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Ogg Vorbis / Theora Language Removed From HTML5 Spec
Rudd-O writes "It's official. Ogg technology has been removed from the HTML5 spec, after Ian caved in the face of pressure from Apple and Nokia. Unless massive pressure is exerted on the HTML5 spec editing process, the Web authoring world will continue to endure our modern proprietary Tower of Babel. Note that HTML5 in no way required Ogg (as denoted by the word 'should' instead of 'must' in the earlier draft). Adding this to the fact that there are widely available patent-free implementations of Ogg technology, there is really no excuse for Apple and Nokia to say that they couldn't in good faith implement HTML5 as previously formulated."
Instead of specifying a specific format, just specify the salient details...how about "...MUST use a non-patent-encumbered format that is released under an OSI-approved license...". Well, not that, per-se, but you get my drift.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
there are bigger problems than Ogg!
For one, it will mean the death of any lightweight web browser. Web will become something like a TV where you are fed with content you cannot filter (because the TV is too complex to hack). Monopoly through complexity.
A simple new format that is designed from the start for vector graphics and that doesn't try to be backwards compatible with HTML would be the best way for the new web.
Honestly, if the choice was between "Should" and not referencing it, I'd go for the latter. I deal in construction contracts and specifications, and if there's a word that has done more damage than "should", I'm not aware of it.
Repeat after me:
Shall=imperative
May=permissive
That's it. "Should" means "we want it, but making it a requirement will cause a problem, so if you don't do it we're going to whine, but there's nothing we can legally do about it"
Of course, then there's the whole "Shall" vs. "Will" thing, but I don't want to talk about it.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
HTML 5 is designed to be a pragmatic markup language, and neither Apple nor Nokia felt that Ogg was of practical use. The "intellectual purity" of ogg pales in comparison with the benefits of MPEG-4 and H.26x codecs. (To name a few: superior compression, less processing power for decoding, specialized chip support, and DRM hooks).
If the format is free of patents, and is essentially open source (released under the BSD license)... how can Nokia shake its finger around and threaten people?
This wouldn't be a story if Microsoft had done it, trying to force WMP codecs into the standard - I'm actually kind of surprised they hadn't yet... but Nokia? wtf
Google is more of neutral, with good and bad acts.
Apple has always been evil, but the suave evil (with a few flaws in it's act) that makes other think it's not so bad. But in the end, it's evil nature is what got it such a low market share in the 90s. There recovery has been more due to improving thir suave act, rather than pretending not to be evil.
MS is a known evil and doesn't hide it, sometimes it's better to face a known evil, than an entity with unkowns.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
why does anyone think that would actually carry weight? reference microsoft browsers and previous standards
make ogg official, and business will ignore it, and marginalize the standard. do we really want the standards ignored?
so allow the businesses their moronic formats, and use ogg anyways
it's silly if anyone thinks the war against proprietary formats is going to be won by a standards body. at the very best, business will embrace standards because the standards body play footsie with business desires, which is what happened, which is good!
at worst, the standards body ignores business on some ideological crusade, so businesses just ignore the standards as well, and we have a worse tower of babel on our hands
folks: this is the best possible outcome, where best possible outcome = ugly begrudging accomodation of moronic business desires. you can't do any better than what happened, unfortunate, but true
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The submarine patent threat. Ogg claims to be unencumbered, but until somebody big starts using it and lawsuits start flying in the Eastern District of Texas, nobody actually knows whether it's unencumbered. And companies which are already carrying a significant risk of submarine patents from other more popular/profitable codecs don't have much incentive to assume even more risk for sake of a codec that's hardly used and doesn't present compelling technical advantages.
Some people think this is FUD. I think those people don't pay attention to patent-related news in the US; the only safe position right now is to assume something is encumbered until someone else has spent millions of dollars litigating it to be sure, which is why you get development models like SQLite: SQLite refuses to accept or use any code based on algorithms or techniques that are less then 17 years old, so that they can prove they're using technologies which couldn't possibly be patent encumbered.. Patent reform would be a nice thing to have for cases like this...
Wrong icon and everything!
"Widely available patent-free implementations of Ogg".
First, saying "Ogg" means Ogg Vorbis to most people. This is about Ogg Theora.
Second, whether something is patent free is not determined by the implementation. You're thinking of copyright!
Ogg Theora uses patented technology. We don't want to enter into a Rambus-type situation where once something becomes popular a company can come back and start dinging people for money.
And the icon doesn't make sense. This isn't about trying to patent existing or trivial things, it's about whether a standard should make mandatory a patented codec that isn't even widely used.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Without really knowing what happened behind closed doors there... I suspect the issue is less desktop browsers and more mobile browsers. Nokia (with the S60 browser) and Apple (with Safari Mobile) both use WebKit on their phones, thus being two of the only handset providers to need to deal with 'the real web' on small portable devices... as a developer, I can see trying to embed the OGG container format and the Vorbis codec into a mobile browser being a pain-in-the-ass. (And yes, even if 'optional,' I'm fairly sure they'd want to support it.)
/page encoding character-sets/, etc.).
This is a little ironic, given we have two companies whose browser team (both use WebKit, after all) love to blog about 'why can't we have some solid standards,' and about how there is no one true standard for images, embedded documents, etc. I think Apple and Nokia are shooting themselves in the foot here rather than taking the opportunity to run with standardizing other things (image formats,
But I think this is less nefarious/evil and more just short-sighted focus on one problematic area of implementation rather than on the overall gains.
--Rachel
Hi. I'm the 'inventor' (not really, On2 originally wrote vp3 and we're riffing from there. I'm the hacker working on it now).
1) That is in comparison to h264. And I call it 'embarrassing' because Theora *could* easily be just as good, but it isn't right now. That document is a call to arms and because of it, a new encoder is rapidly taking shape. Its improvements are already making it back to mainline. We'll catch up rapidly.
2) "It's safe to say that MPEG4 and it's codecs have been more thoroughly researched than Theora" Bullshit. MPEG is simultaneously inefficient and narrow in their focus. MPEG-4 / h.264 is a decades old chassis with a few recent research papers tacked on. _Several of the items I identified as 'embarrassing' and 'obsolete' ironically apply to MPEG-4 too_.
3) "I absolutely, positively promise you that Youtube serves more video than Wikipedia, and they don't stream Theora." Irrelevant. This is an argument against Google (Altavista dwarfed them), Microsoft (IBM and even Apple dwarfed them), Toyota (GM dwarfed them), etc.
"As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it."
Why does everyone here think this is a battle of individuals? These are huge multinationals and your puny insignificant selves don't even appear on their radars. Sure, the public will indeedy benefit from a standard multimedia codec set with no proprietary/encumbered strings attached, but that is entirely irrelevant in the process of making money. They're *for profit corporations* doing what for-profit corporations do. Making money. And that is entirely orthogonal to morals, public good, or even competent engineering. They don't have any interest whatsoever in what you think.
Although we're a non-profit (and exist on behalf of the common good), our argument in this battle happens to concern rallying all the sub-$100M companies that will be frozen out by the very biggest players getting their way. When big companies win, little companies generally lose. Although the little compaines greatly out-mass the big companies, they tend to be fragmented. If we can get them all together to fight for a uniform technology recommendation, way more people win.
But you might want to run for cover, 'cause Godzilla has his squishin' boots on.