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And I don't really trust an organization like Mozilla to be able to create something that meets the needs of most people. Their staunch opposition to H.264 is a prime example of this. H.264 is an non-negotiable requirement for me. If you won't support it, I can't use your product. Period.

Then the Web is not for you. It isn't some kind of Mozilla standard that Mozilla is worried about, it's Web standards. Most Web software developers disagree with the idea that closed, royalty bearing formats are an acceptable choice for the Web. Mozilla, as we know, disagrees with you. The W3C disagrees with you. Opera disagrees with you. Google disagrees with you. And Tim Berners-Lee, of course, disagrees with you.

I found your comments suspect and a quick Google pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

Google, by contrast... "Big Brother"? Have you read 1984?

Yes I have. Obviously the current situation isn't like the brutal dictatorship in the book, but the information gathering is getting there. Not a camera in your home, but spying on all the sites you visit.

they only gather information from people who willingly donate said information, or from information already in public spaces.

"willingly" would be opt-in, instead of having to opt-out. How many web sites use Google Analytics? Google also owns DoubleClick.

by accident

There's nothing accidental about collecting all this information (ignoring the wireless case), which once collected, can be abused. If they get a National Security Letter they will have to comply with it. If a rogue employee decides to misuse the data, it's done. If Google decides to misuse the data, it's done. All this is possible because they collect the data.

By having, say, youtube.com/html5 not work at all.

It's completely Google's fault for requiring H.264. They could always fall back to another format. HTML5 does not require H.264. If you want to talk about FUD, then H.264 is where it's at, straight from Google: "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet." http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

YouTube won't re-encode it for the high quality version.

Nothing is stopping them. At the worst, they can offer a lower-quality version, they way they do now with Flash Video. Requiring a patent-laden format to view video content on the web is evil. It's GIF all over again.

Second, only Theora might be open.

More FUD. It's been around for years, and there's no evidence that it isn't. There's no need to use scare words.

I for one am no expert in this subject, so here are some links I ended up reading:

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

a decent article that could provide one with some insight on the patent "wars to come": http://www.vcodex.com/videocodingpatents.html

a random google search to a blog post with a good bit of information, but also opinionated: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what-history-tells-us-and-why-were-standing-with-the-web/

cnet on Microsoft's stance: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20003838-264.html

Lastly, does anyone have a good article on Opera's stance? - I had heard they are against it, but not much more than that...

(as an aside, they also *massively* overestimate the impact they can have on the web, hilariously of the belief that Firefox making a stand will somehow stem the tide of H.264 video on the web... it'd be funny if it weren't so sad)

I think you massively underestimate the impact Mozilla had and continues to have on the web. You should look at browser user agent strings sometime. IE, Safari, and Chrome and Opera all claim to be Mozilla implementations.

Ultimately, you're on the losing end of this debate. Open video is where it's at. Google is the biggest video provider on the Internet and Google is all about the open web. In this regard, Mozilla and Google are in perfect alignment:

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/04/interesting-times-for-video-on-web.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
http://www.mercurynews.com/business-headlines/ci_14847976
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2010/01/html5-video-and-h-264-what-history-tells-us-and-why-were-standing-with-the-web/

This is how important Internet companies like Mozilla and like Google think. This is why YouTube will move to open video sooner rather than later. Join the 389 million people who have downloaded Firefox 3.6 so far:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

Use open video and be happy.

Mozilla can use AVC/H.264. They just need to do it via the OS, like I think IE and Safari will do, and Opera already does. H.264 is already directly supported on Windows 7 and Mac OSX. Linux users need to do their tricks, like with MP3.

They only way they can do as you suggest is by severely compromising Firefox. This has been answered exhaustively many times. See Mike Shaver's blog post about it. To quote:

People have raised questions about using existing support for H.264 (or other formats) that may already be installed on the user’s computer. There are issues there related to principle (fragmentation of format under the guise of standardized HTML), to effectiveness (about 60% of our users are on Windows XP, which provides no H.264 codec), to security (exposure of arbitrary codecs to hostile content), and to user experience (mapping the full and growing capabilities of to the system APIs provided); I’ll post next week about those in more detail, if others don’t beat me to it.

Security is not to be underestimated. It's worth noting that IE9 will not support all media formats supported on the host operating system, purely to limit the attack vector surface area available. See this comment by Microsoft's Frank Olivier on the IE blog. He's talking about image formats but the same applies to video formats:

We've not heard many requests for additional image types - to limit the attack surface in a web browser, it is a good idea to not expose more decoders.

