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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

#81

Post by niczar »

blasdel wrote: post #54
buster wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 M…

> The patent licensing is dirt cheap, the people paying in are almost exclusively hardware makers

That is absolutely incorrect. The MPEG-LA even wants per unit royalties on decoders (as well as on encoders AND content providers).

This is simply incompatible with Free/Open Source Software, at least where SW Patents exist. Note that Chrome is not F/OSS even though it's 99.9% identical to Chromium that is. Firefox is 100% F/OSS.

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

#82

Post by bad_user »

CoreDumpling wrote: post #32
evgen wrote: post #4

Don't worry, Mozilla is taking a principled stand that will become the impetus for their final jump into irrelevance. If IE9 does what their recent noises regarding HTML5 have been suggesting then Mozilla will join Opera in the "cute but useless" category and Chrome & IE9 will divvy up the Firefox marketshare within three years.

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…

That's not necessarily the case.

Silverlight runs on top of IE6. Silverlight 3 has support for "plugable media codecs", which means that you can stream Theora/OGG content in Silverlight (I don't know if it can be hardware accelerated ... but it would work for non-HD content anyway).

Silverlight also has good browser/JS interoperability, which means it is possible to add support for HTML5 Theora in any IExplorer version without even asking the user if it wants to or not.

I couldn't find better references, but see here ...

http://www.atoker.com/blog/2010/02/04/html5-theora-video-cod...

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Mar-23-1.html

Penetration is already pretty good, and I'm pretty sure that within the next 2 years all IExplorer users will have Silverlight installed (Microsoft can always push it using their update mechanism).

You could do the same in Firefox ... add support for H.264 by using a Flash or a Silverlight applet in combination with a JS script that manipulates the HTML5 tags and communicates with the applet.

Since Silverlight is also running in Safari, you can add Theora support to it too (wouldn't work for iPhones, but still, it's pretty cool).

And it's all transparent. No confirmation dialogs.

It all depends on penetration rate of Silverlight of course, but recent stats (from riastats.com or statowl.com) puts it at ~ 45% ... jumping 10% from September (probably because of events like the Vancouver Olympics requiring it).

So web developers that are looking for a solution to streaming media that's standards compliant, can just do something like this.

Pretty ironic that the technical solution for this new format war comes from Microsoft.

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

#83

Post by GHFigs »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #65
ubernostrum wrote: post #61

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.

Then why do they still allow me to use Adobe's h.264 license?

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

#84

Post by sid0 »

ubernostrum wrote: post #61
allyt wrote: 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.

> which either already ships a licensed copy of the codec (Windows and OS X)

Only Windows 7 does.

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

#85

Post by GHFigs »

buster wrote: post #55
ubernostrum wrote: post #53

Earlier 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…

But think about it, what will happen then?

You make it sound like this is a hypothetical scenario, but the codec mandate was removed from the HTML5 spec last June.

The reality is that Microsoft will support h.264, Apple supports h.264, Google supports h.264 (and Theora). Opera currently supports only Theora, but their implementation can support h.264. Mozilla is the only browser vendor that willfully forbids its users from viewing h.264 (or any other format but Theora) in . In addition: Flash, Silverlight, and QuickTime all support h.264.

Bear in mind that the tag has always been codec agnostic and able to support multiple codecs in the same tag. The codec mandate was only to specify a common codec across all browsers, but there is no point in mandating something that won't be implemented.

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

#87

Post by blasdel »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #70
blasdel wrote: post #48

Earlier 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…

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…

Nokia's the one that's going to ship it, and shipping speaks louder than FUD. For some reason I thought Nokia was funding it too, but maybe their contributions to Mozilla are just patches to the browser.

Thanks for pointing out the ffmpeg VP3 decoder, which appears to have SSE2 optimizations and everything — yet another reason why Mozilla should be linking with libavcodec or GStreamer :)

I remember that the original libtheora alpha release was just the On2 BSD-licensed code dump rearranged with the copyright strings changed and working makefiles, but I can't find the original On2 tarball anywhere to confirm that. I just did some spelunking into their old SVN repo, the first few commits seem to be him checkpointing as he's working his way through munging the original files. The alphas just add library glue and their parochial container format fuckedness. The library infrastructure changes a lot more towards 1.0 but it doesn't look like any of the real codec implementation changes at all. http://svn.xiph.org/trunk/theora-old/

There being nothing absolutely forcing independent rewrites just means everyone sticks with one really shitty implementation they don't understand very well, instead of there being a whole spectrum of implementations competing with one another and calling them on their shit — that's how you get implementations like x264. DarkShikari has sassed the crappy commercial h.264 implementors, but he's got vitriol for the single-implementation proprietary codecs.

I'd love to see if someone can find anyone that really used VP3 pre-Theora, because I can't. There's announcements about them making the decoder available through various channels, and then they open-source it a year after 3.2 was shipped. The only thing I can find is this press release touting On2's use of it on a dot-bomb contract: http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=486&news_id=399

VP4 and VP5 fared only a little better, getting distributed in Winamp and Realplayer and getting shelved after a year. VP6 made them huge piles of money after it was bundled in Flash. VP7 got used for Skype's video chat. VP8 appears to complete the circle, with nobody using it that I can find.

Windows 7 was released a year ago. MS is shipping IE9 for Vista, so all those users will probably get the DirectShow codec. I think if you get it if you install the Zune software (it's always been supported on the hardware), or the Media Center stuff from the last several years. The Xbox 360 has shipped it since 2007.

I knew Microsoft were MPEGLA members (they have a huge stake in the VC-1 pool, after all), but I hadn't noticed that they have a big stake in the AVC/h.264 pool as well (Apple has one patent in it).

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

#88

Post by GHFigs »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #63
bcrescimanno wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bles…

You're saying it's anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests rather than go out of their way to support their competitors?

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

#89

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

IE9 is bundling the codecs (otherwise it wouldn't work on Vista). Mozilla is bundling codecs. Google Chrome is bundling codecs. Opera bundles codecs on all platforms but Linux.

Apple gets you to install Quicktime on Windows if you want video in Safari.

Any thoughts on why you'd want to support every codec under the sun (and pay licence fees for most of them) if the market externalities and network-effects lead to only one codec being used? Why argue for "choice" if you know that will lead to people being forced to support one particular codec?

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

#90

Post by blasdel »

kinetik wrote: post #75
blasdel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks, that's a lot clearer than it used to be.

I had found the 1099s a while back, but they stopped showing the whole picture after the Mozilla Corporation was created to take the revenue.

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