Editing Software webm and webp discussion. Have you noticed this new format?

[Beanie Draws]

I've noticed in the last year, google is serving out more of it's image result downloads as webp format (I assume that's short for webpicture format) and interestingly, I've noticed webm (webmovie) is a growingly popular format. Maybe webm is a bit like MKV or FLV files. It's an interesting format that I don't know a lot about yet. I know Apple have been working on some lossless image formats that save smaller than JPEG which I haven't seen much more about yet, but this webp format is definitely making the rounds and is very similar to JPG.

One thing I've noticed is like .MOV, the new .webm format doesn't seem to be supported by many editing software yet, because it's such a new format, but considering this is the second decade of internet being fairly mainstream, the internet will evolve with it's formats, like abandoning flash, html5, mkv being a big format over the last 10 years or so, and now .webm format.

Do you know much more about it? All I know from reading is that it's a google developed file format, and they're working on making codecs available for windows 10 to make editing easier to work with (especially important for downloading movie trailers etc to react to) So what's your thoughts? have you noticed it?

 

[SILTHW]

I've been following it a bit as it is one of the formats supported by HTML5. While there is a lot of "built specifically for the web" marketing surrounding it, the real effort is about creating a 100% royalty- and patent-free container format (and image format). The video and audio CODECs specified by webm are specifically royalty- and patent-free.

The reason it is important goes back to the old GIF days when Unisys decided to enforce their patent rights on the LZW compression used by GIF. H.264/265 are all standards but encumbered with patents and IP that is in-theory donated to the standards group, however there is a company that was stood up just to manage the MPEG patents.

Worth noting that MPEG LA claims that the VP8 CODEC used by webm infringes on their patents. That alone tells you why getting this right matters to the future of the web.

 

[tropicthunder]

if I'm not wrong, that webm format is smaller in size while still keeping the audio/video quality.

 

[SILTHW]

if I'm not wrong, that webm format is smaller in size while still keeping the audio/video quality.

More efficient might be another way to say it. It's designed to not require as much processing power to decode. But also designed for the web and streaming, versus repurposing formats designed for broadcast quality video.

 

[Beanie Draws]

I've been following it a bit as it is one of the formats supported by HTML5. While there is a lot of "built specifically for the web" marketing surrounding it, the real effort is about creating a 100% royalty- and patent-free container format (and image format). The video and audio CODECs specified by webm are specifically royalty- and patent-free.

The reason it is important goes back to the old GIF days when Unisys decided to enforce their patent rights on the LZW compression used by GIF. H.264/265 are all standards but encumbered with patents and IP that is in-theory donated to the standards group, however there is a company that was stood up just to manage the MPEG patents.

Worth noting that MPEG LA claims that the VP8 CODEC used by webm infringes on their patents. That alone tells you why getting this right matters to the future of the web.

That's right, I remember reading about that. It's actually kindof scary just how patented codecs are becoming, although I guess I can understand why. But because of how widespread webm is starting to become, I wonder what the implications would be if the infringment of patent actually goes deeper. Could it potentially mean the sudden death to many videos encoded in the codec? Or would that simply have to be a thing Google worries about, and the regular content creator will be more or less uneffected, if not having a temporary halt in access to videos encoded in that codec?

 

[SILTHW]

That's right, I remember reading about that. It's actually kindof scary just how patented codecs are becoming, although I guess I can understand why. But because of how widespread webm is starting to become, I wonder what the implications would be if the infringment of patent actually goes deeper. Could it potentially mean the sudden death to many videos encoded in the codec? Or would that simply have to be a thing Google worries about, and the regular content creator will be more or less uneffected, if not having a temporary halt in access to videos encoded in that codec?

I think it hurts the "small guy" more than the big companies. Much harder for the small guy to invest the money in distributed CODEC systems to do large bulk processing.

One of the last major projects I worked on at a major media company was something they called "media monorail" which was a massive transcoding system that could transcode from just about any format to just about any format in near real time. Since that was built around 2006-2007, I imagine the ability of that company to transcode is even better and faster.

That solves the "broadcast" side but moving stored video would be a bigger issue.

tl;dr - transcoding the stream format should be simple. Transcoding the library of stored videos would suck.

 

[Beanie Draws]

Here's a little bit of discussion of the webm format being implemented into Davinci Resolve https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=131091