Mozilla is waiting for google to open source On2's codec.
Noone really wants On2's proprietary codec implementations — that got us the Theora shitpile.
What we could use is their independent patent portfolio.
Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
51–60 of 134 posts
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#52This is utterly stupid. Mozilla can't support H264 and distribute freely its browser and conform to the (moronic) US law. This guy can whine as long as he want, there is no way around. Mozilla is a real US company with real money, not a couple of hackers in a garage; unfortunately they must comply to the unfortunate state of patent laws.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor, because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support and licensing be the OS vendor's problem.
But since you mention it:
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.
Personally I'm against having HTML5 specify any codec of any sort. HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 are each over ten years old now, and HTML5 won't be broadly usable as a replacement for at least another year or two; given the rate of development in video codecs, mandating one in a spec with that sort of expected lifespan would simply be stupid.
But it's worth pointing out that MPEG-LA is currently exempting H.264-encoded online video from royalties (so long as it's provided free of charge to users -- hence YouTube and other video sites don't have to pay every time a video is played), and will continue to do so until at least 2015 (by which point the whole question of software patents may be moot), so rushing to draw lines in the sand now is -- as I already said -- rather premature.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers, shipping hundreds of millions of embedded devices a year. Apple having a few patents in the pool just makes a janitorial-sized line-item in their budget even cheaper since they get payments back too. Apple has paid to license a suite of codecs for every install since the dawn of Quicktime (though they charged $20 for an MPEG2 encoder for a long time), supporting h.264 costs them nothing — they already paid a nickel for your iTunes install.
Dirac is terrific, but it'll be another few years before it's ready; and it'll be much longer before the available bandwidth and demand for quality exists — it'll pick up among people pirating 1080p video, but it doesn't scale down enough for the youtubes of the world.
QuickTime is not a codec and never has been, it's a container, which happens to have been standardized as the MPEG4 container, because it doesn't suck ass like everything else (save Matroska). WMV is mostly a container too — they had a good 'proprietary' WMV codec called VC-1, but they got pwned with submarine patents after they lobbied it into the HD standards war.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor, because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support and licensing be the OS vendor's problem. But since you mention it: MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our cod…
Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service. Vimeo has premium subscription.
Ok, so you don't want to specify the codec. Technically a good reason. But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora. This is a freaking nightmare for every enduser! Now on a desktop you can probably tell the user to install the correct decoder (my family/mother/older people certainly would never be able to do that!). But on a phone? So Windows Mobile 7 will ship with "hardcoded" wmv support? iPhone with quicktime?
As i told you, this is not technical, it's political. Now i don't know you, but when you have ever worked in a bigger revenue driven software company every f*cking decision is first made by money. It doesnt matter if something is technically the best solution as long as another solution provides a "benefit" in terms of money, marketshare, whatever the manager thinks will drive the competition away. MS in particular has proven to be driven by such decisions in the past, why would they change now?
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#56Things I don't understand: * Fork? * H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin? Why aren't these valid solutions?
Because you need to pay licensing fees measured in "millions of USD per year" if you're going to distribute software which decodes H.264.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They don't have to cough up $5 million to support Flash. That's a priniciple I can understand.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you'll notice I was talking about the point of view of a browser vendor, because H.264 licensing is irrelevant to that use case: the right thing to do is delegate to the operating system's media framework, and let codec support and licensing be the OS vendor's problem. But since you mention it: MPEG-LA could just have said "Alright guys, browsers are free of charge, go ahead with HTML5, we'd like to see our cod…
Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service. Vimeo has premium subscription. Ok, so you don't want to specify the codec. Technically a good reason. But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora. This is a freaking nightmare for every enduser! Now on a desktop you can probably tell the…
Last time i checked there a lot of video services out there with subscription/premium service.
Vimeo doesn't charge to watch videos, so far as I know, and that's what triggers the licensing exemption.
But think about it, what will happen then? MS will support wmv by default, Apple will support Quicktime by default, Mozilla theora.
If HTML5 were to mandate Theora support, that part of the spec would simply be ignored by browser vendors who don't want to support Theora. Thus the mandate or lack of mandate in the spec produces no practical difference whatsoever in the end result: Apple's browsers would do H.264, Mozilla's browsers would do Theora, etc., etc.
But on a phone?
Again, it seems unlikely that anyone other than Mozilla will bother with Theora on mobile devices. Apple and Nokia have already taken pretty clear stances against supporting Theora, for example, so what good would it do to put a mandate in the spec? It'll just be ignored.
As i told you, this is not technical, it's political.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of how web standards actually work; without buy-in from the companies which will implement them, the standards might as well not exist at all. That's why HTML5 currently doesn't mandate a video codec; originally it required Theora support, but several major players basically said "if you leave that in there we're just going to ignore it".
Since this is a recurring problem with what you seem to be saying, what's your solution? Any approach to video codecs must take into account the fact that browser vendors can't be forced to ship an implementation of any particular codec, and will make their own decisions independently of what you might like them to do. As far as I can see right now, delegating to the operating system's media framework is the only way to get the sort of broad support that's needed, since those frameworks have to ship with a wide range of codecs already.
(and, honestly, the manual codec install really only turns out to be an issue with Theora; Windows and OS X both ship pretty much everything else out of the box)
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#59Earlier 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.
Supporting Theora is not free. There may be no licensing costs, but every feature costs developer time, testing time, increases the surface area for bugs and so on. In a hobby project there may be no financial cost - but in commercial software there certainly is.
Re: Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ugh. Please, read the other side of the "argument", I was going to say "research", but seriously, the information is 5 seconds of google-fu away: http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codec...