I think the Mozilla folks are just trying to make a point here but ultimately it's hard to see how they back it up against IE/WebKit. They'll have to give in eventually or they'll be left behind.
Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#42Earlier 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.
You're right of course. Free vs Non-Free had nothing to do with it. I just really hate how everyone is hating on Mozilla for making a choice that is consistent with their principles.
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Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#43I imagine I'm missing something. But why couldn't Mozilla use an extension that supports H264? Similar to Ubuntu's nonfree packages?
I imagine the HTML5 video tags are pretty deep in Gecko, but surely they could 'pave the way' with a clear interface for such an extension. And then use one that is developed by others. Isn't that one of the advantages of having a standardized tag?
Reading this: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codec...
It sounds like Mozilla is worried about (a) encouraging a non-free web and (b) passing on licensing fees to other people who use their product downstream. But surely there is less risk in being 'side-stream' so to speak with licensed technologies, esp. under a standardized markup. Anyway, curious legal issue.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#44Things I don't understand:
* Fork?
* H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin?
Why aren't these valid solutions?
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#45Firefox has been slowly winning Joe consumers in the past few years by simply doing it better. Faster, less complicated, no spyware, displays everything. Regular users don't give a crap about the ideology behind any of those decisions, they just cared that FF sucks less than IE in almost every measurable way.
From a consumer standpoint, not playing the video format everyone else plays goes against why so many started using FF in the first place.
I don't care if Theora is great, it's not what people are using right now. Maybe Mozilla can fight this battle on the next go-round, but right now they're the odd man out in a split which has all major browsers and many many content creators on the other side.
If Mozilla was Microsoft they could maybe try this, but they're not, and I think many people are frustrated by this video thing because to people who "just want good software," that was the message behind adopting FF from day one. Not militant idealism or everything should be free hippie coder talk or anything else - the impression they gave at least, was of practical and clean decisions to uncomplicated the lives of average users. Sometimes that means going with the flow, even if only for the time being.
The moment they reintroduce "why doesn't this just work" into the equation, they fail at the expectation they spent so much trying to create when Firefox first caught on. This fight is weird because it feels like "Mozilla the ideological open source organization" is battling against "Mozilla the practical and uncomplicated software for your previously complicated and annoying life" marketing campaign.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#46Earlier 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.
You're right of course. Free vs Non-Free had nothing to do with it. I just really hate how everyone is hating on Mozilla for making a choice that is consistent with their principles.
They have a custom auto-installer for Flash baked into Firefox, and they've even distributed the binaries to it from addons.mozilla.org.
Nobody that hasn't already been wanking over it is going to start using Theora. Authors will just fall back to Flash playing h.264 in mp4 containers via HTTP like they've been doing for years, which Mozilla is eager to support.
There's nothing consistent about their principles.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#47this 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…
To suggest that the only way to handle H.264 is to directly write and ship a codec for it is such an uninformed position that I'm surprised you're sitting at a positive score. Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264. Mozilla's policy is to refuse to delegate to the OS for media handling, largely so that they'll have a political bargaini…
So, then can you enlighten us a bite more? Personally i have read pretty much every kind of "myth" about mpeg licensing.
One blog post i remember was "according to their terms you (theoretically) would have to pay when a friend sends a video with copyrighted material to you" which more or less sounds like "wherever there is mpeg video they have the right to demand fees" (because even your holiday movie may contain a copyrighted soundtrack).
According to http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalti... there are "royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video". And this is just what is happening in the internet all over the place. Firefox can't even know if you look a "free" broadcast or just paid for an online stream, so they just have to pay to support this codec?
And in the end, it's not at last the uncertainty about the codec. MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our codec in HTML5". Afaik, they didn't. Because there probably is quite a good amount of money to be earned from fees.
Screw that H.264 stuff, support theora or dirac and problems are solved.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I think the "chrome" in your post is a typo, do you mean Safari?) Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware decoder. They bluster a bit about submarine patents, but really, their refusal boils down to the iPhone. If desktop Safari supports Theora and the iPhone doesn't, users will complain. If playing some videos on the iPhone uses the battery faster than advertised, us…
It's funny how one can see that you are a mac/iPhone user.. You are, aren't you? ;) No, Apple stated that they don't support Theora "claiming that the lack of known patents on Theora doesn't rule out the threat of submarine patents that could eventually be used against adopters." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the... They also said that they have no hardwaredecoder, but this is just an excus…
It's not 'just an excuse' — the fosstards+Nokia only started working on a DSP decoder in the last year, and haven't shipped anything yet.
Before that there were ZERO independent efforts at implementing Theora decoders — there was the original On2 code dump, and a transliteration of that to Java called Cortado (used in an applet player by Wikimedia). There are no independent encoders, just the original code dump and a deshittifying refactoring (v1.1, Thusnelda) that was just released a few months ago.
Before it was tied as an anchor around the necks of the FOSS partisans, Theora was a really awful totally proprietary (in the original sense) codec. It was open sourced because it was never once licensed to a customer, and On2 only pushed one codec at a time (they never improved them, just forked off a new one).
As for the patents, MS has been shipping h.264 decoders with their OSes for a while now (they always left MPEG2 decoding the OEMs to bundle until recently too). Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#49Things I don't understand: * Fork? * H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin? Why aren't these valid solutions?
Yes, someone could fork Gecko + XULrunner + Firefox; but it is a huge pain-in-the-ass to even track it as upstream, much less diverge from it.
It's purposefully architected to make a plugin very unsavory — you could do it with a plugin/extension that inspected every DOM for failed embeds, dynamically replacing them with an of its own NSAPI plugin. You'd be guaranteed to get FOUC, poor detectablity, and regular breakage. At that point the author is better off just seamlessly falling back to Flash.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny how one can see that you are a mac/iPhone user.. You are, aren't you? ;) No, Apple stated that they don't support Theora "claiming that the lack of known patents on Theora doesn't rule out the threat of submarine patents that could eventually be used against adopters." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the... They also said that they have no hardwaredecoder, but this is just an excus…
It's not 'just an excuse' — the fosstards+Nokia only started working on a DSP decoder in the last year, and haven't shipped anything yet. Before that there were ZERO independent efforts at implementing Theora decoders — there was the original On2 code dump, and a transliteration of that to Java called Cortado (used in an applet player by Wikimedia). There are no independent encoders, just the original code dump and a…
I see, h.264 support is a really bad idea.
With "Apple actually has patents in the h.264 licensing pool!" you scared atleast me away. So one competitor has patents and the competition should use that too? nooo, sir.
So, dirac it shall be then?
edit: Also you mention technical reason. My reasoning still is: This is not about technical reasons it is a pure political decision to get rid of competition in a shameless way. You don't want to tell me that two of the biggest software companies in the world which did their own codecs (quicktime, wmv) arent capable of shipping a decent theora decoder in their browsers? It's just a stupid manager decision in the likes of "haha, mozilla can't/won't pay mpeg fees, we'll use that".