Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard

bmullan writes "Dailymotion, one of the world's largest video sites, announced support for Open Video. They've put out a press release, a blog post on the new Open Video site, and an HTML 5 demo site where you can see some of the things that you can do with open video and Firefox 3.5. (You can get the Firefox 3.5 beta here.) Dailymotion is automatically transcoding all of the content that their users create, and expect to have around 300,000 videos in the open Ogg Theora and Vorbis formats."

Comments

Other sites with support exist as well

[g-to-the-o-to-the-g]

There are some other sites which have had <video> support for a while now, such as omploader. It would be nice if some big sites like youtube get rid of flash too, but I'm not holding my breath.

Disclaimer: it's my site

Linux?

[goldaryn]

Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard

Well, bye bye karma... but..

How is this a Linux story/Firefox story? It's a new HTML standard. All browsers will support it, eventually.

Re:Linux?

[Chatterton]

Linux, yes, there is a problem because Firefox run on windows too. Firefox, the tag is correct, because only Firefox support these part of HTML5 for now.

Re:Linux?

[TinBromide]

It looks like firefox is supporting the new standard faster than most other browsers, hence it possibly being a firefox story, but this story doesn't appear to be branded firefox, it looks to be branded linux,/media, which is really weird because firefox probably has more windows installs than linux ones, but it is open source and as we all know "open source = linux". (not really)

Re:Linux?

[Dynedain]

Just like they all support all portions of the previous 4 HTML standards, CSS, XHTML, etc...

Re:Linux?

[Bake]

Really, only Firefox? Because I could SWEAR it was working for me in Safari 4 with Youtube's HTML 5 demo site.

Re:Linux?

[Tensor]

The page that the articel makes reference to (http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo) works in FF 3.5

IE8 tries to download openvideoframe.
FF3, Safari 4 and Chrome 2 say you need FF3.5 (dont have Safari3 to test),

So no, this wont work in Safari 4.

Re:Linux?

[RalphBNumbers]

Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.
Thus Safari users are shown better compressed, but definitely patented, h264 streams on those sites.

IIRC some other WebKit browsers use GStreamer as the back end for their video tag support, and thus probably support Theora.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try going to http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/ in Safari 4

That landing page requires FireFox, but the actual video pages work fine in Safari.

Re:Linux?

[sxpert]

apple is a bunch of loonies that prefer others pay them patent licenses to *them*..
oh. it seems apple has patents related to x264 in the form of the quicktime multiplex format... how practical...

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari supports the HTML5 video tag, but doesn't include Theora support because Apple considers it a patent lawsuit magnet.

Ummm... Apple doesn't include it because it REALLY doesn't want a free video/audio codec becoming widely used.

Re:Linux?

[Kippesoep]

That's just plain Flash though.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Browser-sniffing for the lose!
It should easily be capable in any other browser.

Firefox 3.5 isn't anything special, Safari 4 and Chrome 2 have <video> support. (not trolling in any way, just stating a fact)
They must be browser-sniffing for some reason. (read: business deal)
I tried checking the source, but i already have a sore head as it is, and they have compressed their JS files by the looks of it...

Re:Linux?

[Goaway]

Wait, people who prefer to get money instead of pay money are loonies?

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to click on a video's icon, then click on it's miniature flash version, to be taken to a page that uses the html5 video tag to show the video.

Yes, it's really that stupid.

Re:Linux?

[wampus]

Shit, in Canada the money is the loony.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have just tried this on safari 4 beta (on powerbook g4) with the ff3.5 user agent string defined. It looks ok good to me. The video effects such as blur and colorize did not work, but I can do the rotate, hide the controller, and skin the player.

Re:Linux?

[FlyingBishop]

To be perfectly clear, it's h264 that's a patent lawsuit magnet. Theora makes the patent lawsuit problem go away because there are no patents to worry about. I can only assume the GP was a troll.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

All browsers will support it, eventually.

Doubt it will ever come to the most popular browser (IE6). Only the most fringe OSs like Windows Vista, 7 or Linux, and browsers like IE8 or firefox will ever support HTML5. It is still pretty cool though

Re:Linux?

[reashlin]

*Sorry Karma*

Seems to be working in Opera 10 (alpha) as well. So is it news when Firefox does it - even if its last?*

What I think is news is there seem to more browsers that support the tag that websites that use it. Must be a first for a new feature of HTML.

--

*Yeah yeah I'm discounting IE.

Re:Linux?

[supernova_hq]

I'm surprised that they haven't made this work in chrome yet...

Re:Linux?

[supernova_hq]

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
~Robert J. Hanlon

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Faster? You must be joking. Unless you mean faster than IE.

Re:Linux?

[macslut]

Sorry FlyingBishop, but the original poster was correct. Apple doesn't want to touch Theora, FLAC, Ogg or any other open codec/container because of the patent lawsuit magnet issue. Apple can use h.264 because they can pay to license it and be done with it. There's so much that goes into codecs and container formats that it's absolutely inevitable some patent trolls are going to pounce on any new format. With h.264, Apple is isolated because they've licensed the format. With Theora and the other open formats, any patent troll is going to go after the deeper pockets, which would be Apple, if they supported the format. Apple gets around this, sometimes, by offering a plug-in architecture that allows 3rd parties to develop the compatibility for them.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, it's a pity it's so flippin' buggy. Maybe they should slow down a little and fix all the bugs.

Re:Linux?

[delt0r]

Apple doesn't want to touch Theora, FLAC, Ogg or any other open codec/container because of the patent lawsuit magnet issue.

What a pile of Rubbish. They want you to use h.264 because they have patents for h.264 and some of those license fees goes to apple.

Re:Linux?

[delt0r]

Maybe they use h.264 because Apple are one of the patent holders of h264.

Where do you dig up this tripe.

Re:Linux?

[N Monkey]

To be perfectly clear, it's h264 that's a patent lawsuit magnet. Theora makes the patent lawsuit problem go away because there are no patents to worry about..

Really?

The Theora FAQ says that it is based on patented technology but that that a licensing deal permits free use. That's all well and good for the parts that are in that/those patent(s). What concerns me is the features section of the Theora wiki lists things that are also in other standards or are variants thereof.

A patent is usually meant to cover a single "invention" but I suspect that a video coding scheme would have scope for multiple different inventions. I'd be worried some of those may already be patented

Re:Linux?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Hypothetically (I haven't confirmed this) you can also just install XiphQT and subsequently, Ogg Vorbis audio and Ogg Theora video should work in Safari just as it does in the Firefox 3.5 and Opera browsers.

Whether Apple® wants that or not...

Re:Linux?

