Slashdot Mirror
Ogg Theora In Firefox, With Wikimedia Support
An anonymous reader writes "Ogg Theora support for the HTML5 <video> tag is in the Firefox 3.1 nightlies. Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons, so Wikimedia people are pushing Wikipedia readers to download a nightly and try it out. Break it, crash it, report bugs, get it into good shape and nullify Apple and Nokia's FUD the best way possible. They may have gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
It would be nice if YouTube supported in-browser Theora once Firefox 3.1 is released. It would also be nice if Theora were a good enough codec for that to be practical for them.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
You should see the doom9.org results of Theora. It's like... watching 1990s RealMedia clips or MPEG-1.
I hate to burst your guys bubble but Theora is a pretty lousy codec. This isn't like Vorbis which holds its own. I have no interest in it at all.
Now Dirac / "That guy with a cat who's name I can't spell" I'd be interested in.
Wikipedia doesn't have that much Theora content yet so if this is going to become more universal more work on the content side is probably needed.
I've put more Theora videos on Wikipedia commons than almost anyone else. The problem is, ffmpeg2theroa (which is the most direct way of generating theora videos, by transcoding them from other video formats) is not all that great. I've tried to get three features included in ffmpeg2theora with no success at all. The developers don't have bugzilla and don't respond to email. (For anyone interested, those three features are: [1] a command line option to use whatever resolution the target video uses rather than manually specifying it [2] the ability to rotate by 90 degrees, and [3] because many cameras (including mine) tend to set a couple of bits wrong when creating quicktime movies, ffmpeg2theora need to be less picky about following certain file specifications. Right now, it errors out without producing any output)
So yes, this is good news. But until there's more content to actually view using this - and that necessitates better production-side software - it's not all that big of a deal.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Have the fixed the bug that causes crashes in Yahoo Mail Beta?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It is as useless as the EMBED tag from HTML3 tag, which was deprecated by OBJECT tag. Why bother with introducing a specialized version of OBJECT tag, when similar tags are made obsolete in HTML4? These HTML5 developer are wasting their time on features that only serves to create confusion and inefficient code.
With the way things are going this sounds like it's going to be quite a fight between the proprietary and open worlds. I can't think of anyone better than Noikia and Apple to play the side of proprietary. ... Not even Microsoft seems to be able to pull off, well, evil as completely as those two these days. And with Mozilla and Wikipedia on the other side it's not like either side of this fight is hopelessly out-gunned.
Of course, this is interesting to more than just Wikipedia, but few other players are both as important and have such a clear long-term vision.
Round TWO! FIGHT!
I keep hearing that Theora has problems. Does it really? Or are these rumors FUD?
Some of the "problems" seem to be misunderstandings. Like, someone encoding at a too low bitrate, and then complaining that the quality is poor. Perhaps encoding isn't very fast either. I know Theora isn't the best codec ever, but it's decent.
I've heard it's difficult to program for the Theora libraries.
But what I've heard the most of is unethical and unwarranted efforts to stop the use of Theora and Vorbis as well. In light of that, I regard reports of "problems" with a lot of skepticism.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
They try to use terms like 'FUD' to look cool, but it is painfully obvious they have no idea what it means or why it was coined in the first place. It's just sad.
Really , what is the point? Its not like every other video format on the planet is closed source with a fee required. MPEG2 and MPEG3 are the ISO standard and the de facto free standard for most high bandwidth video apps these days and MPEG 4 for low bandwidth, deal with it and stop re-inventing the fscking wheel just to play OSS one upmanship.
... because it's patent-free. Quite a few games I see have vorbis.dll and therora.dll's about.
Yeah, it's not like anybody used the IMG tag either, all media on the web is in OBJECT tags.
Theora is the only video format allowed on Wikimedia Commons,
Animated Gifs are allowed on the Wikimedia Commons.
