitations of copyright such as
177-507: A "mixed source" model including both free and non-free software in the same distribution. Most if not all so-called proprietary UNIX distributions are mixed source software, bundling open-source components like BIND , Sendmail , X Window System , DHCP , and others along with a purely proprietary kernel and system utilities. Some free software packages are also simultaneously available under proprietary terms. Examples include MySQL , Sendmail and ssh. The original copyright holders for
236-523: A February 21, 1997, internal Microsoft memo drafted for Bill Gates : Early versions of the iPhone SDK were covered by a non-disclosure agreement . The agreement forbade independent developers from discussing the content of the interfaces. Apple discontinued the NDA in October 2008. Any dependency on the future versions and upgrades for a proprietary software package can create vendor lock-in , entrenching
295-467: A Government Security Program (GSP) to allow governments to view source code and Microsoft security documentation, of which the Chinese government was an early participant. The program is part of Microsoft's broader Shared Source Initiative which provides source code access for some products. The Reference Source License (Ms-RSL) and Limited Public License (Ms-LPL) are proprietary software licenses where
354-494: A VP8 patent pool , without revealing the patents in question, and despite On2 having gone to great lengths to avoid such patents. In November 2011, the Internet Engineering Task Force published the informational RFC 6386, VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide. In March 2013, MPEG LA announced that it had dropped its effort to form a VP8 patent pool after reaching an agreement with Google to license
413-467: A VP8 (and VP9) codec is found in the programming library libvpx which is released as free software . It has a mode for one-pass and two-pass encoding , respectively, while the one-pass mode is known as being broken and not offering effective control over the target bitrate. Currently, libvpx is primary software library capable of encoding VP8 video streams, but at least one independent implementation exists in ffvp8enc . A Video for Windows wrapper of
472-401: A copy can decide whether, and how much, to charge for a copy or related services. Proprietary software that comes for no cost is called freeware . Proponents of commercial proprietary software argue that requiring users to pay for software as a product increases funding or time available for the research and development of software. For example, Microsoft says that per-copy fees maximize
531-451: A developer of the x264 encoder, gave several points of criticism for VP8, claiming that its specification was incomplete, and the performance of the encoder's deblocking filter was inferior to x264 in some areas. In its specification, VP8 should be a bit better than H.264 Baseline Profile and Microsoft's VC-1 . Encoding is somewhere between Xvid and VC-1. Decoding is slower than FFmpeg 's H.264, but this aspect can hardly be improved due to
590-564: A license for the Internet forum software vBulletin can modify the source for their own site but cannot redistribute it. This is true for many web applications, which must be in source code form when being run by a web server. The source code is covered by a non-disclosure agreement or a license that allows, for example, study and modification, but not redistribution. The text-based email client Pine and certain implementations of Secure Shell are distributed with proprietary licenses that make
649-413: A mixture of HTML5 and a freed VP8. Word of an impending open-source release announcement got out on April 12, 2010. On May 19, at its Google I/O conference, Google released the VP8 codec software under a BSD -like license and the VP8 bitstream format specification under an irrevocable free patent license. This made VP8 the second product from On2 Technologies to be opened, following their donation of
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#1732780552067708-560: A monopoly position. Proprietary software may also have licensing terms that limit the usage of that software to a specific set of hardware. Apple has such a licensing model for macOS , an operating system which is limited to Apple hardware, both by licensing and various design decisions. This licensing model has been affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit . Proprietary software which
767-424: A number of reasons why an individual would choose the form of an open letter, including the following reasons: Eric Kaufmann characterizes the authoring of open letters in academia calling for the dismissal of academics as a form of "hard authoritarianism" accompanying political correctness and cancel culture . Others associate open letters with bullying, divisiveness, safetyism (suppressing ideas to ensure
826-400: A reader's immediate emotional comfort), and a culture of complaining. Online open letters have some qualities in common with gossip , including the impossibility of un-saying what has been disseminated and its use by marginalized groups to complain about others. Open letters tend not to win hearts and minds , especially if there is a limited connection between the writers, the subject, and
