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Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

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61–70 of 134 posts

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

#61
post #56

Things 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.

Or you just delegate to the OS, which either already ships a licensed copy of the codec (Windows and OS X) or has users who ignore patents and install unlicensed codecs (Linux). By doing this you incur a whopping license fee of... zero dollars, because licensing becomes someone else's problem.

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

#62
post #52

This 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.

I'm going to go round to the homes of everyone who assumes that shipping a hard-wired copy of a codec in a browser is the only way to support video, and smack them all upside the head with a printout of the source to gstreamer.

It won't cause them any sort of enlightenment, but it will make me feel a bit better.

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

none of those change the fact that they "chose proprietary"

Sure--but they chose pragmatically. Proprietary vs. open was not as major a factor as say; not forcing 9 of 10 businesses to re-encode all of their video if they want it to work with Firefox.

Yes, it's entirely pragmatic for Apple and Microsoft to choose an option that can't be implemented in Free Software or even free software produced by small companies. Anti-competitive actions are always pragmatic if you're not going to get punished for them.

I don't really blame them though. The US government allows software patents and has a terrible patent system that massively favours entrenched interests and blessed the MPEG patent pool which created the current mess. (Bear in mind that the US government spent most of the 20th century breaking up patent pools because they were anti-competitive).

People say "there's too many patents around video codecs" but no one stops to ask why. The answer is because anyone who gets a patent into MPEG gets an equal cut of the profits, doesn't matter how small, useless or even counter-productive your idea is. It all adds to the patent thicket that prevents competition.

How can anyone say with a straight face that they are choosing a bureaucratic monopoly because quality is so important to them?

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, my sarcasm meter needs some calibration. While HTML5 video driving forward web standards is certainly nice, I can't even bring myself to believe that we will rid ourselves of the rotting carcass that is IE6 within the next three years, let alone Flash as a video delivery platform. I don't think Mozilla feels threatened yet, but we'll see if they change their minds once they see this affecting their bottom line…

Opera is sort of "cute but useless" -- on some sites I maintain for non-technical users, Opera has a smaller market share than IE5. IE6 will probably be around until we're all dead of age.

I'm guessing your not in Eastern Europe?

I'm guessing you are in the US since their denizens are famous for assuming the world stops outside their borders.

Opera + Chrome + Mozilla (i.e. Theora supporting) market share varies by region but is probably over 50% in every european country bar the UK and that will probably topple with the browser ballot.

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

#65
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or you just delegate to the OS, which either already ships a licensed copy of the codec (Windows and OS X) or has users who ignore patents and install unlicensed codecs (Linux). By doing this you incur a whopping license fee of... zero dollars, because licensing becomes someone else's problem.

It's not someone else's problem if your stated mission is to be "dedicated to promoting and preserving an open, shared and innovative web."

It's like a shareholder owned corporation deciding that making money is someone else's problem.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you just delegate to the OS, which either already ships a licensed copy of the codec (Windows and OS X) or has users who ignore patents and install unlicensed codecs (Linux). By doing this you incur a whopping license fee of... zero dollars, because licensing becomes someone else's problem.

It's not someone else's problem if your stated mission is to be "dedicated to promoting and preserving an open, shared and innovative web." It's like a shareholder owned corporation deciding that making money is someone else's problem.

It is an ideological issue; look at my other comments and you'll see me saying that.

My problem with comments like the one I was replying to is that they refuse to see this; there is an easy solution to the financial issue of codec licensing, but it keeps getting thrown out as a red herring, when the focus should be on whether Mozilla's ideological stance is a good thing.

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

#67

Things I don't understand: * Fork? * H.264 HTML Video support via a plugin? Why aren't these valid solutions?

It's a valid solution for a client. For a web developer, chances are that your visitor isn't using the fork and hasn't installed the plugin. This means that web sites won't be able to rely on HTML5 to deliver video, and so will use something else (such as Flash).

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not someone else's problem if your stated mission is to be "dedicated to promoting and preserving an open, shared and innovative web." It's like a shareholder owned corporation deciding that making money is someone else's problem.

It is an ideological issue; look at my other comments and you'll see me saying that. My problem with comments like the one I was replying to is that they refuse to see this; there is an easy solution to the financial issue of codec licensing, but it keeps getting thrown out as a red herring, when the focus should be on whether Mozilla's ideological stance is a good thing.

they refuse to see this

Nah, just hadn't read up/thought about the issue enough, thanks for explaining. I'm actually a bit of a supporter of software patents, as they give business reason to invest boatloads of money in things like H.264 to begin with.

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

None the less, Chrome _does_ support Theora (and Vorbis).

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

#70
post #48
post #38

Earlier 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…

You've got quite a few facts wrong in this short rant.

Nokia isn't working on a Theora DSP decoder. In fact Nokia along with Apple were among the strongest voices against including Theora as an interoperable baseline codec in HTML5. (It was revealed, but only later, that Nokia are, like Apple, in the MPEG patent pool). Mozilla are writing the software needed for "hardware" decode on the n900 and similar platforms.

If a DSP decoder counts as an independent Theora decoder then there's several other things that would count too. I would have thought the ffmpeg Theora/VP3 decoder would have counted by any measure.

The On2 code was rewritten, even for Theora 1.0. Theora 1.1 was another major rewrite but mostly of the encoder (though that work also made the decoder faster).

While more an omission or curious framing than an incorrect fact it could be suggested that since Theora is BSD licenced then there is little need for anyone to rewrite it. This is unlike, for example, H.264 where there is no liberally licensed reference implementation (and some experts from x264 think that most independent implementations are atrocious since the spec is easy to mess up). So you seem to have portrayed a strength as a weakness here.

You (or someone else round here) have claimed before that VP3 was never licensed to a paying customer and this is why it was released as open source. I don't think this even makes logical sense, but moreover I believe it to be entirely untrue. Do you have a source for this surprising claim? (The official On2 line from the guy who suggested it is that they open sourced VP3 to "scorch the earth" for competitors as they moved onto the next generation codec)

On2 backported changes introduced in VP6-8 and VP6 improved measurably as a result.

Microsoft only introduced H.264 decoders in Windows 7.

Microsoft are also MPEG patent pool members.

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