11–20 of 95 posts
I get really tired of people saying that the patents on H.264 are a "red herring." How is open source software like Firefox supposed to use H.264 if they have to pay massive licensing fees? That enforcement thus far has been weak to non-existent doesn't imply that it will continue to be so in the future.
Here's what I'm not clear on: why did we scrap the whole Ogg Theora thing in favor of WebM at all? Isn't Ogg actually unencumbered by lawsuit-fodder?
Ogg (like mp4 or mov) is actually a container format that can have Theora or WebM compressed media inside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For example, by trying to use the codec that is provided by the underlying operating system. The latest versions of both Windows and OS X ship with a H264 codec.
And what of Linux, and its variants like Android or MeeGo?
The real problem is non-commercial desktop distributions such as Debian or Fedora; it could still check for the presence of x264 or FFmpeg (with h264 support) on the system and use it if it's available, and defer the responsibility of licensing to the user or distributor.
Of course, Google owns VP8. So they are pushing it so it might become a defacto standard that later gets officially adopted. Despite meeting the requirements to be part of the HTML spec, without the official backing of the W3C it is no different than any other out of spec extension to HTML.
Until the W3C officially adopts a royalty free codec as part of the HTML standard, Google and Mozilla should assume HTML video is dead. They might as well make the tag inoperable by default. Just parse it and ignore it. Of course, Google owns VP8. So they are pushing it so it might become a defacto standard that later gets officially adopted. Despite meeting the requirements to be part of the HTML spec, without the o…
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx
I am SHOCKED to hear that Microsoft would like to continue receiving royalties from all those H.264 license fees and doesn't give a toss about open standards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For example, by trying to use the codec that is provided by the underlying operating system. The latest versions of both Windows and OS X ship with a H264 codec.
And what of Linux, and its variants like Android or MeeGo?
Even if it couldn't, why would it be a bad thing for Firefox to support OS-supplied codecs on OS X and Windows, and a set of built-in codecs, such as WebM, on Linux?