[macslut]

So by your logic, Apple shouldn't allow the use of the avi container because they own the mov container...but they do allow avi. I could give a ton of examples like this. However, when it comes to open formats that have high legal risks, and at the same time much less adoption, Apple just doesn't want to go there directly, but provides a plug-in architecture. Again, if they wanted to be heavy handed and only allow Apple owned/co-owned/etc formats, they wouldn't provide the plug-in architecture to QuickTime.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[harryandthehenderson]

It would be nice if some big sites like youtube get rid of flash too, but I'm not holding my breath.

No it wouldn't be nice. The h.264 codec that is used to stream their content is far and away better than that Theora garbage format.

Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera has supported for a while now. Stupid site says I'm not allowed to open it cause I'm not using Firefox.

Hmm, does this seem familiar to anyone?

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the part about needing the latest BETA? Even with Firefox 3.0, the site doesn't work. You need Firefox 3.5 beta.

Who modded this insightful?

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[yincrash]

If the site only needs HTML5 support, you should be allowed to view it with any HTML5 browser, rather than constricting it only to work with Firefox 3.5 beta.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[cha5on]

If you actually read TFA, you might have noticed

Do other browsers support this HTML tag? Yes, but our code works best on Firefox 3.5 beta and is not yet optimized for other browsers. We would be happy to work more closely with developers from Webkit and Opera.

Considering that the demo is intended to show what an emerging standard can do better than current ones, it's understandable that they want it to look the best it can, which means they're going to want people to watch it using the optimized platform and not something that's barely going to run their demo.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[harryandthehenderson]

Actually their list of support for HTML5 doesn't include the video object only the audio object/element. And that includes up to the latest 9.64 version that has been released.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[plus_M]

I don't know. I use Opera exclusively and just a few days ago upgraded to Opera 10.00 Beta, and yet I can't seem to view the Youtube html5 demo. Note that I have been trying this only on my 64 bit Linux workstation.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

That's not really the fault of Firefox or HTML5, it's the fault of the site, but really I do think HTML5 is indeed a step backwards.

It reduces separation of the content and presentation layers and it increases parsing ambiguity by relaxing standards. Of course, ambiguity is bound to lead to a performance hit too, albeit perhaps rather small so may not really matter. This is really not great news as far as the web is concerned as it's exactly what we've been fighting against for the last decade with reasonable success - the web is certainly more portable and accessible now than it used to be.

From what I've read previously of the HTML5 spec and comments surrounding it the idea is to make HTML development more accessible, but I'm not sure this is the right way to go about things. If we're going to increase the amount of people who can publish on the internet then a better option seems to be to improve the applications for doing this - whether they're web applications (i.e. Wordpress to Twitter to Facebook to MySpace) or whether we simply make better quality WYSIWYG desktop applications. If we do this on a spec that's better built for the real web developers - those who really need clear separation of concerns to ensure their sites are truly enterprise ready then we'll undoubtedly end up with a much better web.

With tags like and so forth added it's meant to increase clarity, but really it doesn't, because ultimately it will never fulfil everyone's needs, someone will want or so on, this means they're back to something like

meaning half your markup is in the div format and half not, or you could just ignore the feature but then effectively you may as well just carry on using XHTML anyway.

Let web developers develop and let users use applications to publish - it's worked so well as many Web 2.0 successes have shown.

Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.

Standards should be lightweight, extensible and well defined, I would argued HTML5 is flawed in all of these areas, whereas with XHTML that is much less the case. HTML5 simply makes worse the very reasons we started to move away from HTML to XHTML in the first place.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[ardor]

Let web developers develop and let users use applications to publish - it's worked so well as many Web 2.0 successes have shown.

Actually, it didn't. HTML 5 isn't actually suited for *web applications*. It is suited for *documents*. These two are entirely different entities - for example, there is no need for navigation buttons in a web application. HTML 5 reflects today's actual web needs much better. The web is no longer primarily made up of hypertext document, it is primarily made up of web applications.

Also, the market forcing a standard ends up with closed standards that require licensing and whatnot. Even if the specs are open.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[ardor]

HTML 5 isn't actually suited for *web applications*.

For some reason, Slashdot submit ate the <.
It should read "HTML <"

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[harryandthehenderson]

That's because they still don't have support for the video tag yet. The GP is full of shit to claim that Opera has support for it yet.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[i.of.the.storm]

That's kind of misleading, since there is no such thing as an HTML5 browser as of yet. All the upcoming versions of browsers that aren't IE are getting support for parts of HTML5, but it would be incorrect to say that they are all equivalent. Especially in the case of the tag, they seem to do different codecs right now. Firefox does Theora, Safari and I think Chrome does h264, and I have no idea what opera does. I'm honestly not sure how this is a better situation than flash video players, at least until everyone decides to standardize on a common format. I guess the idea is that once all the dust settles, we'll have lower CPU usage and maybe nice things like videos being cached and/or easily downloadable, which flv doesn't do easily, but until then this isn't much of an improvement unless you're stuck on, say, 64 bit linux and can't get the flash plugin to work, but that's a really tiny edge case. Last I checked I could play youtube videos under 64 bit linux, so I'm not really sure what the advantages are.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Oh, thats silly. Its great, it means website video content can be transcoded in 2 formats and have a fallback flash or silverlight implementation. Awesomeness. I wonder if it would be possible for the video implementation of Firefox to use DirectShow on Windows, Quicktime on Mac, and Gstreamer on Linux. That way, there wouldn't be any need to deal with those stupid video player plug-ins that never seem to work properly anyway and adding support for new formats is as simple as installing a new native decoder package.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[maxume]

HTML5 specifies the algorithm to use to transform bad markup into a DOM. How is that ambiguous?

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[sznupi]

So...you're limiting Opera to official/final releases but Firefox Beta is fine?

How cute...

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[sznupi]

Opera has different preview versions for different functionalities.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[pizzach]

Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.

According to the w3c site, the members include:

• Apple, Inc.
• Microsoft Corporation
• Opera Software
• Mozilla Foundation

I may be wrong, but I believe this encompasses all the major rendering engines on the web today. There are about 390 other members on the page too. I do not understand how this is a smaller clique of people than just having the developers of Webkit, Gecko, Trident and Presto doing their own things.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[sznupi]

Yeah, it's simply exchanging browser monopoly for browser duopoly - previously we've had "best viewed in IE", now it's "...in IE & Firefox". No real progress at all.

Posting from a place where Opera is quite popular (8.5% here, 31.6% in neighbouring country (yeah, more than Gecko - 24.5%); most countries in the region have less than 50% IE usage); trust me, browser-agnostic web is a much better idea.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[EvanED]

Oh, thats silly. Its great, it means website video content can be transcoded in 2 formats and have a fallback flash or silverlight implementation.