If it looks like a cheesy animated video format, you might as well call it a cheesy animated video format.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
While the original post is kinda nasty about it, I have to agree completely. It'd be better to use the class attribute, or some new type attribute, on the object tag rather than come out with a bunch of new tags for media. It stinks of make-work for the HTML spec authors.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
From Wikipedia:
"MPEG-4 contains patented technologies that require licensing in countries that acknowledge software patents. Patents covering MPEG-4 are claimed by over two dozen companies. The MPEG Licensing Authority[1] licenses patents required for MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual from a wide range of companies (audio is licensed separately) and lists all of its licensors and licensees on the site. New licenses for MPEG-4 System patents are under development[2] and no new licenses are being offered while holders of its old MPEG-4 Systems license are still covered under the terms of that license for the patents listed (MPEG LA â" Patent List).
AT&T is trying to sue companies such as Apple Inc. over alleged MPEG-4 patent infringement.[3] The terms of Apple's Quicktime 7 license for users[citation needed] describes in paragraph 14 the terms under Apple's existing MPEG-4 System Patent Portfolio license from MPEGLA."
Ogg and Vorbis names of characters in Terry Pratchett novels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld
I'm not sure where Theora originated.
http://www.mhall119.com
Ah, nothing like Slashdot to bring out the best in humanity. The doom9 comparison is four years old... that would be like comparing something to the MPEG reference code. The latest work on Theora shows a pretty clear doubling of quality per bitrate vs theora from a few months ago... but since this is Slashdot, I'm sure that little details like that won't slow anyone down. Good job, Nokia.
The immediate thing that comes to mind with this support, right after "awesome", is questions about streaming support. The user experience of progressive download is really terrible, especially over a slow net connection.
Yeah! And while we're at it, what's with all these em, b, img, table, h1 tags? All we need are span tags with CSS! In fact, just blank object tags with CSS will work just fine.
The video & audio tags are there for semantics- sure, you could just use object tags, but it's a lot easier to use video and audio when you don't have to worry about what particular plugin the user has installed- the video and audio tags give you a consistant API.
The level of free-content zealotry that has infected the Wikimedia Foundation has done nothing but drive contributors away and remove useful content from their projects. They're a bunch of idiots shooting themselves in the foot.
How is "free-content zealotry" in an organization which exists solely for the purpose of developing free libraries of free content a bad thing?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Opera has also added support for Ogg Vorbis and recently released a build that supports video, 3D and their proposed file access: http://labs.opera.com/ Hopefully, Firefox and Opera can jointly tilt the scales in the favor of open video. Google should start using Ogg Theora instead of the proprietary bits they spew out now.
The command-line options for mencoder are a bit scary, but it can do almost anything. It has dozens of video filters, one of which is rotate ("-vf rotate=1"), and it will copy the resolution from src->dest by default. I've built a few web apps that wrap mencoder to make it easy to transcode from any container/format to any other container/format. It is also very forgiving of errors, and provides copious debug output if you like.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The truth is, Theora takes much more processing power to decode than h264. It can't match the quality of h264 when compressed to the same size. Beyond that, there are HARDWARE h264 decoder chips that require little power for use in mobile devices, not so with Theora.
Free and open formats are awesome. But sometimes, just sometimes, being free and open isn't as important as being efficient and portable. Its about priorities and usefulness in the broader market. Theora has no traction in the mobile space. there is no indication it will surpass h264 in quality at similar file sizes.
what good is a free and open video codec if it requires more disk space, more processing power, and has no ability to be offloaded to a specialized chip in a mobile device?
If you want companies to adopt Theora, fix those issues. That's the benefit of open and free software. You are free and open to make it better until it meets the demands of the marketplace.
I don't think so. Pay-per-access (such as having to pay for a video codec) would be directly against the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Encoding to something patent-encumbered (even if it's standard, like MPEG) would be shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun in the longrun as opposed to a .22LR with Theora and Vorbis.
.
