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Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

briancrescimanno.com

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Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#21

Post by kinetik »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #17
fungi wrote: post #14

this really isn't fair mozilla is in no position to be directly supporting h264, to suggest otherwise is just naive. its not a free codec and they simply can't afford to bet their future on the liability of massive royalties when the licensing regime changes (and it will). their reasons for not indirectly supporting h264 via the OS is in my view valid but weak, would assume that this will be overcome with an extensio…

How do you account for them directly supporting GIF? I'm not disagreeing in principle; but history shows that Mozilla as an organization is capable of picking it's battles and even supporting patent encumbered formats if doing so will make the Web a better place. Being an employee of a one of the largest online video providers, I can assure you that both we and our customers see multiple encoding formats as a big dea…

GIF is a different situation. It was already a well established format before Unisys started enforcing the patent it held on it. The patent was a "submarine" patent, so it was not publically known before the format became widely used. It's also worth pointing out that the GIF fiasco was well underway (1993-1999) before Mozilla ever existed. The Mozilla organization formed in 1998, and was mostly influenced by the vast number of participating Netscape employees until 2002-2003. By 2003 Unisys's patent had expired.

If anything, Mozilla's stance towards H.264 is an attempt to avoid the web ending up in a similar situation it did with GIF, where the format was deeply entrenched before the companies controlling the licensing began asking users to pay license fees. The MPEG-LA's recent announcement that internet streaming would remain free until 2015 is a direct attempt to achieve further entrenchment of the format. There is a very real possibility that they will ask for licensing fees come 2015. And we have no idea how much they might cost. Even with free streaming, most of the people in the video production chain need to pay license fees to the MPEG-LA right now.

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#22

Post by bcrescimanno »

jmillikin wrote: post #20
bcrescimanno wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you account for them directly supporting GIF? I'm not disagreeing in principle; but history shows that Mozilla as an organization is capable of picking it's battles and even supporting patent encumbered formats if doing so will make the Web a better place. Being an employee of a one of the largest online video providers, I can assure you that both we and our customers see multiple encoding formats as a big dea…

The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented. People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html

The Mozilla appsuite was released as a 1.0 product in 2002 Firefox was released as a 1.0 product in 2004

The last GIF patents expired in 2006 (the first, in 2003 after the 1.0 version of the Mozilla App Suite)

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#23

Post by jmillikin »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #7
docgnome wrote: post #5

I like how Mozilla gets all the blame for refusing to support a non-free solution, instead of Google, Apple, and Microsoft for choosing a proprietary solution.

I'd personally contend that MS, Apple, and Google didn't "choose proprietary," they chose 1) the current market leading format 2) ...that has the most video content available online already 3) ...that can be hardware accelarated 4) ...that offers the best quality to size ratio.

I don't think it's fair to blame Google here -- after all, Chrome supports Theora and Vorbis natively. If they want to pay for licenses, that's their decision.

The problem is when a browser doesn't support Theora/Vorbis at all, such as Safari or current news regarding IE9. I'm personally hoping that the released version of IE9 will support Theora/Vorbis -- very unlikely, but a man can dream.

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#25

Post by jmillikin »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #22
jmillikin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented. People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html

The Mozilla appsuite was released as a 1.0 product in 2002 Firefox was released as a 1.0 product in 2004 The last GIF patents expired in 2006 (the first, in 2003 after the 1.0 version of the Mozilla App Suite)

Looking further, there were no patents on GIF decoders (from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html >). So Mozilla was completely in the clear.

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#26

Post by reconbot »

jmillikin wrote: post #23
bcrescimanno wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd personally contend that MS, Apple, and Google didn't "choose proprietary," they chose 1) the current market leading format 2) ...that has the most video content available online already 3) ...that can be hardware accelarated 4) ...that offers the best quality to size ratio.

I don't think it's fair to blame Google here -- after all, Chrome supports Theora and Vorbis natively. If they want to pay for licenses, that's their decision. The problem is when a browser doesn't support Theora/Vorbis at all , such as Safari or current news regarding IE9. I'm personally hoping that the released version of IE9 will support Theora/Vorbis -- very unlikely, but a man can dream.

I'm really confused why chrome (and now IE9) doesn't support Theora/Vorbis when it's FREE and USEFUL for them to do so. I think I'm missing something.

I do know if you build your own Chromium you can use a non neutered library of ffmpeg and play every codec it supports instead of just mp4.

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#27

Post by kinetik »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #22
jmillikin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented. People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html

The Mozilla appsuite was released as a 1.0 product in 2002 Firefox was released as a 1.0 product in 2004 The last GIF patents expired in 2006 (the first, in 2003 after the 1.0 version of the Mozilla App Suite)

There was only one patent, for LZW, but it was held in multiple countries. It first expired in 2003, and had expired in the last country by 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format#Uni...

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#28

Post by kinetik »

reconbot wrote: post #26
jmillikin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to blame Google here -- after all, Chrome supports Theora and Vorbis natively. If they want to pay for licenses, that's their decision. The problem is when a browser doesn't support Theora/Vorbis at all , such as Safari or current news regarding IE9. I'm personally hoping that the released version of IE9 will support Theora/Vorbis -- very unlikely, but a man can dream.

I'm really confused why chrome (and now IE9) doesn't support Theora/Vorbis when it's FREE and USEFUL for them to do so. I think I'm missing something. I do know if you build your own Chromium you can use a non neutered library of ffmpeg and play every codec it supports instead of just mp4.

Chrome (and Chromium) ship with support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis. I'm not sure where this misconception comes from.

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#29

Post by vrode »

fungi wrote: post #14

this really isn't fair mozilla is in no position to be directly supporting h264, to suggest otherwise is just naive. its not a free codec and they simply can't afford to bet their future on the liability of massive royalties when the licensing regime changes (and it will). their reasons for not indirectly supporting h264 via the OS is in my view valid but weak, would assume that this will be overcome with an extensio…

I believe that by 2015, when the free use license of H264 will end, we'll have another more powerful encoding algorithms ready to take its place. So losing this battle may allow open-source community still to win the war.

Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

#30

Post by vrode »

jmillikin wrote: post #20
bcrescimanno wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you account for them directly supporting GIF? I'm not disagreeing in principle; but history shows that Mozilla as an organization is capable of picking it's battles and even supporting patent encumbered formats if doing so will make the Web a better place. Being an employee of a one of the largest online video providers, I can assure you that both we and our customers see multiple encoding formats as a big dea…

The GIF patents expired while Firefox was still in early development. And it was not the GIF format itself which was patented, but a particular compression algorithm used with it -- decoders, as used in Mozilla, were not patented. People could (and did) create uncompressed GIFs to avoid the patent risk. For obvious reasons, uncompressed H.264 is not useful. [1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html

What about Flash then?
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