As opposed to just a Flash implementation that works decently well almost everywhere?

Unless you were being facetious, how is having three ways to do the same thing for not a whole lot of benefit a great thing? (I mean, I *am* looking forward to being able to dump Flash, but at the same time I don't see it as a big improvement to stick that in the browser itself.)

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

Here. You ignorant clod!

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5 a step backwards?
HTML5 reduces separation of content and presentation?
Flawed in some areas?

Dude, HTML 5 is still in the process of being finalized, and it makes a LOT of things much easier to develop.
While we have been able to embed videos before without Flash, it varied from computer to computer with all the different versions of media players installed, codecs used, etc.
HTML5 defines a standard that i seriously hope comes to pass quickly and kills off Flash as soon as possible as the content provider for video.
Flash also doesn't do a thing for DRM, since it has always been broken, and always will be, and the actual swf files can be decompiled too. (brought this up since it is the main reason people use it)
And considering the demo of some of the interesting things you can do with the <video> and JavaScript (actually interacting with the video, something that wasn't easy to do with Flash and other plugins), it is many times more useful.

Everything Flash can do now can be replicated with <video>, <audio> and JavaScript, one way or another.
The only reason it seems harder at the moment is that it hasn't had time to have tools developed to ease development with it, whereas Flash has years of tools behind it. (not that it is that hard, i looked over the source of that guys demo with interactive video and it looks relatively simple, JavaScript-wise)

The quicker sites change from supporting plugins to supporting standards, the better for all of us.
Plugins have been the cancer of the web for too long.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[zuperduperman]

> That's kind of misleading .... All the upcoming versions of browsers that aren't IE are getting support for parts of HTML5

Speaking of misleading - IE8 already supports parts of HTML5 and Microsoft have committed to support it "in full" in future versions. Can we tone the bias down a little?

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

So...you're limiting Opera to official/final releases but Firefox Beta is fine?

How cute...

Yeah, in purely practical terms a browser you can access the source code to might be easier to develop a new feature for than browsers that don't give you any source code. Who'da thunk it?! Jackass. I dare you to respond and tell me what's wrong with that.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I was being facetious. Apologies for forgetting my sarcasm tags.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[i.of.the.storm]

Haha, that was not intentional. It just seems like much of the coverage around HMTL5 features ignores IE8, and I haven't seen much regarding this from Microsoft either. I downloaded IE8 the day it released and there are a few neat features from it that I really wish Firefox had. If I could edit my post to remove that bit I would, but I honestly didn't know IE was planning on adding HTML5 features. I kind of assumed based on their record of CSS feature adoption, which I guess was wrong.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

I went directly to their own page, which I also linked in another post, and it only shows support for the audio tag. Having support for it in some unreleased or nightly beta doesn't count.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[ClosedSource]

Actually, no version of HTML is really suited for "web applications" but that's how we roll anyway.

I'd love it if documents and web applications were really treated as "entirely different entities" (i.e. the only thing they'd have in common is the set of transport layers).

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[ClosedSource]

"Dude, HTML 5 is still in the process of being finalized, and it makes a LOT of things much easier to develop."

So, is your point is that we shouldn't complain about HTML 5 because the standard isn't finished, but we can talk about how great it is because the standard .. how does that go again?

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Macthorpe]

Having support for it in some unreleased or nightly beta doesn't count.

You should probably tell the article submitter that.

Firefox 3.5 Beta Boosts Open Video Standard

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Locklin]

Considering that the demo is intended to show what an emerging standard can do better than current ones, it's understandable that they want it to look the best it can, which means they're going to want people to watch it using the optimized platform and not something that's barely going to run their demo.

So, they intend to showcase an open standard by publishing something that only works on a single "optimized" platform??

While I understand the pragmatism, it still seems odd.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[cha5on]

So, they intend to showcase an open standard by publishing something that only works on a single "optimized" platform??

While I understand the pragmatism, it still seems odd.

That the standard is open does not mean that every browser implements the standard properly yet. If you intend to showcase an emerging standard, you want to actually showcase the emerging standard. As this is such a showcase, it's perfectly reasonable to restrict presentation to those browsers capable of displaying the page as intended.

As I quoted earlier FTFA:

We would be happy to work more closely with developers from Webkit and Opera.

Based on that, I expect that we'll see similar demos running on those and other HTML5-capable browsers in the near future.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[sznupi]

For starters, one could check also devbuilds of Opera 10...would be good for integrity.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Randle_Revar]

Opera follows FF/wikimedia/dailymotion in supporting Theora. The YT demo is h.264, which needs Safari.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Randle_Revar]

Opera can't afford MPEG, so they go with Theora

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[i.of.the.storm]

That's good. I don't understand Apple's reasons for not going with Theora, it seems like a stupid move on their part. But it would be much nicer if in the long run the browsers would just use whatever codecs are installed on the local machine rather than bundle their own.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, now if only they had used HTML or some other system that degrades gracefully...

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Randle_Revar]

Supposedly, Apple is afraid of submarine patents on Theora (they already exposed themselves to risk of submarine patents on h.264, and don't want more risk). Or maybe, being Apple, they just aren't big fans of open standards.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

Pages that conform to standards should NOT be optimized for a particular implementation of the standard. Doing so defeats the entire point of something being a standard. Pages should be optimized for THE STANDARD. Implementations that conform will handle it, ones that don't will not.

Really, pages/sites shouldn't check, or have to check, what version/brand of browser one is using. The site should instead include a specification for what standards its compliant with, and the browser should then decide how/if it can support those standards.

I move for the eradication of the User-Agent header from HTTP.

Perhaps in its place could be something like a 'Recognized-Standards' header, where the browser could specify which versions of HTML, CSS, and other stsandards, it was able to recognize and render (ideally, by specifying their RFC or STD numbers, to encourage this to be used for documented public standards over secret proprietary ones)

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Tubal-Cain]

You should probably tell the article submitter that.

You should read what you quoted again:

Having support for it in some unreleased or nightly beta doesn't count.

Firefox's beta isn't a nightly build. That would be Minefield.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Skapare]

They should not be trying to "optimize" it to any specific platform whatsoever, neither for a demo nor for final production. They should present it in strict standards compliant HTML 5. Whatever HTML 5 and other standards in use cannot do, they should not be attempting to do. Attempting to optimize to specific browsers is what makes too many things work poorly when transitions happen in the future. Also, new browsers end up having to pretend to be a browser they are not just to get sites to work at all. If their site is refusing to deliver a video tag at all to an Opera browser, which supports it, then Opera might have to pretend to be Firefox (a little tweaking can make it do that). Once we have too many browsers pretending to be other browsers, then the whole world is in a mess. If anything, there never should have been a header like "User-Agent:". Where does it get used in any non-abusive way?