885-481: A single user or computer. In some cases, software features are restricted during or after the trial period, a practice sometimes called crippleware . Proprietary software often stores some of its data in file formats that are incompatible with other software, and may also communicate using protocols which are incompatible. Such formats and protocols may be restricted as trade secrets or subject to patents . A proprietary application programming interface (API)
944-462: A software package may be ended to force users to upgrade and pay for newer versions ( planned obsolescence ). Sometimes another vendor or a software's community themselves can provide support for the software, or the users can migrate to either competing systems with longer support life cycles or to FOSS -based systems. Some proprietary software is released by their owner at end-of-life as open-source or source available software, often to prevent
1003-425: A technical measure, such as product activation , a product key or serial number, a hardware key , or copy protection . Vendors may also distribute versions that remove particular features, or versions which allow only certain fields of endeavor, such as non-commercial, educational, or non-profit use. Use restrictions vary by license: Vendors typically distribute proprietary software in compiled form, usually
1062-508: A technology advantage." Google claims that VP8 offers the "highest quality real-time video delivery" and Libvpx includes a mode where the maximum CPU resources possible will be used while still keeping the encoding speed almost exactly equivalent to the playback speed (realtime), keeping the quality as high as possible without lag. On the other hand, a review conducted by streamingmedia.com in May 2010 concluded that H.264 offers slightly better quality than VP8. In September 2010 Fiona Glaser,
1121-406: A work of free software, even copyleft free software, can use dual-licensing to allow themselves or others to redistribute proprietary versions. Non-copyleft free software (i.e. software distributed under a permissive free software license or released to the public domain) allows anyone to make proprietary redistributions. Free software that depends on proprietary software is considered "trapped" by
1180-484: Is a software library interface "specific to one device or, more likely to a number of devices within a particular manufacturer's product range." The motivation for using a proprietary API can be vendor lock-in or because standard APIs do not support the device's functionality. The European Commission , in its March 24, 2004, decision on Microsoft's business practices, quotes, in paragraph 463, Microsoft general manager for C++ development Aaron Contorer as stating in
1239-575: Is a traditional block-based transform coding format. It has much in common with H.264 , e.g. some prediction modes. At the time of first presentation of VP8, according to On2 the in-loop filter and the Golden Frames were among the novelties of this iteration. The first definition of such a filter is already found in the H.263 standard, though, and Golden Frames were already in use in VP5 and VP7. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) on 4×4 blocks and
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#17327805520671298-489: Is no longer marketed, supported or sold by its owner is called abandonware , the digital form of orphaned works . If the proprietor of a software package should cease to exist, or decide to cease or limit production or support for a proprietary software package, recipients and users of the package may have no recourse if problems are found with the software. Proprietors can fail to improve and support software because of business problems. Support for older or existing versions of
1357-412: Is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally. Open letters usually take the form of a letter addressed to an individual but are provided to the public through newspapers and other media, such as a letter to the editor or blog . Critical open letters addressed to political leaders are especially common. Two of the most famous and influential open letters are J'accuse...! by Émile Zola to
1416-436: Is not synonymous with commercial software , although the two terms are sometimes used synonymously in articles about free software. Proprietary software can be distributed at no cost or for a fee, and free software can be distributed at no cost or for a fee. The difference is that whether proprietary software can be distributed, and what the fee would be, is at the proprietor's discretion. With free software, anyone who has
1475-400: Is required for another party to use the software. In the case of proprietary software with source code available, the vendor may also prohibit customers from distributing their modifications to the source code. Shareware is closed-source software whose owner encourages redistribution at no cost, but which the user sometimes must pay to use after a trial period. The fee usually allows use by
