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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

#91

Post by ZeroGravitas »

GHFigs wrote: post #88
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Why would acting in their own interests be assumed to be pro-competitive?

The "invisible hand" that turns corporate self-interest into something socially beneficial only works when there is free competition and erecting barriers to entry (by excluding those who can't or won't pay patent fees) is by definition anti-competitive.

This is why countries like China are pushing for royalty-free standards. Even communist countries understand that open standards and competition are a benefit.

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

#92

Post by ZeroGravitas »

blasdel wrote: post #87
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nokia is almost certainly not going to ship any Theora or Vorbis support in any of their devices. This would be a substantial turnaround in their previous stance which their developer and open source relations folk have made clear is set as policy at a much higher level than they can do anything about. Maybe Meego will change this but I doubt it.

In the meantime though they have one of the few mobile systems where you can add your own system level code to support video and audio codecs of your choice so it's not all bad.

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

#93

Post by blasdel »

kinetik wrote: post #72
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…

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…

The DSP code was written for Mozilla Fennec to use, and the only platform using Fennec is the Nokia N900. Has Nokia shipped the decoder yet?

I just found that libavcodec implementation today — It looks leagues better than the Xiph implementation, but none of the FOSStard projects I've seen use it — most link directly with liboggplay, or if they're transcoders use ffmpeg to decode the input to feed to libtheora.

That's just the thing: I can't find a source to the contrary. On2 never bragged about licensing VP3 to a customer, just distribution of the decoder through Apple and Real's auto-download mechanisms, and one in-house hosting/consulting deal with TheStreet.com in 2000.

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

#94

Post by fungi »

ubernostrum wrote: post #40
fungi wrote: post #14

this 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…

> Every major operating system on the market today (including Linux) has a media framework with support available for H.264.

thats what i meant by support via the OS. sorry i thought that that was clear?

linux generally doesn't ship with h264 and html5 offers video features beyond just embedding a video smack on a page. really think its more complicated then a "pure ideological decision".

but thanks, point taken and i will try to make my point more clear in the future.

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

#95

Post by blasdel »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #89
blasdel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onl…

IE9 could always install it as a DirectShow filter on Vista like the Media Center stuff does. Google Chrome loosely bundles ffmpeg, which you can just swap out with one that isn't denuded. I don't think you can install Safari on Windows without Quicktime.

You'd ideally support every codec under the sun by falling back to the platform's API. That "choice" would probably lead to people being forced to support one particular codec (h.264 for now), but it means that they don't have to pay for it. It also takes it out of the total control of the browser vendors — so it provides a path for Dirac/etc. to take off in the future.

There's also the ability for minority codecs to persist without gross transcoding (you can always fall back to a download link + VLC, which is what you had before). One of the worst things about the Theora debacle is that nearly all of the video out there is extra-lossily transcoded from more efficient files.

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

#96

Post by blasdel »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #92
blasdel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nokia is almost certainly not going to ship any Theora or Vorbis support in any of their devices. This would be a substantial turnaround in their previous stance which their developer and open source relations folk have made clear is set as policy at a much higher level than they can do anything about. Maybe Meego will change this but I doubt it. In the meantime though they have one of the few mobile systems where yo…

Even if they keep up the FUD, they are shipping an open platform with an official Mozilla Fennec build, so Mozilla could implement the same kind of codec-downloader that they did for Flash.

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

#97

Post by bcrescimanno »

Robin_Message wrote: post #86

> I hope you can at least agree that going from two proprietary formats to one is a marked improvement. I think I'd argue one proprietary format is worse than two in terms of lock-in, monopoly power and misaligned incentives.

Not when, in the case of two formats, the formats aren't competing and one, in fact, includes the other.

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

#98

Post by DrJokepu »

bad_user wrote: post #82
CoreDumpling wrote: post #32

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…

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 versi…

You can't really stream Vorbis in Silverlight 3. Yes, you can plug in codecs, but there aren't any usable codec plugins available. There's one made by Mono that is way too buggy to be used in production and another one that's not even released yet, just promised in a blog post so might be just as well vaporware.

I'm not sure if there's anything for Theora at all and I don't think there ever will be, considering that Silverlight can legally play back H264 out of the box anyway and anyone who does stuff in Silverlight (and generally Microsoft stack) is probably a pragmatist and not an ideologist who worries about the "freeness" of codecs.

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

#99

Post by bad_user »

DrJokepu wrote: post #98
bad_user wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 versi…

You can't really stream Vorbis in Silverlight 3. Yes, you can plug in codecs, but there aren't any usable codec plugins available. There's one made by Mono that is way too buggy to be used in production and another one that's not even released yet, just promised in a blog post so might be just as well vaporware. I'm not sure if there's anything for Theora at all and I don't think there ever will be, considering that…

It's not there yet, but it is technically possible.

Of course the current implementation sucks, because it's an abandoned port of some Java code. But if someone cares enough about this, it can be implemented.

And you wouldn't need to be someone that does stuff in Silverlight ... all is needed is some Javascript/applet stored on some CDN that you can just drop in your HTML.

As far as ideologists go (thinking about services like Wikimedia here) ... what's better?

Using a proprietary plugin for those proprietary platforms that don't have Theora or using a patented format?

Life is full of compromises, you can't have it all.

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

#100

Post by spatulon »

kinetik wrote: post #28
reconbot wrote: post #26

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.

Chrome (and Chromium) ship with support for Ogg Theora and Vorbis. I'm not sure where this misconception comes from.

The misconception comes from Google not wanting to use Theora on Youtube.
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