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Cymurgh]

nice things like videos being cached and/or easily downloadable, which flv doesn't do easily

Works pretty well with the Firefox add-on Downloadhelper, in my experience.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[andy.ruddock]

But how can the browser just use whatever codecs are installed on the local machine?

The choice of codec is determined by the media format, which is determined by a third party, remotely. By using HTML5 standards the provider is at least encouraged to provide media in a format which will be accessible to the majority of internet users.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[i.of.the.storm]

Right, but that's not something that flv does by default. Of course with just a little know-how you can download flv files and play them with VLC or mplayer or whatever your favorite player is, but it's not something that is really part of the design. I think at least with video tags we could see browser vendors build their own player interface around it, so that there are easy and obvious download links for videos.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

Yes but are they getting a say?

Nokia wasn't happy with the video codec choice and it's not Apple's preferred choice. I doubt Microsoft is happy with it either. How about Adobe whose player is perhaps the most successful through simply being the player people have chosen to use?

They're members, but only because they don't want to be left out altogether - how much of a say they really have is questionable and we've already seen disputes suggesting some are not happy about how things have been decided.

Effectively the spec is being put together regardless of them.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

I don't really understand how HTML 5 reflects todays needs better when we're in an increasingly web application based world and when HTML 5 is far less suited to applications than XHTML is?

When building applications you need the separation of document structure ((X)HTML markup), presentation (CSS), client side script (Javascript), server-side script (I wont list them all!), data storage (RDBMS usually). Content fills into the structure and is styled by the presentation layer but the problem with HTML 5 is it's advocating mixing the presentation structure and content again into one big mess. It's advocating inconsistent coding throughout the document (see previous comments about how some sections will be divs, others will be pre-defined sections such as footer).

There are plenty of other areas where it's really not suited to web applications or good software development practice in general such as defining a specific format for video and such. What if that format becomes obsolete and a much better codec comes along, do we then make a new HTML spec which could take years again? Do we change the existing spec (specs shouldn't change!) and expect new browser versions? Do we just hold the web back and not bother to update?

Or do we just stick with the line of HTML specs that are by definition eXtensible? That avoid defining specific components so explicitly so that the web can adapt on the fly to handle those changes? Of course HTML5 makes allowances for these things too in a similar way, but if you want to change your video codec you need to change your markup from video tags, whilst in XHTML you just don't use them in the first place.

Issues like this demonstrate why HTML5 just isn't a good spec for application development as it goes against decades of what has been learned through experience to be good practice.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Yfrwlf]

I'm sure 99% of Slashdotters completely agree with you, and that's what TFA is about, the HTML 5 standard. It's stupid that they'd have a barrier like a browser check, and I think most everyone would agree with you there as well. I *hope* they simply wanted to inform users that Firefox 3.5 supports, as far as they know, most of or all of the features of their site, and perhaps other browsers may not be the best to use while viewing their demo, but they should provide an easy way to bypass it of course, or simply put some kind of notification someplace about the situation and about their demo to explain all that.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[howlingmadhowie]

Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall.

been there. done that. didn't work.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

Really? Flash based video players have been a resounding success in the last 5 or so years. Hell we even have sites like YouTube which are built entirely around it and have got into the top 10 most visited sites around the world.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

According to wikipedia, in April IE was at 66% and firefox at 22%. That leaves a very significant 12%.

If you think going from well over 90% IE to less than 2/3 is "no real progress", then what exactly DO you consider progress? I'll be breaking out the champagne when IE dips below 50% too, but heck, we've already got diversity in the market, and it can only get better.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[BenoitRen]

It reduces separation of the content and presentation layers

Really. Explain how, because I'm not seeing it.

it increases parsing ambiguity by relaxing standards

Nonsense. HTML5 defines exactly how web browsers should parse the HTML, and describes how they should handle errors in the HTML (which was missing from previous versions, and sorely needed).

If we're going to increase the amount of people who can publish on the internet then a better option seems to be to improve the applications for doing this

Patches welcome. The open source community has pretty much given up on this.

Besides that there's also something that stinks about forcing a standard on the web too - open or not. I think I'd rather have market forces decide a standard

We already had the browser wars. Did you forget already? It sucked and didn't lead us anywhere.

over a small clique of people who have their own interests and agendas which may not necessarily be the best for the web overall

Like most trolls who bash web standards, you don't have a clue about the W3C at all. Organisations from all over the world have a membership with the W3C, including the organisations behind the rendering engines.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[thaig]

"Nokia" is 100,000+ people. I promise that at least one of them is happy with Theora.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera has supported for a while now.

Wrong, actually.

Opera has an experimental build that supports video, but neither Opera 9.6 nor the upcoming Opera 10 will actually support it yet.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

"Really. Explain how, because I'm not seeing it."

Perhaps the most obvious is that the standard advocates the use of presentation elements such as b, i, and so on. These were deprecated in XHTML strict because presentation does not belong with document structure if you want to be able to manage these things indepently, which you will in complex web apps.

"Nonsense. HTML5 defines exactly how web browsers should parse the HTML, and describes how they should handle errors in the HTML (which was missing from previous versions, and sorely needed)."

I'm referring to the fact that you can't count on HTML5 documents being well formed like you can with XHTML. This leads to extra difficulties in developing applications to work with the DOM from browsers themselves, to agregators to accessibility tools such as screen readers. More complication inevitably results in more problems and greater inefficiency. All for the sake of people being able to write sloppy markup when such people would be better off (and almost certainly happier) just making use of applications to publish - applications such as Drupal, Wordpress or even simpler stuff like Facebook or MySpace

"Patches welcome. The open source community has pretty much given up on this."

I'm not sure what you're on about here, as stated previously, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla are all great tools for letting the average user publish, hence why they've been so damn successful.

"We already had the browser wars. Did you forget already? It sucked and didn't lead us anywhere."

I'm not talking about arguing the core standards which is really what the browser wars were about, I've made it quite clear I advocate XHTML and CSS as standards. But for example we are able to support many image formats in our sites, using different ones for different purposes. Imagine if the JPEG format had been forced as the only format leaving no scope for animated gifs? How about if PNG had been forced with the rendering issues some user agents still have dealing with PNGs?