See also Chris Blizzard's blog post about the decision to only support open video in Firefox. And most importantly of all, don't worry about. Open video is the way forward for video on the web. Theora is here now, VP8 may be joining it next month, and Dirac may join both in the future.

Your links got chopped, the right posts are pretty easy to find right now, but just in case:

Theora on TI C64x+ DSP and OMAP3
This is really cool, and I hadn't seen it before

HTML5 video and H.264 – what history tells us and why we’re standing with the web

Mozilla, for good reasons (IMHO), is not willing to support H.264, but that seems to be the direction YouTube is heading. But as good and open as Theora is, I think don't believe there is any hardware with a Theora accelerator (yet?).

You can make use of the DSP that's used for H.264 acceleration and use it for Theora acceleration or any other similar workload. That's what's been done here:

http://www.schleef.org/blog/20...-c64x-dsp-and-omap3/

As mentioned in the post, that work is broadly applicable to Nokia's N series of phones, the Motorola Droid, and the Palm Pre. There are millions of devices in the field today which are capable of accelerated Theora playback. All they need is the software.

See also Christopher Blizzard's post on the importance of open formats to the future of the web:

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/webl...anding-with-the-web/

In the comments Christopher Montgomery from Xiph.org, the foundation behind Theora, says:

"As for the chicken/egg problem of hardware support, several big commercial groups are already scrambling to get over it, partly because full Theora support in hardware is so much simpler than full h264 support. It’s a tiny fraction of the complexity. You practically get that many transistors for free in the today’s average cardboard cereal box. Can’t say more– NDAs. But that’s OK, it will be reality or not soon enough."

As you say, Microsoft's lack of HTML5 support will probably be a problem for some time. Fortunately, it can be worked around with Cortado or Highgate media suite's Theora for Silverlight

The only reason Firefox can't have h.264 support is because they are 'making a stand'....

That stand is, of course, H.264 has patent encumbrances which require royalties. How deep are your pockets?

I apologize for being blunt, but you're not going to get what you want. It's perfectly clear by now.

And if it's a choice between Firefox being unusable for large parts of the Web for everyone, and only being unusable for those who are not willing to compromise their FLOSS principles - well, I'd take the latter any day.

It isn't about FLOSS principles. To suggest that it is is to miss most of the point. The only formats that will succeed in the long term on the web are open formats. It was true for PNG and it will be true for HTML5 video. Open formats are the precise reason the web is possible at all. I think I will get what I want.

Have a read of Christopher Blizzard's perspective.

http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2008/07/the-new-gnome-duality/

This would be far beyond what would be nessesary for statistically significant data and monkeys are expensive

And if the monkeys aren't expensive, then you should be suspicious of their quality.

hmm not the post I would have chosen for this news... Could have pointed out some of the source post announcements and avoid perpetuating a few misconceptions.

I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs

Hence the need for funding the Thusnelda enhancements. Theora is a pretty solid codec and can be greatly improved with a few enhancements on the encoder side.

I wonder if wouldn't be better to direct effort to Dirac, perhaps putting Dirac into an Ogg container

Dirac is best at high resolution high bitrate video and not so good for standard definition low bitrate video, hence an enhanced theora is the optimal way to hit the low bandwidth target. Enabling theora to be competitive or better than others codecs in the low bitrate range in the intimidate future with relatively small investment.

Furthermore dirac is planed for inclusion and will be explored in the tail end of this grant. (once liboggplay is more solid). Making liboggplay playback library solid will enable Dirac support to be solid as well. Since Dirac already has a maturing decoder/encoder library (Schrodinger) and already been mapped to an ogg container (what liboggplay plays).
It's relatively easy to add in additional free codecs with ogg mappings. if( FLAC, Speex or Dirac) and will not be the primary use of the funding so its not focused in on the announcement or secondary coverage of the announcement.
More info on the announcement here and the above mentioned links.

Okay, after being forced to dive into the sources by lousy reporting, here is the story:

Christopher Blizzard has posted to his blog that Wayan Vota, a main writer for OLPC news is the director of Geekcorps. That Wayan Vota writes for OLPC news is not a secret (his name is on every post). And a Google search for "Wayan Vota" turns up the Geekcorps result as its third hit.

Now, on Geekcorps' website, of one their technology partners is listed as Intel.