1534-811: The FFmpeg Team announced the ffvp8 decoder. Through testing, they determined that ffvp8 was faster than Google's own libvpx decoder. The WebM Project hardware team released an RTL hardware decoder for VP8, that is releasable to semiconductor companies at zero cost. TATVIK Technologies announced a VP8 decoder that is optimized for the ARM Cortex-A8 processor. Marvell 's ARMADA 1500-mini chipset has VP8 SD and HD hardware decoding support (used in Chromecast ). Intel has full VP8 decoding support built into their Bay Trail chipsets . Intel Broadwell also adds VP8 hardware decoding support. Also on May 19, 2010,
1593-559: The Flash Player will support VP8 playback in a future release. On September 30, 2010, Google announced WebP , their new image format, on the Chromium blog. WebP is based on VP8's intra-frame coding and uses a container based on Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF). While H.264/MPEG-4 AVC contains patented technology and requires licenses from patent holders and limited royalties for hardware, Google has irrevocably released
1652-772: The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). VP8 can be multiplexed into the Matroska -based container format WebM along with Vorbis and Opus audio. The image format WebP is based on VP8's intra-frame coding. VP8's direct successor, VP9 , and the royalty-free AV1 codec from the Alliance for Open Media are based on VP8. VP8 only supports progressive scan video signals with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and 8 bits per sample . In its first public version, On2's VP8 implementation supports multi-core processors with up to 64 cores simultaneously. At least in
1711-777: The VP3 codec in 2002 to the Xiph.Org Foundation , from which they derived the Theora codec. In February 2011, MPEG LA invited patent holders to identify patents that may be essential to VP8 in order to form a joint VP8 patent pool . As a result, in March the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) started an investigation into MPEG LA for its role in possibly attempting to stifle competition. In July 2011, MPEG LA announced that 12 patent holders had responded to its call to form
1770-548: The Walsh–Hadamard transform (WHT) serve as basic frequency transforms. A maximum of three frames can be referenced for temporal prediction: the last Golden Frame (may be an intra frame), alternate reference frame, and the directly preceding frame. The so-called alternate reference frames (altref) can serve as reference-only frames for displaying them can be deactivated. In this case, the encoder can fill them with arbitrary useful image data, even from future frames, and thereby serve
1829-658: The WebM Project was launched, featuring contributions from "Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors" in a major effort to use VP8 as the video format for HTML5. In the WebM container format , the VP8 video is used with Vorbis or Opus audio. Internet Explorer 9 will support VP8 video playback if the proper codec is installed. Android is WebM-enabled from version 2.3 - Gingerbread. Since Android 4.0, VP8 could be read inside mkv and WebM could be streamed. Adobe also announced that
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1888-425: The first-sale doctrine . The owner of proprietary software exercises certain exclusive rights over the software. The owner can restrict the use, inspection of source code, modification of source code, and redistribution. Vendors typically limit the number of computers on which software can be used, and prohibit the user from installing the software on extra computers. Restricted use is sometimes enforced through
1947-468: The machine language understood by the computer's central processing unit . They typically retain the source code , or human-readable version of the software, often written in a higher level programming language . This scheme is often referred to as closed source. While most proprietary software is distributed without the source code, some vendors distribute the source code or otherwise make it available to customers. For example, users who have purchased
2006-515: The reference implementation of VP8, under the revised BSD license . Opera , Firefox , Chrome , Pale Moon , and Chromium support playing VP8 video in HTML video tag. Internet Explorer officially supports VP8 if the user has the DirectShow filter installed. According to Google, VP8 is mainly used in connection with WebRTC and as a format for short looped animations, as a replacement for
2065-414: The 21st century is the increasing prevalence of open letters with many signatories (similar to an online petition ). When academic scientists publish open letters about science, they may use some of the same features that they use in academic writing, such as seeking informal peer review before publication or believing that the act of communicating itself is a meritorious scholarly activity. There are
2124-625: The Free Software Foundation. This includes software written only for Microsoft Windows, or software that could only run on Java , before it became free software. Most of the software is covered by copyright which, along with contract law , patents , and trade secrets , provides legal basis for its owner to establish exclusive rights. A software vendor delineates the specific terms of use in an end-user license agreement (EULA). The user may agree to this contract in writing, interactively on screen ( clickwrap ), or by opening