We've got an issue where a video format, that right now is really quite awful is being forced on us despite the fact half the web is quite happy using Flash already. What happens if this video format becomes obsolete when there's a realisation it can never be as good as what we want? Do we wait years for a new standard? Do we change the old standard? Or do we just stop using the video tag and go back to what we were doing with XHTML anyway?

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see Flash replaced, but I'd like to see it replaced with a standard that has got their on it's merits - because people actually want to use it en-masse rather than because it was forced through as part of a standard. I'd like to also see that that format can be replaced with ease, without the need to re-write new versions of standards or god-forbid, edit old ones which goes against the point of having standards to start with.

"Like most trolls who bash web standards, you don't have a clue about the W3C at all. Organisations from all over the world have a membership with the W3C, including the organisations behind the rendering engines."

Yes, except this isn't a standard W3C wanted anything to do with until it realised that it was gaining traction amongst those who saw "Ooooh shiny new features" without understanding how bad these features were for good practice web application development. The W3C had to step in and start trying to make the best it could of a bad job. Really, it's WHATWG that has made most of the decisions on HTML5, WHATWG is a group that was setup by individuals, which is a far cry from the W3C which as you rightly state is quite well represented.

The W3C was on the right path - sticking to it's guns and following the good practice route with XHTML until it was cornered into dealing with the step backwards that is HTML5. WHATWG has effectively acted as minority pressure group pushing what the W3C as a whole really did not want, but was forced to embrace by the pub

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

Unless that's the CEO, then one person in a company does not dictate company stance on an issue.

See here for Nokia's position paper and why they have been unhappy:

http://www.w3.org/2007/08/video/positions/Nokia.pdf

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[sorak]

But they do have one other thing in common. In the end, each one must present some content to the end user. The problem there is that it is only logical that the syntax used to describe a confirmation message be the same as that used to describe a blog post, and that the syntax used to markup the two items be of the same type as well.

Of course, if you were arguing for an HTML document subset with javascript/flash/html forms/etc removed, then that would be a technically clean way to do it.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[sorak]

Did you read the part about needing the latest BETA? Even with Firefox 3.0, the site doesn't work. You need Firefox 3.5 beta.

Who modded this insightful?

I took that as a comparison to the days of sites that would redirect netscape users to a page that said "This site requires Internet explorer. Suck it, boy!". I wouldn't agree that it is a fair compariosn, but it would be nice if they let you see how it is rendered in your current browser (and maybe included a message that tells you to view it in Firefox 3.5 beta to see the "good" version).

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[ClosedSource]

There could be things in common, but the main point is that designing for one type of task and then trying to shoehorn another type of task into that design isn't a very good method.

For example, if your going to standardize the syntax and semantics of markup, an understanding of the various types of systems that are going to use it should be reflected in the design.

The problem isn't so much that HTML has too much stuff in it for documents, but rather it has too little stuff in it for web apps. A lot of boilerplate javascript is used to implement functionality that would have been built-in if the original design anticipated web apps. I'm not knocking the original designers, they just weren't designing the kind of system we need now.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[sorak]

Ok. I think you have a point there. You seem to be suggesting that, had they been planning for a webui, they may have gone for something more like a more traditional event driven UI.

That makes a lot of sense.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[BenoitRen]

Perhaps the most obvious is that the standard advocates the use of presentation elements such as b, i, and so on.

If you actually read the spec you'd have known that they are redefining such elements to give them semantic value.

I'm referring to the fact that you can't count on HTML5 documents being well formed like you can with XHTML.

This isn't as much of an issue as XHTML advocates like to think.

I'm not sure what you're on about here, as stated previously, Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla are all great tools for letting the average user publish, hence why they've been so damn successful.

But they all produce crappy code with barely any semantic meaning. Great tools my behind.

I'm not saying I wouldn't like to see Flash replaced, but I'd like to see it replaced with a standard that has got their on it's merits - because people actually want to use it en-masse rather than because it was forced through as part of a standard.

You'll find out rather quickly that people don't care which codecs their video uses. This won't help.

The W3C had to step in and start trying to make the best it could of a bad job. Really, it's WHATWG that has made most of the decisions on HTML5, WHATWG is a group that was setup by individuals, which is a far cry from the W3C which as you rightly state is quite well represented.

At least the WHATWG consists of the organisations behind the rendering engines. Also, the W3C didn't have to adopt their work. They were asked to when the W3C finally realised that they were going nowhere.

The W3C was on the right path - sticking to it's guns and following the good practice route with XHTML

XHTML was going nowhere, and was not the right path to take. Have you tried looking at their XHTML2 spec? That showed how they missed the point.

was forced to embrace by the publicity WHATWG had got HTML5 and because other browser manufacturers just fell like dominoes

As said above, the WHATWG represented the browser manufacturers. Stop spreading misinformation.

Web standards in general are important for all the reasons I dislike HTML5, HTML5 is not a good standard as it is inflexibie, lacks extensibility in some areas and adds needless complexity.

*sigh* Spoken like a true XHTML fanboy that won't look further than his/her nose.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[BZ]

> I'm referring to the fact that you can't count on HTML5 documents being well formed
> like you can with XHTML.

While true, that doesn't matter that much if the parsing algorithm is well-defined. And the current problem is that you can't count on any documents actually being produced as XHTML (with the right MIME type; there's plenty of stuff out there with the XHTML doctype, and most of it is not well-formed).

> All for the sake of people being able to write sloppy markup

They already do this, and are enabled by the fact that web browsers "deal". The parsing specification if entirely for the benefit of consumers of the crap that the producers are generating no matter what.

The other alternative is fatal error handling and all consumers sticking to their guns on that (which even for XHTML they're not so much). As you note, XHTML tried this approach. It failed in the marketplace, for various reasons, ranging from lack of IE support to it being too much pain to author with the tools people were using.

> Imagine if the JPEG format had been forced as the only format leaving no scope for
> animated gifs?

Then that would be a poor standard. I don't see what that has to do with the HTML5 draft.

> WHATWG is a group that was setup by individuals, which is a far cry from the W3C
> which as you rightly state is quite well represented.

Not quite. WHATWG was set up by individuals officially representing Opera, Mozilla, and Apple. The W3C is a pay-to-play industry consortium. Both take input from various sources, but in the end for WHATWG the steering committee has members from the above three organizations and for the W3C the consensus need only be amongst the paid-up members. Which is better for the web depends on whether you trust the above three organizations to develop web technologies more than you trust the average W3C member...

> The W3C was on the right path

Do you mean not having made any meaningful progress on actually delivering anything other than a recasting of HTML4.01 into XML syntax in years? Or do you mean having made some progress on defining a completely new language that would be incompatible with both XHTML1 and HTML4.01 and that had no clear strategy for how anyone would actually start using it?

