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Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video

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

#71

Post by blasdel »

dtf wrote: post #57
blasdel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spent millions promoting Theora to the exclusion of all else (they reinvent the wheel by linking directly with liboggplay, instead of using libavcodec or the platform DS/QT/GS like everyone else)

The salaries of all the cheerleaders and wheel-reinventors have to add up to something substantial. They've got piles of Google cash — they stopped begging for donations after their $60m search-referral windfall in 2006 got publicized, but they've gotten secretive about their financials after that.

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

#72

Post by kinetik »

blasdel wrote: post #48
buster wrote: 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…

The DSP decoder was implemented by David Schleef and funded by Mozilla. Nokia weren't involved with it at all. It was released last year, and you can use it right now: http://www.schleef.org/blog/2009/11/11/theora-on-ti-c64x-dsp...

FFmpeg has had an independent VP3 and Theora decoder for years. The history goes back to 2003. The source is here: http://git.ffmpeg.org/?p=ffmpeg;a=blob;f=libavcodec/vp3.c

The claim about VP3 never being licensed to a customer is pretty ridiculous. Do you have a source?

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

#73

Post by blasdel »

allyt wrote: post #60
blasdel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'd already read it when it was published along with the rest of the Mozilla employee apologia.

They don't have to bundle a h.264 decoder with the browser — Google is the only one that does that with their binaries (depending on how many transcoding machines they had for youtube, they may have already been paying the full license fee), and they're nice enough to dynamically link with libavcodec, so if you build it yourself you can just symlink to your platform's copy, and get every codec under the sun instead of just wav, mp3, aac, vorbis, h.264, and theora.

Apple and Microsoft just link with their native platform libraries (QT & DirectShow), and use the licensed codecs they already licensed to bundle so your computer can function in the real world.

Opera's using GStreamer on at least some of their platforms, but I think it's with a private copy. GStreamer would be a great fit for Mozilla if they'd get their heads out of their asses: they could even bundle their whole own private copy with only their foss-wank decoders. They don't even have to make it fall back to the platform libraries, as long as it's possible to drop in more decoders. They could even implement the same 'a proprietary plugin is missing' thing they do for Flash, and just download the binaries from the upstream developers (most of whom are based in western europe).

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

#74

Post by avar »

ubernostrum wrote: post #62
wazoox wrote: 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.

The issue isn't that it's technically impractical to support H.264 but rather that it's legally impractical.

Sure you could just offload the problem to the operating system via something like GStreamer but that just moves the target, it doesn't eliminate it. It just means anyone who distributes your OS gets into trouble rather than your browser distributor.

This is about eliminating the possibility of submarine patents for an essential feature like video, not just moving the target around.

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

#75

Post by kinetik »

blasdel wrote: post #71
dtf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to cough up $5 million to support Flash. That's a priniciple I can understand.

I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spent millions promoting Theora to the exclusion of all else (they reinvent the wheel by linking directly with liboggplay, instead of using libavcodec or the platform DS/QT/GS like everyone else) The salaries of all the cheerleaders and wheel-reinventors have to add up to something substantial. They've got piles of Google cash — they stopped begging for donations after their $60m sea…

Google will help you find more recent financial details. The 2008 financials are right here: http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-a...

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

#76

Post by barrkel »

blasdel wrote: post #71
dtf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to cough up $5 million to support Flash. That's a priniciple I can understand.

I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spent millions promoting Theora to the exclusion of all else (they reinvent the wheel by linking directly with liboggplay, instead of using libavcodec or the platform DS/QT/GS like everyone else) The salaries of all the cheerleaders and wheel-reinventors have to add up to something substantial. They've got piles of Google cash — they stopped begging for donations after their $60m sea…

I have little confidence in the stability of most video decoders in the face of corrupt data. The smaller the dependency set here, the better for stability.

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

#77

Post by barrkel »

blasdel wrote: post #73
allyt wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'd already read it when it was published along with the rest of the Mozilla employee apologia. They don't have to bundle a h.264 decoder with the browser — Google is the only one that does that with their binaries (depending on how many transcoding machines they had for youtube, they may have already been paying the full license fee), and they're nice enough to dynamically link with libavcodec, so if you build it yo…

IE dragging in random codecs is one of the reasons I don't use it. As it is in Firefox, I have realplayer and quicktime plugins disabled.

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

ubernostrum wrote: post #62
wazoox wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by rimantas »

fnid2 wrote: post #37

In the end, this was a good move from Google, Apple, and Microsoft if they want to kill off FireFox. Why do any of those three want FF to survive? They're rich, they got money. They want to dominate the browser market. FF is all of their enemies, so in this instance, they are friends. I don't see anyway that FF could compete against them all if people can't watch videos in the browser. Additionally, they are all owne…

Why would anyone want to kill something that looks suicidal anyway?

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

#80

Post by pingou »

tmsh wrote: post #43

I 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/di…

But who will make this extension ? Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use H264 on Firefox ? If H264 become standard, every browser will have to pay the license fee. What if a new team of developers decide that all browsers sucks and they want to create their own, just like the Mozilla team did ? They will have to pay 5 millions if they want to distribute a browser that people could really use (almost nobody would use a browser that doesn't play their favorite videos).
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