Blipverts, anyone?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
There is another free codex that I heard was pretty good. BBC has the Dirac video format. Could this be an alternative?
I ate some bad chicken last night, and now I have a case of ogg theora. I'm a little concerned about all the water I'm using each time I flush the vorbis after ogging.
Seriously, I'm all for open compression codecs, but do they need to be included in the browser? Can't I just install a plugin (if I want to) and keep the browser slim and lean?
sig: sauer
And MPEG3? We should use a dead, patent encumbered, standard for HDTV that is designed for 25+mbit/sec for web use? Give me a break!
Many of the codecs people think are "free" are really quite expensive with per unit encoder, decoder, and encoded media costs. It's easy to ignore these when they are packed up as part of the "Microsoft tax" but their burden on content creators and society in general is pretty substantial.
When you're a Wikipedia, serving hundreds of millions of users per month on donations, this matters. Especially since a key part of their mission is making sure that everyone has the freedom to modify their works without paying tribute to middlemen like Apple and Nokia.
It is just like Microsoft... embrace and extend. Stick to the standards! Oh wait... it is Mozilla that is extending this time. I'm confused. So it is OK for open source to embrace and extend the standards then?
'Theora' is greek for watcher isn't it? Kind of makes sense.
You've just described the bloated, inconsistent, semantically-challenged, XML-cleanliness-optional-because-we-hate-verbosity-waaaaah design model of HTML5.
Long live XHTML2.
I am not sure whether Firefox 3.1 will ever be finished as most Firefox developers seem to be trapped without power in Canada... :-) See: http://planet.mozilla.org/
From the Theora FAQ:
Q. Why the name 'Theora?'
Like other Xiph.org Foundation codec projects such as Vorbis or Tarkin, Theora is named after a fictional character. Theora Jones was the name of Edison Carter's 'controller' on the television series Max Headroom. She was played by Amanda Pays.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
If you actually read the HTML5 spec (as linked), it contains references to the Vorbis and Theora formats. What's with the FUD?
When I was evaluating codecs for an embedded platform H.264 consumed three times the MIPS of the Theora decoder, on our target CPU architecture.
H.264 did win out on quality, but the licensing was very expensive... almost as costly as our whole CPU. The cpu load would have required us to add an expensive decoding chip. Because of those negatives H.264 was simply a non-starter.
Fortunately our application didn't require interworking with the outside world so Theora was a good fit. At the low bitrates we needed Theora's quality was far above our other options (MPEG1, for example) and reasonable enough.
As Theora adoption increases we can expect the pace of increase to increase. For many people the objective balance is already in favour of Theora but for most applications compatibility dwarfs all other factors. Few care about 10% differences in bitrate, and free has a huge advantage over the long term in terms of archiving ubiquity.
so insisting that content is available royalty-free without risk of legal trouble because of patent infringement is according to you "zealotry".
Yeah! And while we're at it, what's with all these em, b, img, table, h1 tags? All we need are span tags with CSS! In fact, just blank object tags with CSS will work just fine.</sarcasm>
Didn't you mean:
<span class="sarcasm">Yeah! And while we're at it, what's with all these em, b, img, table, h1 tags? All we need are span tags with CSS! In fact, just blank object tags with CSS will work just fine.</span>?
I don't know why this is so hard. Sure, make the upload requirement be Theora. While you're at it, allow a link to download the Theora version. That said, can't they just convert the video on the server to h.264 or something suitable for streaming over the web? Makes sense that the uploaded version is higher quality than the streaming version anyway! They don't have to change the format they "use" - they can just make it more accessible (much like they already make thumbnails of large JPG files automatically).
Yes, because nobody else has these problems.
Also take a shower, you smell.
IMG is a leaf tag. You're not likely to want to make an OBJECT tag for an image, and provide alternative content inside it like you would do for a video file. For example, by writing
you can support browsers with a load of different capabilities, even those predating the OBJECT tag. Adding a VIDEO tag will not add to that.