Note that nothing prevents work on XHTML2 from continuing. It would hardly be the first time the W3C has produced specs that don't work well with each other, or even flat-out contradict each other.

Note also that HTML5 does have some serious issues on a lot of the details; those need to be worked out. But the overall approach of something that can actually be adopted incrementally seems to be the correct one to me. It's already paying off: the web platform is moving forward for the first time in years, and might even stave off the Silverlight-like beasties.

Additional recommended reading:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html (which sort of sums up why HTML5 is getting more traction than XHTML2).

http://dbaron.org/log/2006-08#e20060818a (which explains more or less how some of the people who started the WHATWG came to be working outside the W3C in the first place).

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

"If you actually read the spec you'd have known that they are redefining such elements to give them semantic value."

Which in itself is a bad thing. Changing the purpose of tags is bad for maintability of web applications.

"This isn't as much of an issue as XHTML advocates like to think."

Great argument there.

"But they all produce crappy code with barely any semantic meaning. Great tools my behind."

And you think the people who use these tools are going to be able to produce quality markup thanks to HTML5? This is my point - the people who write bad markup might as well use tools anyway so we can have a markup language designed for people who actually develop applications rather than those who are happy with bad markup which HTML5 effectively caters for.

"You'll find out rather quickly that people don't care which codecs their video uses. This won't help."

They'll care if suddenly quality vs. throughput suffers, which, under theora, it will. Hypothetical scenario - who will go to say Google video if it were to start using only Theora when everything looks better in Flash video on YouTube for example?

"At least the WHATWG consists of the organisations behind the rendering engines."

The HTML5 was fairly complete when only a handful individuals from companies behind three of the rendering engines were on it. That hardly demonstrates the whole spec has been built with support of the full set of relevant people behind all the rendering engines.

"XHTML was going nowhere, and was not the right path to take. Have you tried looking at their XHTML2 spec? That showed how they missed the point."

Ah, so the solution is to take a step backwards and rather than fix the stuff XHTML2 did wrong, undo all the stuff XHTML1 did right? That's effectively HTML5

"As said above, the WHATWG represented the browser manufacturers. Stop spreading misinformation."

I'm not sure how facts are misinformation. You should consider checking yours. Mozilla, Opera, Apple aren't the only browser manufacturers, there are many others.

"*sigh* Spoken like a true XHTML fanboy that won't look further than his/her nose."

Oh cool, so I'm promoted from troll to XHTML fanboy now? Thanks for that. Perhaps you should consider reading back that comment as if it applied to yourself though.

The problem is, those arguing for HTML5 don't seem to be the people who will actually need to use it in large scale applications and it is those people we need to cater for as they're the ones building the web. HTML5 might be great for someone who wants to knock together the odd static page, but that's increasingly less what the web actually is.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

"Then that would be a poor standard. I don't see what that has to do with the HTML5 draft."

Because defining a specific standard for a media format puts us in exactly that situation. So we define Theora as being the standard to be used for video, what if Theora fails to successfully support 3D technology as we're seeing come to prominence in cinemas and no doubt soon to computing too. The video tag is no longer fit for purpose and has to be bypassed anyway. This is what I was referring to with the example of not being able to use animated GIFs. We need to be able to define the formats we use on the fly and based upon our needs. It should not depend on changes in the standard as standards should not change, only be replace by new versions on an infrequent basis, which is again unacceptable.

I found those links interesting. Ironically the first link seems to explain why HTML5 is such a bad spec.

"Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design."

This outlines my problem with the fact HTML5 doesn't require strict adherence to XML, in not adhering strictly to the XML format there is ambiguity as to how a document can be formed. Where there is ambiguity there is duplication - things can be done in different ways. This is not simple, simplicity means having the most simple, straightforward way of doing things and that's having one way.

Of course, HTMl5 introduces a lot of stuff in an explicit manner that was already supported in a generic manner, it brings back the likes of b, i, u tags. This adds complication to the spec where it is not needed.

HTML5 is a step backwards in terms of simplicity.

"Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct."

As a spec defines correctness for whatever it is specifiying it's hard to argue that HTML5 is not correct, so this is an area HTML5 is fine in.

"Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency. "

HTML5 markup will be inconsistent. You can have footer tags for your footers now, header tags for your headers and so on but if you then want comments you have to have div tags with the class parameter set as comments or whatever. This is inconsistency and this is bad development practice. If you find Theora unacceptable which many do and will because it's simply not very good then we'll see further inconsistencies in people not using the video tag for video anyway. It's much better that content is defined in a generic but consistent manner as in XHTML.

"Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface."

XHTML was already complete, it was by definition extensible. HTML5 simply adds bloat.

I appreciate the links, but really, the former just acts as a good description of what is wrong with HTML5.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[BZ]

> Because defining a specific standard for a media format puts us in exactly
> that situation.

It would, if that happened. But it's not happening, and no one has suggested it. There have been suggestions to require at _least_ Theora support, with no restrictions on what else can be supported. No one is proposing forbidding other codecs or anything silly like that.

It's good to have your facts straight when critiquing things.

> This is not simple, simplicity means having the most simple, straightforward way of doing
> things and that's having one way.

This is true, and HTML5 does this as it can, within the design constraint of being compatible with existing web content. Unlike HTML4, it defines a single way of parsing documents, for example.

But the reason I pointed to that link is because it does a good job of explaining the networking effects via which a "good enough" thing can displace a "good" thing if the "good enough" ships first. This is exactly what's happened with HTML and XHTML and why consistency with HTML is now needed in whatever markup language the web ends up using.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[BenoitRen]

Yes, I promoted you to XHTML fanboy because it's clear that you bash HTML5 because it's not more like XHTML.

I'm not sure how facts are misinformation. You should consider checking yours. Mozilla, Opera, Apple aren't the only browser manufacturers, there are many others.

Bullshit. Aside from Trident not being represented, Gecko, Presto and WebKit/KHTML all were. There are a couple of HTML-only rendering engines, but those don't carry much weight. You seem to be thinking that each web browser has its own rendering engine, which would give it a voice. This is false. There are many more web browsers than those organisations because a lot of them are built on the same rendering engine. For example, Gecko's web browsers include Firefox, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Camino, Epiphany, and Galeon.

Not going to touch the rest, as you clearly don't understand thanks to your XHTML fanboyism.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

Congratulations on resorting to insults, it's always interesting to see people do that - it makes it easy to tell who didn't actually have a point in a discussion.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[Xest]

Out of interest, do you feel we should have a longer term goal over and above HTML5 that does work to provide a markup language that really is actually good rather than good enough then?