I don't know about you, but that's enough to convince me that the black helicopters are involved! What a conspiracy.

BTW, is this the Digg effect? I notice more and more looney conspiracy stories over there all the time. Maybe it's spreading.

Has something to do with this news, read Red Hat and GNOME developer blog post for more information http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302

It was on slashdot last week, but here is the results of a quick google search on the topic: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=288

Over in my slashdot post roundup there are mutterings in a post of further announcements. The same mutterings reappeared elsewhere too...

Over in my slashdot post roundup there are mutterings in a post of further announcements. The same mutterings reappeared elsewhere too...

I think you missed an overall point that the original commenter had in mentioning one particular shortcoming of interest to him. Firefox development is haphazard. There is insufficient overall guidance of the process. Because there is insufficient guidance, Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.

For example, see this Slashdot comment: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs. In my attempts to report bugs in Firefox, Firefox developers have used every one of those excuses, some of them many times. If you look within Slashdot stories about Firefox, you will find many comments about Firefox developers abusing those who report bugs.

In comments like those posted here, people often talk about some shortcoming in Firefox that occurs to them at the time they are writing the comment, and fail to make the overall point, that there are a lot of issues receiving little or no attention, not just the one they mention.

The head of the Mozilla Foundation is Winifred Mitchell Baker, a woman who is very uncomfortable socially, like many people with technical knowledge. However, she has NO technical knowledge. She is a perfect example of the fact that someone with no technical knowledge cannot guide a technical company.

In the beginning, Winifred got the job because no one thought there was money in free software, and the effort to improve the Mozilla browser was very small. But then Google started paying for Google Search to be to the right of the address bar in Firefox. Now Mozilla Foundation makes millions of dollars, and Winifred can afford to hire people to do public relations to cover her incompetence.

The linked information about Mozilla Foundation income is from someone on the board of directors of the Mozilla Corporation, who says in the linked blog that the nickname of the Mozilla Foundation is MoFo. It appears that the lack of social ability is more widespread than just affecting the president. Or maybe he is socially aware, and the association is intentional.

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use . What people call the memory hogging bug is actually also a CPU hogging bug, and it is still present in Firefox version 2.0.0.3, even though the bug was reported more than 4 years ago.

If you open a lot of windows and tabs in Firefox on a laptop, and put the laptop in and out of standby, you will eventually notice that the laptop fan is running all the time, even when there is no activity. That's the CPU bug, and it can potentially shorten the life of your laptop.

I could write more, but I have to unload all my Firefox windows and tabs before I am finished working with them, because now that I opened more windows and tabs to do research to find links for this comment, Firefox is using as much about 40% of my CPU as reported by Windows Task Manager, and I don't like the way it slows my computer. (This is not a dramatization, it is an actual fact; I just started my laptop from standby to begin working this morning at about 7 AM Brazil time, where I happen to be at the moment.)

I am also putting this comment on my web site, so that I can make corrections if I find that there is some error.

10 computers? That's odd, I could've sworn they made a few more than that.

It's Christopher Blizzard

I guess it's Christopher Blizzard: http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/

This has gotta be one of the weirder (mis)uses of the term "market". After all, the competing "products" aren't for sale, and a "market" is usually a place where people sell things.
Well, Mozilla.com is a "for-profit", and they actually make money (although it's not their primary goal), so "market" is not necessarily that wrong. See e.g. here

Those poor mozilla servers! I think with the ~$72million they made last year, they can afford the bandwidth...

Is there any relationship or code sharing between Mugshot and the "Sugar" interface for the One Laptop Per Child project? Red Hat's Chris Blizzard blogs about Sugar that "kids can communicate in every app, that they can show each other things, that they can take each other on tours of the web and many other ways of collaborating", which sounds like parts of Mugshot.

Funny. Some Mozilla people were just about how Sun completely screwed up and all the different places (LAMP, interaction with webpages, etc.) where java could have been big, but wasn't.

And you trust the DHS to map domain names to IP addresses better than they do with city names and geography ?

Other Lizard Wranglers that deserve a voice in this. To be honest these guys are the ones I listen to when it comes to Mozilla.
alsa
Blizzard
mpt

Why should JWZ be quoted about a project he bailed on years ago? jwz is entertaining when he whines, it's the only reason I can think of.

It should be noted that Mike Shaver's (formerly of Netscape, still of Mozilla) comments were, as he points out, taken horribly out of context in the ZDNet article.