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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."
No way Youtube is going to let Joe Sixpack easily download whatever video he wants to his computer.
How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?
They may not be able to fix the problem, but at the very least they should be able to prevent Flash from crashing Firefox.
Yeah, it's not like anybody used the IMG tag either, all media on the web is in OBJECT tags.
Youtube's business model (such as it is) revolves around keeping you coming back to their site to watch the videos, and view the associated ads while letting them track what you're watching. They are most certainly not eager to help you make them less money y letting you easily download. You may as well ask why your local cinema doesn't give you a copy of the DVD with your movie ticket.
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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?
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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 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 think you are missing the thread of this conversation. The question is whether or not Youtube would consider offering Theora files. Someone above claimed that offering Theora files would allow people to download the videos (ie, watch them while not pointing their browser to Youtube). Someone else responded that tools exist to download Flash videos. The AC I responded to claimed that "Jow Sixpack" couldn't use those tools. I would argue that someone who can't use those tools would be equally incapable of downloading a Theora file.
Thank God for evolution.