I guess I just follow the school of thought that if you're going to do something properly you should do it right the first time if time permits and I do not personally see any urgency in getting a new spec out there when we have XHTML1 which is extensible enough.

I do not feel HTML5 actually brings anything to the table. HTML to me should define document structure, CSS should define presentation, and Javascript should provide scripting and dynamic content to a site, simply because this is what the 3 things are good at. I do not like the idea of using Javascript for presentation for example, even though it's been used to solve the equal height columnar divs problem in the past and that sort of thing - ultimately it can be solved in CSS and it seems better to do so. This is effectively my main reasoning for disliking HTML5, it seems to be branching away from what HTML is actually good for into areas where we already simply have better solutions cleanly separated as separate tools and standards.

Re:Yeah, screw you too

[BZ]

> do you feel we should have a longer term goal over and above HTML5

Yes.

> I do not personally see any urgency in getting a new spec out there when we have XHTML1

XHTML1 doesn't actually define browser behavior sufficiently to allow interoperable implementations to be built based on it. I'd say that this lack has been the biggest barrier to entry in to the browser market for the last 10 years or so.

> which is extensible enough

The point is to extend the same way in multiple browsers, which means having a spec for the extensions. You seem to feel that this spec should not be called HTMLn for some n. I really don't care what it's called much; I care about the substance.

> I do not feel HTML5 actually brings anything to the table.

It brings to the table an actual specification for how to deal with text/html input; something that's never existed before. It defines the interaction of things like document.write and HTML parsing. Just that on its own is worth publishing a spec (and there are those who feel that this is all HTML5 should do, mind you).

Now it also brings along some features. I couldn't care less if the features got spun off into separate specs, as I said. And some of them have been, and more will be.

But I'm not sure how you can say that, say, is any less something that should be done in "HTML" than is...

Styling the UI?

[Chris Pimlott]

How does the open video format handle styling the UI? One of the reasons sites love flash for video so much is that it gives them complete control over how the video is presented, e.g. available controls, positions, colors and themes to match the rest of the page, etc. Then you have the more intrusive things, like Youtube's overlay ads, text captions, and suggested videos after playback finishes.

If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.

Re:Styling the UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does the open video format handle styling the UI?
See that link, get the beta here? Try it!

Re:Styling the UI?

[spartin92]

There is a skinning option, it's on http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo

Re:Styling the UI?

[db48x]

There's a default UI, but you can turn it off and use whatever HTML/CSS/XML/SVG you care to dream up.

Re:Styling the UI?

[ouwiyaru]

Easily, it's all JS and HTML dom. As you can see in the YouTube demo (the video doesn't work in linux/ffox 3.5, since they don't provide an OGG source, but it should work elsewhere):
http://www.youtube.com/html5
The play/seek widgets are all html and not flash/etc.

Re:Styling the UI?

[Disco Hips]

I've just created an based project along with a friend. We didn't use the 'controls' attribute, and instead created some faux-LCD style display, with all the play, pause, skip buttons, volume dial and track progress slider with scrubber, in standard HTML - images, links and JS calls. All styled as per our own designs. I assume is much the same, but I've only yet begun to fiddle with using that element as yet.

Re:Styling the UI?

[Warbothong]

How does the open video format handle styling the UI? One of the reasons sites love flash for video so much is that it gives them complete control over how the video is presented, e.g. available controls, positions, colors and themes to match the rest of the page, etc. Then you have the more intrusive things, like Youtube's overlay ads, text captions, and suggested videos after playback finishes.

If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.

HTML5 video isn't a widget, which is the point. You can place anything you like over the top of the video and mess around with it using JavaScript. HTML5 video isn't a 'widget' in the same way that images aren't 'widgets'.

Re:Styling the UI?

[complete loony]

Heck you can do green screen style processing with Javascript in real time.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[TheSunborn]

Yes, so just use the tag with mpg4(h.264).

finally

[delirium of disorder]

Thank flying spaghetti monster. Flash is the only proprietary software I use. I can't wait for in browser ogg theora support to take off, and the online video market to embrace it. As soon as I see it working, I'll delete my google video account and self-host all my videos.

Re:finally

[Microlith]

I'll delete my google video account and self-host all my videos.

Enjoy the lack of exposure and footing the bandwith costs.

On second thought, those are mutually exclusive, now aren't they?

Re:finally

[blakedev]

I can has video on FreeBSD plz? One of the major reasons why I don't use FreeBSD as my main os (even though I like it) is the lack of good support for Flash. I feel giddy.

Re:finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to the year 2009 when videos can be sent down tubes without paying an arm and a leg.

Re:finally

[Shadow-isoHunt]

You use openbios? How's that working for you?

Question

[sys.stdout.write]

Do Google or other owners of the big video sites have any incentive to stick with Flash?

I would assume that most users would prefer not to have to download Flash plugins..

Re:Question

[TinBromide]

I'm really not sure if google pays flash licensing fees. If they do, the fees may not decrease if X% use open standard players and 100-X% use flash. Until google can cut flash loose, those flat rate fees may not decrease. (I.E. Adobe says "Google, pay me $250K per year and I'll let you use all the flash you want").

However, adobe may not charge for flash applet generation and google may not pay a single penny to adobe for the flash portion. If that is the case (which is more likely as a "free" media standard would make flash the ubiquitous "standard" it is to day), Google may only offer the firefox HTML standard flash player as an option.

Re:Question

[Fry-kun]

IIRC, Flash won over Shockwave because the developer had to pay to use Shockwave but didn't for Flash.

Re:Question

[Fry-kun]

Yes, because Flash boasts huge market penetration (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/). Of course it's Adobe's own market research, but it's probably true that they have most of the market in their grasp.
Add to that the fact that IE still has the largest browser market share.
Those two practically guarantee that Google will stick with Flash for most part. Maybe they will create a dynamic service which would prefer support over flash, but Flash is here to stay for quite a while longer.

Re:Question

[harryandthehenderson]

I would assume that most users would prefer not to have to download Flash plugins..

Most users are probably more inclined to download the flash plugin that happens automatically for them versus downloading a whole new browser to get HTML5 video tags to work.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

X.264 will have a fee attached to it for content distributors from some point in 2010 (either the start or the end, I forget which), so there is a monetary reason for moving over to a free codec too. Just imagine the amount of money that would have to be forked over on per video basis royalties.

Re:Question

[tepples]

IIRC, Flash won over Shockwave because the developer had to pay to use Shockwave but didn't for Flash.

They were made by the same company: Macromind, then Macromedia, then Adobe. And until Macromedia/Adobe documented the SWF format and later released Flex SDK, you did have to pay for Flash authoring software (mid to upper three figures USD) to make SWF files.