2183-578: The President of France, accusing the French government of wrongfully convicting Alfred Dreyfus for alleged espionage; and Martin Luther King Jr. 's 1963 " Letter from Birmingham Jail ", including the famous quotation "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere". In previous centuries, letter writing was a significant form of communication. Letters were normally kept private between
2242-603: The VP8 codec based on the Google VP8 library ( FourCC : VP80) is available. The WebM Project hardware team in Finland released an RTL hardware encoder for VP8 that is available at no cost for semiconductor manufacturers. The Nvidia Tegra mobile chipsets have full VP8 hardware encoding and decoding (since Tegra 4 ). Nexus 5 could use hardware encoding libvpx is capable of decoding VP8 video streams. On July 23, 2010, Fiona Glaser, Ronald Bultje, and David Conrad of
2301-460: The VP8 patents it owns under a royalty-free public license. According to a comparison of VP8 (encoded with the initial release of libvpx) and H.264 conducted by StreamingMedia, it was concluded that "H.264 may have a slight quality advantage, but it's not commercially relevant" and that "Even watching side-by-side (which no viewer ever does), very few viewers could tell the difference". They also stated that "H.264 has an implementation advantage, not
2360-416: The box containing the software ( shrink wrap licensing ). License agreements are usually not negotiable . Software patents grant exclusive rights to algorithms, software features, or other patentable subject matter , with coverage varying by jurisdiction. Vendors sometimes grant patent rights to the user in the license agreement. The source code for a piece of proprietary software is routinely handled as
2419-406: The implementation (from August 2011), VP8 is comparatively badly adapted to high resolutions ( HD ). With only three reference frame buffers needed, VP8 enables decoder implementations with a relatively small memory footprint . The format features a pure intra mode, i.e. using only independently coded frames without temporal prediction, to enable random access in applications like video editing. VP8
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2478-447: The late 1960s, computers—especially large and expensive mainframe computers , machines in specially air-conditioned computer rooms—were usually leased to customers rather than sold . Service and all software available were usually supplied by manufacturers without separate charge until 1969. Computer vendors usually provided the source code for installed software to customers. Customers who developed software often made it available to
2537-619: The legal status of software copyright , especially for object code , was not clear until the 1983 appeals court ruling in Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp . According to Brewster Kahle the legal characteristic of software changed also due to the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 . Starting in February 1983 IBM adopted an " object-code -only" model for a growing list of their software and stopped shipping much of
2596-541: The nominal addressee. A close connection, such as university faculty writing to the university president about their hopes and goals for university students, is more likely to be effective at influencing a decision than an absent or distant connection, such as students writing to the internet at large about the students' beliefs about a political situation in a country that most of the students have never visited. Signatories may feel pressured to sign an open letter written by someone else instead of writing their own. Even if
2655-527: The patents that it alleges "may be essential" for VP8 implementation, and granted Google the right to sub-license these patents to any third-party user of VP8 or VP9 . This deal has cleared the way for possible MPEG standardisation as its royalty-free internet video codec, after Google submitted VP8 to the MPEG committee in January 2013. In March 2013, Nokia asserted a patent claim against HTC and Google for
2714-429: The profitability of software development. Proprietary software generally creates greater commercial activity over free software, especially in regard to market revenues. Proprietary software is often sold with a license that gives the end user right to use the software. Open letter An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that
2773-712: The public without charge. Closed source means computer programs whose source code is not published except to licensees. It is available to be modified only by the organization that developed it and those licensed to use the software. In 1969, IBM, which had antitrust lawsuits pending against it, led an industry change by starting to charge separately for mainframe software and services, by unbundling hardware and software. Bill Gates ' " Open Letter to Hobbyists " in 1976 decried computer hobbyists' rampant copyright infringement of software, particularly Microsoft's Altair BASIC interpreter, and asserted that their unauthorized use hindered his ability to produce quality software. But
