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No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

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Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#71

Post by Teef »

marbletiles wrote: post #65

The content is all in h.264 because it works in 99.9999% of places. You can make every browser support webM tomorrow and that still wouldn't be a compelling reason for publishers to add WebM in favour of the status quo. The only thing that could achieve such a thing would be a device with iOS levels of popularity that a) doesn't support h.264 b) doesn't support Flash. Who is going to make such a device? A: Nobody, be…

Android if not today will be more popular device than iOS soon. I was thinking the combination of Android + Chrome would be enough to motivate publishers to encode using Webm?

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#72

Post by spiffworks »

GHFigs wrote: post #53
spiffworks wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, here is how I define minimal software freedom - I give you a piece of software, along with source code, you are free to use it in anyway you please, or make your modifications and distribute it to as many people as you like. With H.264 bundled with a piece of software, that is not possible. > This ambiguity is more pronounced when you use words like "open" because it means different things to different people. I…

With H.264 bundled with a piece of software, that is not possible. The decision to only support bundled codecs and refuse to let the user use anything else was made by Mozilla, Google, and Opera. It is not a spec requirement or technical necessity. The idea that a browser would be forced to bundle h.264 is quite evidently mistaken, as the browsers that do support it don't bundle it.

If all browsers did that, web codec development would move at the same glacial pace as Windows version updates, not to mention losing any semblance of uniformity and all possible hope of changing the status quo in any meaningful way away from patent-encumbered codecs.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#73

Post by Herring »

commandar wrote: post #18

I was discussing this with some people yesterday. I find it incredibly frustrating that the Grubers of the world have spent months attacking Google for supporting the evil, closed Flash, but then manage to spin Google dropping a closed format in favor of an open one as evil and using it as a roundabout way of continuing to hate on Flash. The fact of the matter is that Flash is an entrenched, defacto standard and isn'…

it's really about software patents & about their iThings being unable to play WebM

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#74

Post by kenjackson »

spiffworks wrote: post #58
kenjackson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not irrevcably licensed. If you find that WebM does actually violate your patents you can't sue otherwise you lose your license to all of the other patents. Realistically Google should not revoke your licenses unless you lose the lawsuit (not when filed), because if they have legitimately infringed your patent then it seems like blackmail to keep them from acting on it by such a method.

You're quite right, but I think its ridiculous to ask Google to give you a free license to their patents even as you are suing them for infringing yours.

They're the ones pushing that this be the defactor standard for web video. If that's the case then they shouldn't attempt to block a party from exercising their patent rights by effectively threatening that if they do so they won't have any access to video on the web.

Could you imagine MS saying in their Windows license agreement saying that they can revoke your licenses if you sue them over a patent?

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#75

Post by marbletiles »

Teef wrote: post #71
marbletiles wrote: post #65

The content is all in h.264 because it works in 99.9999% of places. You can make every browser support webM tomorrow and that still wouldn't be a compelling reason for publishers to add WebM in favour of the status quo. The only thing that could achieve such a thing would be a device with iOS levels of popularity that a) doesn't support h.264 b) doesn't support Flash. Who is going to make such a device? A: Nobody, be…

Android if not today will be more popular device than iOS soon. I was thinking the combination of Android + Chrome would be enough to motivate publishers to encode using Webm?

See my point below: it has to only support WebM, and they're not brave enough to do that against iPhone, esp if they had to kill the Flash support we've heard so much about.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#76

Post by neild »

commandar wrote: post #18

I was discussing this with some people yesterday. I find it incredibly frustrating that the Grubers of the world have spent months attacking Google for supporting the evil, closed Flash, but then manage to spin Google dropping a closed format in favor of an open one as evil and using it as a roundabout way of continuing to hate on Flash. The fact of the matter is that Flash is an entrenched, defacto standard and isn'…

I was discussing this with some people yesterday. I find it incredibly frustrating that the Grubers of the world have spent months attacking Google for supporting the evil, closed Flash, but then manage to spin Google dropping a closed format in favor of an open one as evil and using it as a roundabout way of continuing to hate on Flash.

Your argument turns on Gruber hating Flash for being closed. He doesn't: He hates Flash because he thinks it's crap. Gruber is not an open source advocate. He has no objection to open standards, free software, or open source software, but they aren't his passion.