The HTML5 spec originally specified that, as a baseline, conforming implementations should include a minimum of Vorbis and Theora.
This would mean that web developers would have a reasonable baseline they could target that would work for all users, but still offer up 'higher quality' versions in more efficient alternative formats if the user had the right software.
Sadly, some of the MPEG video patent holders have big voices in the W3C and demanded that there be no baseline. (What a shock: they don't want to have have a more level compatibility playing field because they don't want to have to compete on quality and price).
W3C pulled the baseline due to those demands... but at least they didn't mandate useless or proprietary codecs.
No one proprietary format can gain universal adoption because some companies are always going to push their own, which is why we have this morass of incompatibility... FLV, WMV, Real, ugh. Apple pay Microsoft for a video format? Not if they can help it!
Companies like Apple are perfectly happy having their own walled gardens of incompatible formats since they've made quite a business out of it. The lack of a good standard suits them just fine.
So... providing good working web video becomes a numbers game and it's all up to us users to set things straight by making good choices, which is why this is such big news. Internet standards... protocols, formats, etc. should belong to the public. Anything less will make us perpetual victims to fighting between big companies and leave us subject to constant taxes on our internet use.
It's "available for Windows" in the same sense that all open source software is -- they provide the source, and (assuming you have a compiler on your windows systems) you do the job of compiling it yourself.
OK, that's techically true - you've just ignored the fact that most windows-compatible open source software has binaries freely available. I don't have any compilers on my windows box and I run dozens of free software packages (I practically live in PuTTY, for example).
That's so far from usable for the vast majority of windows users that I do not count it.
It sound like you are trying to say that the vast majority of windows users are incapable of following any written instructions. I don't think that's a useful observation and I don't think you have the data available to you to be able to make such a judgment anyway - though you are welcome to prove me wrong by posting the datasets from your experiments.
Or, to put this another way, my momma told me if I didn't have anything meaningful to say I shouldna say nothin'.
I really don't want to sound fanboyish, but, Opera implemented the attribute (though only for Windows at the time) at 8th November 2007 and it added the Mac and Linux builds at 18th July 2008.
But, as always, it didn't got the respectable place in /.'s front page.
I am also dissapointed in the fact that Wikipedia didn't even say a single word about Opera supporting the same spec. as Firefox even earlier than Firefox.
Yes, I do know they support free (as in free speech) software so they recommended Firefox, but not saying a single word about Opera makes me (and Opera's devs) cry.
[insert lame sig here]
Ogg Vorbis has an excellent integer-only implementation called Tremor which runs much faster on mobile devices. I wonder if they will have something similar for Theora soon.
Ogg and Vorbis names of characters in Terry Pratchett novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld I'm not sure where Theora originated.
Ogg did not originate from Discworld, according to Wikipedia:
"It is sometimes assumed that the name Ogg comes from the character of Nanny Ogg in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. However, it derives from ogging, jargon from the computer game Netrek which came to mean doing something forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future resources. At its inception, the Ogg project was thought to be somewhat ambitious given the power of the PC hardware of the time."
Considering that nothing comes immediately with all the programs you need to make it fully useful, this is a big deal and pushes the momentum toward a free and open web considerably.
Digital Citizen
damn you're stupid.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/12/when_will_html_5_support_soone.html
As far as I am concerned, all of HTML5 is like that.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Anyone who disagrees with me is a zealot, plain and simple.
Why do you need JPEG / PNG support in the browser? ... So it actually *works* for most users.
The whole "sit back and let a plugin handle it" approach has resulted in a pretty good chunk of the web locked up behind proprietary players and authoring tools. Since it's an explicit goal of the W3C to not propritarize the web by adopting non-royality-free technology some folks argue that they ought not to propritarize the web through inaction either! ... and a browser that can't support the basic functionality that people expect while browsing without a bunch of extra plugins isn't doing its job very well.
What's the point in having a huge, free, public archive of diverse knowledge if your users require non-free means to access it?
