Dear Mozilla, Please Don't Kill HTML5 Video • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by cookiecaper » Fri, Mar 19, 2010, 2:23 AM UTC

tpz wrote: post #124

pingou wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Who will pay 5 millions $ each year to use H264 on Firefox ?" I've already paid for my H.264 licenses. Now I just want to use them. The PC to my left has a video card with licensed H.264 that I paid for and free software that harnesses it, the Mac in front of me has both a video card with licensed H.264 and a licensed software decoder and I paid for both, the Windows 7 VM running in the Mac even has a licensed H.264…

The browser has to take responsibility for its formats. Offloading to the OS is all fine and good if you have a native H.264 decoder installed, but only Windows 7 and OS X only ship with that. Most users out there are still using XP. Most users are not going to understand if Firefox comes up and says "Hey buddy you need to install some codec from OS vendor to watch this, teehee", and they'll just switch to something else, so it's kind of useless in that regard.

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

#132

Post by carussell » Fri, Mar 19, 2010, 2:43 AM UTC

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 why couldn't Mozilla use an extension that supports H264? Similar to Ubuntu's nonfree packages?"

That might not be an unreasonable approach concerning some other aspect of video on the Web, but has only bad consequences in this particular debate.

As you can see, this debate involves Mozilla and co. versus detractors over the following two non-exclusive decision problems:

Support Theora? Support h.264?

But it's incredibly important to keep in mind the greater issue here motivating these questions, which is the desire for a baseline video format. As soon as anyone suggests delegating video decoding to the operating system, they're clearly divorcing themselves from this particular debate. Perhaps that kind of delegation is a solution to a problem concerning another aspect of video on the Web, but not this one, because it gains nothing in the pursuit for a baseline video format.

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

#133

Post by blasdel » Fri, Mar 19, 2010, 5:01 AM UTC

carussell wrote: post #130

blasdel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, someone could fork Gecko + XULrunner + Firefox; but it is a huge pain-in-the-ass to even track it as upstream, much less diverge from it. It's purposefully architected to make a plugin very unsavory — you could do it with a plugin/extension that inspected every DOM for failed embeds, dynamically replacing them with an of its own NSAPI plugin. You'd be guaranteed to get FOUC, poor detectablity, and regular breaka…

"It's purposefully architected to make a plugin very unsavory" I'd like a citation for this please, or at least some synthesis based on some explicit rationale (which is what I expected on the with that em dash, instead of a non-sequitur).

Gecko links directly with liboggplay to restrict themselves to exclusively WAV and vorbis+theora in ogg containers. Every other app out there uses a standard media handling library: ffmpeg (esp. if bundling), GStreamer, QuickTime, DirectShow, or some combination of them.

This was made explicit when us proles discovered that Mozilla has had a GStreamer implementation for two years, for use in their mobile port so that they have a hope of playing video in real time:

> My exclusive focus for this GStreamer integration has been to make it work with Fennec. Not enabling it in Firefox on platforms where GStreamer has been ported to, is as far as I know a political decision. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540#c105

Architecting against plugins is not new in the free software community. RMS purposefully designed GCC so that you couldn't interface with its internal representations to make it impossible to have independent language frontends, optimizers, or target backends. That led directly to ECGS, a complete fork of GCC away from the FSF's control after they let it languish and refused patches — the FSF lost and eventually blessed it as the 'real' GCC. Its closed architecture is the primary motive behind LLVM's ascendancy.

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

#134

Post by KirinDave » Fri, Mar 19, 2010, 5:54 AM UTC

carussell wrote: post #128

KirinDave wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"They're one of the majority shares of the browser market last time I looked." (Emphasis mine.) There can be only one majority share by definition.

Cool story, bro.