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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

#111

Post by jmillikin »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #64
jmillikin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Why do Opera users always say something like this? "Opera (and the important browsers) has some huge market share!" 0.2 + 18 + 43 > 50, but the 0.2 really doesn't matter.

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

#113

Post by ZeroGravitas »

jmillikin wrote: post #111
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Opera + Chrome + Mozilla (i.e. Theora supporting) market share varies by region but is probably over 50% in every european country bar the UK Why do Opera users always say something like this? "Opera (and the important browsers) has some huge market share!" 0.2 + 18 + 43 > 50, but the 0.2 really doesn't matter.

I phrased it like that because the individual share varies by country and the article is about HTML5 video and Theora which is a cross browser issue. I have never heard anyone use that kind of phrase before, even though I think they should for any discussion of browser standards support. Especially now the IE-Firefox duo are being challenged in the US by Safari and worldwide by Chrome, and doubly-especially in Europe.

This is important in the case of say Russia in which the top four browsers are Opera with 32.8%, Firefox with 30.8%, IE with 28.43% and Chrome with 5.71% (data from http://gs.statcounter.com/)

Just looking at the Firefox stats here and ignoring Opera would be highly misleading regarding viability of Theora in this market which is near 70% (assuming up-to-date browsers).

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

#114

Post by driax »

jmillikin wrote: post #111
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Opera + Chrome + Mozilla (i.e. Theora supporting) market share varies by region but is probably over 50% in every european country bar the UK Why do Opera users always say something like this? "Opera (and the important browsers) has some huge market share!" 0.2 + 18 + 43 > 50, but the 0.2 really doesn't matter.

Wikipedia says that: "[Opera has] 20–25% market share in Russia, 25-30% Ukraine, and 5–9% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic"

A bit more than 0.2

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

#115

Post by lolcraft »

GHFigs wrote: post #107
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communis…

Forgive me for not understanding, but if I can ask for further clarification-- In your last post, you said: " Anti-competitive actions are always pragmatic if you're not going to get punished for them. " From this, I conclude that when you say "anti-competitive", you are referring to actions that ought to be punished. Then, I asked if it was anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests…

Then, I asked if it was anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests instead of aiding competitors, to which you say yes.

No you didn't. The question you asked was, and I quote: "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?" Note you used supporting, a passive role, rather than aiding, which is active. To state the obvious: your mistake was assuming that the process of synonymy strictly preserves meaning, which isn't the case.

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

#116

Post by KirinDave »

buster wrote: post #38
jmillikin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I think the "chrome" in your post is a typo, do you mean Safari?) Apple doesn't support Theora in Safari because the iPhone doesn't have a Theora hardware decoder. They bluster a bit about submarine patents, but really, their refusal boils down to the iPhone. If desktop Safari supports Theora and the iPhone doesn't, users will complain. If playing some videos on the iPhone uses the battery faster than advertised, us…

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…

What this all dances around is that, from a technical standpoint, the H.264 codec delivers superior results in nearly every situation that Apple, Microsoft, and Google want to use video.

So why should they use Theora? Are we really making ideological arguments for technology decisions now? The way to stop patents from ossifying the tech industry is to stop filing patents. To do this, people like us are going to have to start pushing back in our companies and displaying prior art whenever the subject of patents comes up with corporate lawyers.

Meanwhile, Mozilla is a corporation. They're a big kid making sums with an "m" at the end. They're one of the majority shares of the browser market last time I looked. They're going to have to start to play the game like a real company and stop expecting everyone to softball them. Already they're behind on the technology front; I only see Chrome and Safari on every hacker's screen that _I_ see these days. If they keep expecting the industry they've so eagerly entered to coddle them, then their future prospects are dim at best.

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

#117

Post by tmsh »

pingou wrote: post #80
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…

Good point. Though they could theoretically setup a separate financial entity that paid 5 million but was separate from the Mozilla foundation. And this separate entity might not really have to pay fees until 2015 or something unless I'm reading it wrong. Anyway, viva theora. It would be cool if there were some legal move they could do to get around the issue is all..

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

#118

Post by GHFigs »

lolcraft wrote: post #115
GHFigs wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me for not understanding, but if I can ask for further clarification-- In your last post, you said: " Anti-competitive actions are always pragmatic if you're not going to get punished for them. " From this, I conclude that when you say "anti-competitive", you are referring to actions that ought to be punished. Then, I asked if it was anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests…

Then, I asked if it was anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests instead of aiding competitors, to which you say yes. No you didn't. The question you asked was, and I quote: " 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? " Note you used supporting , a passive role, rathe…

Note you used supporting

Note that I used "go out of their way to support". The active role was clearly implied, and consistent with the context.

ZeroGravitas described Apple and Microsoft's choice (to use h.264) as an "anti-competitive action", and in contrasting that choice with an alternative, I thought it was obvious that I meant choosing (acting) differently, i.e. using Theora, in spite of it not being in their own interests. What else might I have meant?

If we were talking about a passive role of "supporting", then Apple (and possibly Microsoft) would have to be excluded, as their implementation (at least on the desktop) allows for installing additional third-party codecs, such as Theora. In that sense Apple supports Theora, but clearly that is not what we're talking about.

I know of no other sense in this context that Apple or Microsoft could support Mozilla without also aiding them.

(The reason I stated this initially in terms of "going out of their way" was to distinguish this situation from situations in which self-interested competitors benefit each other directly, such as how Apple's work on WebKit benefited Google's work on Chrome (and vice versa). There was no argument made to suggest that choosing Theora would have been in the interests of Microsoft or Apple, though, so this was (I thought) redundant, hence the change.)

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

#119

Post by planettrash »

I am lost in this debate.

If the decoder is a paid for plugin. Then it makes sense for it not to be shipped.

Why can't Google buy out the h.264 tech and give it to us all?

Why do we need the video tag anyway?

Doesn't it make more sense to use existing codecs that already sit on the system? Why bundle the codecs in the browser, wouldn't it be better to work on a common architecture that can interface with codecs?

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

#120

Post by planettrash »

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.

Here here.

Surely it's not hard to make an operating system and browser that makes it almost transparent to install a codec or bit of software.

I agree, get gstreamer or something else to work seamlessly. And at the same time, give me the ability to turn the damn thing off. I can already imagine, the state of web pages to come, it will be like a license to put video adds all over my webpage, and drag my cpu into hades.

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