The whole point of using a specific element for video is that it makes adding a video to a webpage as easy as adding an image.
You can put something like this in your HTML:
<video src="kittens.ogg" controls width="640" height="480" id="vid">
... and you've got video on your webpage. The browser will take care of issues like buffering and offering playback controls.
The video element is also scriptable, so you can do something like this in JavaScript:
var myVideo = document.getElementById("vid");
myVideo.play();
Opera has been working on video tag support for some time, their test build (a version of Opera 9.52) was released two weeks ago.
Article: http://labs.opera.com/news/2008/07/18/
Download links: http://labs.opera.com/downloads/
sure, you could just use object tags, but it's a lot easier to use video and audio when you don't have to worry about what particular plugin the user has installed- the video and audio tags give you a consistant API.
The object element doesn't require you to know what plugins the user has installed, you just do something like
"They may have gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
I'm sure the guys at Netscape thought they were great activists when they introduced <blink>, to compete with IE's <marquee>. But since it's open source, it's ok to introduce deviations from standards, right? After all, we wouldn't want to deflect to the Dark Side.
No, this is not a troll, although perhaps a bit sarcastically worded. I just think it's smarter (and way more difficult, yes) to focus on getting competitive open formats into the standard.
On the other hand, the video tag lets you do stuff like:
<video id="movie" src="movie.ogg" width="400" height="300" type="video/ogg; codecs="theora, speex"">My cool movie that you can't see because your browser doesn't support ogg. Pity.</video>
<button class="myStyle" onclick="document.getElementById('movie').play();">Play it now!</button>
I'm not sure where Theora originated.
it's from max headroom.
No struggling with drivers, installing software, or suffering from daily crashes and disk corruption.
I disagree with you on this. There's no driver support because Apple doesn't allow choice. Installing software is easier I think on a Linux machine. My mom thinks so too. And I find that my girlfriend's Macbook needs to be restarted more often then my Ubuntu machine.
When single shines the triple sun, What was sundered and undone, Behold! The two made one! ~Rubbs
Why make such a point about Theora support? Why not Xvid? Xvid is free software, released under the GPL, and, in contrast to Theora, yields excellent video quality. Xvid is already pretty much the standard codec for fansubbers because of this, so why is Wikimedia being so difficult?
A: theora is good enough for p0rn
B: most of www is made of p0rn
A + B: ?
We'll have to see what direction Apple is going with rich media content and the codecs combined with Internet standards they are embracing, when 10.6 is released into the wild.
One half of my slashdot geek instict tells me to applaud the aid to OGG, while the other half tells me to rant about how bloated firefox is getting! Cause everybody knows this will make the browser slower even when you are not using ! ... Err, just noticed, that last half is very lame, I'll order it to shut up.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] VLC(99973,0xdd22f000) malloc: *** mmap(size=16777216) failed (error code=12) 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** error: can't allocate region 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] VLC(99973,0xdd22f000) malloc: *** mmap(size=16777216) failed (error code=12) 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** error: can't allocate region 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] VLC(99973,0xdd22f000) malloc: *** mmap(size=4976640) failed (error code=12) 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** error: can't allocate region 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] VLC(99973,0xdd22f000) malloc: *** mmap(size=688128) failed (error code=12) 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** error: can't allocate region 7/31/08 2:36:11 PM [0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 7/31/08 2:36:38 PM com.apple.launchd[129] ([0x0-0x11e81e7].org.videolan.vlc[99973]) Exited abnormally: Bus error
My test was on an Intel Mac. Of course the problem could be with VLC and not Theora. Like I said this was a totally unscientific test, but I've NEVER be happy with Ogg content either audio (vorbis) or video (theora). Theora is reminiscent of MPEG-2 video in quality, size and playback performance. While H.264 just looks great, creates reasonable file size and performs amazingly. I think the community should pressure MPEG LA to open H.264, because it is, for lack of a better term, 'the state of the art'. Of course I'm just an armchair analyst and you should take what I say with a grain of salt.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Video support is a problem that has largely been solved with plugins. Where is my @font-face support?