You're right that Flash is an entrenched, defacto standard. It is, however, much less of one than it was three years ago, and that's pretty much entirely due to one factor: iOS doesn't support it. The HTML element has traction entirely due to the fact that it's the only way to play video from a web page on an iOS device. You don't have a choice between or Flash: It's or nothing.

Chrome dropping H.264 support isn't going to push adoption of the element, because Flash continues to be a perfectly valid alternative method of providing video to Chrome. If Chrome dropped H.264 and Flash, that'd be a different story.

Gruber's position is entirely consistent: He supports moves that reduce the usage of Flash, and doesn't support ones that increase it. Google's choice to drop H.264 in Chrome will, in the short term at least, result in the latter. Acknowledging this fact is neither myopic nor fanboyism.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#77

Post by GodsMoon »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #49
jasonlotito wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However if we're talking "childish", then the "Plugins! I thought the point of HTML5 was to avoid plugins" argument wins by a mile. Which doesn't challenge anything I said. In fact, you can remove plugins from you browser, including Flash, right now.

Sorry, I was agreeing with you about Flash and then going off on a tangent without making it clear I was meaning a different "plugin" argument. I was referring to coverage such as: So Much For Standards, Google Says WebM Plugins Coming Soon For Safari And IE9 http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/14/webm-plugins/

After reading this: http://antimatter15.com/wp/2011/01/the-ambiguity-of-open-and... It sounds like the plugins with be in the OS and not the browser. So it will be like downloading a codec for your Mac or PC not like installing Flash on in your browser.

The big distinction here is that it will be native to the browser because IE and safari use whatever codecs are in the OS instead of providing their own.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#78

Post by joeshaw »

commandar wrote: post #62
kmfrk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally like Gruber and think he tends to weigh his thoughts and arguments very well - but I still can't forgive him for buying MPEG LA's PR release[1] hook and sink[2]. Since when has it been a good idea to take a press release at face value[3]? He hasn't recanted this complete acquiescence, so I am under the impression that he sincerely believes them - and only on the grounds of that single release. Maybe he wa…

Gruber stays in my RSS feed because he can be incredibly insightful at times, but when he decides to go off on one of these insane lines of thought, he really goes for it. The last one I remember was when he spent weeks snarking about how Google was somehow being dishonest about not using private APIs in Android. The reality was Gruber hadn't spent 5 minutes looking at the intro to the Android SDK document, and funda…

I wish I could upvote you a dozen times. This exactly expresses my own feelings about DF. Every time he goes off on one of these snarky tirades I resolve to unsubscribe in my RSS feeder. He usually then redeems himself with an insightful, technically clueful run.

The most irritating thing about the h264 rant is that there are some valid points in there: content producers would have to encode content twice, lack of hardware decoding, pushing video back to Flash, proprietary nature of VP8's development. But these all seem like short-term problems to me. Hardware decoding will happen and Flash will support WebM.

The biggest long-term sticking issue to me is Apple. They have a lot of weight to throw around with iPhones and iPads, and it seems h264 is unavoidable there. Google could throw its own weight around by switching all of YouTube to WebM, but that would take some time as hardware and software catch up. In the meanwhile, Apple is selling millions upon millions of h264-only iOS devices.

And there's the patent issue too. It'd be nice of Google indemnified WebM, but they also have enough patents that they could cause problems for MPEG-LA too.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#79

Post by loire280 »

commandar wrote: post #18

I was discussing this with some people yesterday. I find it incredibly frustrating that the Grubers of the world have spent months attacking Google for supporting the evil, closed Flash, but then manage to spin Google dropping a closed format in favor of an open one as evil and using it as a roundabout way of continuing to hate on Flash. The fact of the matter is that Flash is an entrenched, defacto standard and isn'…

"Further, H.264 was a complete non-starter for Mozilla, and Firefox holds nearly 20% of the market. Using H.264 for HTML5 would have guaranteed market segmentation and hurt the chances of a truly open future"

Except Internet Explorer will continue to be the highest-marketshare browser for the foreseeable future, and IE9 won't ship with VP8 (though you can install a codec for it, I doubt regular people will). It does ship with H.264.

Maybe Microsoft can be convinced to ship VP8/WebM in IE.

Re: No double standards: supporting Google's push for WebM

#80

Post by rimantas »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #45
rimantas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see how this move is good for end users.

The FSF has always been about the long term. This move is actually much less short-term user-hostile than many of their other moves.

I don't have the problem with FSF's long term. I have a huge problem with their vision of that long term. It looks miopic, if you ask me.
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