2832-591: The same purpose as the b-frames of the MPEG formats. Similar macroblocks can be assigned to one of up to four (even spatially disjoint) segments and thereby share parameters like the reference frame used, quantizer step size, or filter settings. VP8 offers two different adjustable deblocking filters that are integrated into the codec loops (in-loop filtering). Many coding tools use probabilities that are calculated continuously from recent context, starting at each intra frames. Macro blocks can comprise 4×4, 8×8, or 16×16 samples. Motion vectors have quarter-pixel precision. VP8
2891-622: The sender and recipient. Consequently, an open letter, usually published in a newspaper or magazine, was a then-rare opportunity for the general public to see what a public figure was saying to another public figure. Open letters, published in newspapers, became more common in the late 19th century. In the 21st century, documents labeled open letters are common and similar to press releases , with large volumes of open letters being sent automatically to large volumes of newspapers and other publications. In other cases, blog posts and posts on social media are considered open letters. Another shift in
2950-460: The similarities to H.264. Compression-wise, VP8 offers better performance than Theora and Dirac . According to Glaser, the VP8 interface lacks features and is buggy, and the specification is not fully defined and could be considered incomplete. Much of the VP8 code is copy-pasted C code , and since the source constitutes the actual specification, any bugs will also be defined as something that has to be implemented to be in compliance. In 2010, it
3009-561: The software from becoming unsupported and unavailable abandonware . 3D Realms and id Software are famous for the practice of releasing closed source software into the open source . Some of those kinds are free-of-charge downloads ( freeware ), some are still commercially sold (e.g. Arx Fatalis ). More examples of formerly closed-source software in the List of commercial software with available source code and List of commercial video games with available source code . Proprietary software
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#17327805520673068-515: The software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA -bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms. Proprietary software is a subset of non-free software , a term defined in contrast to free and open-source software ; non-commercial licenses such as CC BY-NC are not deemed proprietary, but are non-free. Proprietary software may either be closed-source software or source-available software . Until
3127-484: The software. This is particularly common with certain programming languages . For example, the bytecode for programs written in Java can be easily decompiled to somewhat usable code, and the source code for programs written in scripting languages such as PHP or JavaScript is available at run time . Proprietary software vendors can prohibit the users from sharing the software with others. Another unique license
3186-402: The source code available. Some licenses for proprietary software allow distributing changes to the source code, but only to others licensed for the product, and some of those modifications are eventually picked up by the vendor. Some governments fear that proprietary software may include defects or malicious features which would compromise sensitive information. In 2003 Microsoft established
3245-476: The source code is made available . Governments have also been accused of adding such malware to software themselves. According to documents released by Edward Snowden , the NSA has used covert partnerships with software companies to make commercial encryption software exploitable to eavesdropping, or to insert backdoors . Software vendors sometimes use obfuscated code to impede users who would reverse engineer
3304-606: The source code, even to licensees. In 1983, binary software became copyrightable in the United States as well by the Apple vs. Franklin law decision, before which only source code was copyrightable. Additionally, the growing availability of millions of computers based on the same microprocessor architecture created for the first time an unfragmented and big enough market for binary distributed software. Software distributions considered as proprietary may in fact incorporate
3363-640: The use of VP8 in Android in a German court; however, on August 5, 2013, the webm project announced that the German court has ruled that VP8 does not infringe Nokia's patent. Nokia has made an official intellectual property rights (IPR) declaration to the IETF with respect to the VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide listing 64 granted patents and 22 pending patent applications. The reference implementation of
3422-475: Was announced that the WebM audio/video format would be based on a profile of the Matroska container format together with VP8 video and Vorbis audio. Proprietary software Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing
3481-488: Was first released by On2 Technologies on September 13, 2008, as On2 TrueMotion VP8, replacing its predecessor, VP7 . After Google acquired On2 in February 2010, calls for Google to release the VP8 source code were made. Most notably, the Free Software Foundation issued an open letter on March 12, 2010, asking Google to gradually replace the usage of Adobe Flash Player and H.264 on YouTube with
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