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
I want to see vorbis & theora succeed, but is it right to cheer on the FF team while they're going around the W3C? I'm a little uninformed here, so I don't mean this to sound snarky but: why is it okay for Firefox to break or extend the standards when we all acknowledge that it was bad when Netscape & Microsoft kept doing it?
I know that it was supposed to be in the spec, and it was removed for political reasons. I hate DRM, and I know that Nokia and others want to see a solution that supports DRM. But look at it from a user's perspective: once again, the industry can't agree on a standard and so everyone's going to try to force a de facto standard.
And once again, everyone wins except the poor saps who have to choose between a browser stuffed with of competing video codecs (which should probably stay in the OS, and yes you should get off my lawn) and lynx. Forward-thinking developers will use ogg's solution. Youtube will stay with Adobe's.
I can recognize the good intentions here. And more public support of theora is great. But I still have a sinking feeling from this. Even if the long term goals are to make the web a better all-around platform, with more features for multimedia and application development, wouldn't it be better to get there in harmony? How long is HTML6 going to take when the W3C has to clean up the mess from the latest round of the every-browser-company-deciding-they-know-what's-best-for-me wars.
Well, yes, AMD and Nvidia will never write acceleration support for Ogg Theora, so it would be up to the open source community to do that, if at all possible? I had an idea (dangerous, I know, especially at night) that maybe GPGPU could be utilized for this? Maybe I'm just very, very silly...
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
The whole point of Firefox was to be a smaller, faster, simpler browser. We do *NOT* need to have so-called "native" video support inside of Firefox!!!
I have nothing against video support, nor Theora. But those should be handled by external applications as plugins or helper apps! Some people will say "then why have support for PNG" or whatnot, but I would respond with "Where does it end? Why not compile in support for unzipping files or 3-D renders?".
Keep it simple. Keep it clean. The less code the:
1) less download size
2) easier to compile
3) easier to port to other platforms
4) fewer bugs
5) less possible security venerabilities
6) less memory used
7) faster loading/startup time
8) more customizable
Yes, Theora is not as good quality as H.264. But it's not bad, and there are many ways to use video on the Web other than playing full-screen HD video in Youtube. Lots of Web applications will benefit from being able to include *royalty-free* video as part of the application. Also let's not forget that we also have Vorbis in Firefox; all your favourite Web games and apps will be able to have decent sound effects without resorting to hidden Flash objects.
I suspect that official story might be something of a hasty revision, after it occurred to Xiph that Pratchett might sue them.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I know that the Video Lan Client has a wizard to simplify the conversion of video into the Ogg Theora format. You might want to give that a try. It seems to automate most option choices by default to simplify the process.
Most men are not thought unwise until they speak.
In XHTML2, they are supposed to be. Which makes some sense.
No, they aren't pushing for people to download a nightly right now. They say
(emphasis mine)
It would be naive to ask people to test code added one day before.
I'm all for native audio and video support in browsers, but now that we're starting to surf on netbooks, mobiles and toasters wouldn't it be great if the spec also included a way to determine wether or not the user actually wants this content to play? Automatically, or at all? Or if they want it to shut up so they can surf without their music-playlist being blarred over? Note that the intention of the user in this regard is a seperate issue to wether or not the device or connection is capable of supporting said media. Maybe I'm just being stingy with my precious clock cycles...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-comments/2008Jul/0000.html
captcha: cameras
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
then do the right thing and also provide a link to the flv URL?
People would then worship google and alternative browsers who can't use Adobe Flash plugin (which mozilla sniffs to perform the "yourube downloader") will be able to work with the Tube.
Oh, forgot that Mozilla and Google are in bed...
The TV manufacturer and the Content producer. The one makes sure that only Mozilla works with their content and the other makes sure insecure plugins are installed on millions of computers which can be pawned in case of national emergency.
Ogg Theora is proprietary. In every sense of the legal term, it is. It was developed by an independant company without an industry-recognized standards body and continues to do so. It also has several patents which are only licensed to the Xiph foundation, as mentioned in the article.
Stallman will disagree since he uses "proprietary" as a counterpart to "free", but this is only his odd definition of the term and weird wordplay.
What Ogg Theora *is*, is ROYALTY FREE.
What I don't understand here, is why the HTML5 tag can't include several video formats; it is obvious that while also a "proprietary" set of formats which require patent licensing and some require streaming royalties, MPEG4, H.264 and 3GPP video are by and large THE defacto industry standards, ratified by the MPEG group and ISO and ITU, for video playback and video conferencing these days, and will probably continue to be for a very long time. Browsing the web on an iPhone you can guarantee to support these. Browsing the web on a Blu-Ray player (maybe as part of special content), the same applies. How many video discs did you buy at the store, how many iTunes downloads, came in Theora format? None :D
MJPEG is also an option as this is used by a lot of webcam software, and the amount of work to decode it over a current browser is minimal if it already supports JPEG.
What Nokia etc. are worried about is entering into an agreement via the W3C to implement Theora in their devices and somehow, somewhere have to end up open sourcing a lot of stuff by proxy. They really won't want to do that at all.
So, why not have MPEG4 and derivatives, *and* Ogg Theora? And any other mimetype you care to pick which describes some standard-compliant video format like MPEG4, or AAC or MP3 audio... the stuff we use on our MP3 players, phones, video playback devices and already stream from the web? Just like some MP3 players can't play AAC music, some browsers just won't play Theora (and in the end, they wouldn't anyway, because decoding Theora on a 200MHz ARM phone chip with only an MPEG4 decode engine is probably going to be about as efficient as calling your neighbour via the Moon)
And to Nokia, why does the HTML specification need to even mention DRM? The DRM is entirely an OS-level component (as there is a trust path to be considered which cannot be handled by browser alone) which can be optionally embedded in a file or wrapped around a file. You could add DRM to Ogg Theora, why not use another royalty-free format like DReaM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DReaM ?. I think what is more pertinent to define is recommended streaming transports; video src="blah.ogg" just isn't enough is it? What about RTP or RTSP, use of MMS? W3C need not define the transport protocol but it should at least say which ones should become more common and which ones are just Completely Out, Not Going In At All.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:7train_arriving.ogg
plays well in Epiphany 2.22 browser (with old good Gecko 1.8.x.x).
just in case you think SVG is rather limited: see this broad range of applications
I suspect that official story might be something of a hasty revision, after it occurred to Xiph that Pratchett might sue them.
Then why change the meaning of the name of the container, "Ogg", while deliberately saying the name of the audio format, "Vorbis", does come from Discworld?
I've found SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder and Renderer) quite useful. It's a Windows GUI for several FOSS libraries, including FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, mppenc and FFmpeg2theora. It even has a clunky-but-usable batch file conversion facility. Home page: http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
However it seems XHTML2 is somehow... err... almost dead...
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
If HTML5 developers want to add this kind of control to embedded objects, then it should add these features on every type of object, instead of arbitrarily limit it to 'video'. Besides, how do you classify SVG, when it has animation and embedded object support?
If HTML5 really needs any kind of new tag, it will be a universal close tag. Since cross nesting of tags are considered as invalid syntax in (X)HTML, generic close tag eliminates a lot of manual mistakes, and considerably shrink the code sizes.
MPEG-1 with layer 2 audio is probably pretty patent free, since the near complete draft standard was publicly available as ISO CD 11172 by December 6, 1991. I haven't found anyone claiming that they have patents on it, on the other hand I haven't found anyone claiming that there are no patents on it. My long summary of my search for the MPEG-1 patents is up on kuro5hin.