Re:Question

[wagnerrp]

Most users wouldn't understand the difference, flash or otherwise. The only incentive flash has at the moment is support for RTMPE. Content control is impossible on an open standard. You have to have control over the program to have control over the played content. If you can modify the code, or write your own program, you can simply ignore any copy restrictions. The only way around that is to have key revocation systems like BD+ where you can disable future access. Sites like Youtube or Dailymotion dont care, and there's no reason not to move to an open standard. Sites like Hulu will always use a closed module.

Re:Question

[harryandthehenderson]

Except that the amount the licensing fees they would have to pay, since they do cap out at just a few million a year, would barely be 1/2th of 1/10th of a percent of their total yearly revenue. They would spend more on employee lunches in a year, which has been approximated to around 70-80 million a year, than they would on the H.264 licensing fees.

Re:Question

[mgblst]

Yes, but if all browsers have HTML 5 code in them, which will happen in the next year, then they won't have to download anything extra.

Re:Question

[JackieBrown]

So what if it's cheaper than employee lunches? What does that have to do with anything?

If they saved a few millions a year, that is more money they can throw at another project that they actually control

Re:Question

[harryandthehenderson]

So what if it's cheaper than employee lunches? What does that have to do with anything?

That the licensing fees they would pay would be a pittance in their entire budget.

If they saved a few millions a year, that is more money they can throw at another project that they actually control

They already have 20 billion in cash. A few extra million is a drop in the bucket.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I boast huge penetration too, but it doesn't mean that's the best thing for all. As much as it hurts my ego.

Re:Question

[trickyD1ck]

the 10-20% users of "all browsers" won't have to download anything extra.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/02/134224/Internet-Explorer-6-Will-Not-Die?from=rss

Theora has improved

[tepples]

The h.264 codec that is used to stream their content is far and away better than that Theora garbage format.

The version of Theora that was in ffmpeg2theora 0.19 sucked. But Theora has come a long way since then, coming much closer to x264's fidelity.

Re:Theora has improved

[harryandthehenderson]

But Theora has come a long way since then, coming much closer to x264's fidelity.

You must have missed the retraction that was done when it was shown that they were calculating PSNR wrong for x264. Theora is nowhere near the quality of even a low-range h.264 codec.

'Publishing' the graph like that drew well-deserved scrutiny and unfortunately our own data was also off (although by considerably less). ffmpeg had another bug we didn't know about which caused it to mishandle the colorspace on x264 output, so the x264 PSNR value was too low by 1-4dB. Greg fixed the error in the data collection and immediately set about collecting new measures:

Re:Theora has improved

[harryandthehenderson]

You're just pissy because your first post in this discussion was marked Flamebait.

No, I hadn't even noticed it was marked as flamebait till you said so and I couldn't care less.

So now you just repeat yourself uselessly though you were careful to make it look like a useful reply because you're devious like that. What a sore loser crybaby you are!

I didn't just repeat myself. I provided the word of the people who did that comparison that the GP's story linked to where they showed that the only way they beat x264 was by calculating the PSNR graph wrong. In fact the only person who is pissy is apparently you.

Re:Theora has improved

[tepples]

You must have missed the retraction that was done when it was shown that they were calculating PSNR wrong for x264. Theora is nowhere near the quality of even a low-range h.264 codec.

I read that part. VP3 was garbage, as was the alpha version of Theora included in ffmpeg2theora 0.19. But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.

Sort of related, because a lot of people have DivX on their PC or in their DVD player: how does Xvid (an MPEG-4 ASP video encoder) compare to recent Theora and x264?

Re:Theora has improved

[harryandthehenderson]

I read that part. VP3 was garbage, as was the alpha version of Theora included in ffmpeg2theora 0.19. But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.

Yeah, on one single clip using the default settings of x264 which hardly give the highest attainable quality.

Sort of related, because a lot of people have DivX on their PC or in their DVD player: how does Xvid (an MPEG-4 ASP video encoder) compare to recent Theora and x264?

Theora can't beat XviD and XviD is inferior to x264.

Re:Theora has improved

[BikeHelmet]

Theora can't beat XviD and XviD is inferior to x264.

Nothing beats Xvid for low bitrates. (The bitrates which create ~350MB videos)

It blurs more details than some other codecs, which lets it save on space and put more detail into important stuff.

h.264 gets quite blocky well before Xvid does; mind you, it does a better job preserving details when a higher bitrate is allowable. h.264 is often the preferred format for raw video footage, since at high bitrates it comes remarkably close to totally uncompressed video. (which is usually too big to do anything with)

For static content, VP7/VP8 are quite impressive, but VP3... not so much.

A presentation with slides occasionally changing works wonderfully in VP7. It'll use a couple hundred kilobytes on the first frame, plus any frame where it suddenly changes, but aside from that it won't use much/any bandwidth. The result is a video that looks like a 32bit gif animation(perfect quality).

On2's algorithms for figuring out which pixels changed are quite advanced; a 10 second video showing a slide was a couple kilobytes smaller than a 4 minute video showing the same slide... with x264 and xvid, I didn't get results like that even after spending a day tweaking everything.

On2's encoder also automatically removes minor jitter/angle abnormalities, so if the camera was being held by a person, the difference in size will be even more pronounced.

Too bad last time I checked, their encoder was single-threaded. I'm also betting "Superior codec for lectures." isn't the kind of endorsement they wanted. :P

Re:Theora has improved

[N!NJA]

But even the corrected graph shows that Theora has gone from garbage to only 3 dB behind x264.

only?! inst 3db about 50%? huge lag behind.

Re:Theora has improved

[harryandthehenderson]

Nothing beats Xvid for low bitrates. (The bitrates which create ~350MB videos)

h.264 gets quite blocky well before Xvid does; mind you,

If you are getting worse quality at lower bitrates with h.264 over an ASP codec, you are doing something wrong. H.264 was designed precisely to be better than ASP at lower bitrates.

Re:Theora has improved

[benwaggoner]

Nothing beats Xvid for low bitrates. (The bitrates which create ~350MB videos)

x264 pounds xvid into dust at low bitrates.

h.264 gets quite blocky well before Xvid does

Er, no it doesn't. H.264 has a strong in-loop deblocking filter which leads it to degrade into softness well before it loses detail. If you're thinking of a metric like "no annoying artifacts" x264 can go down to half xvid bitrates at the same quality level. Codecs converge as quality goes up, but it's exactly low bitrate non-blocking video where H.264 excels, and what it was designed to do. And designed to do so specifically after the failure of MPEG-4 part 2 (xvid/divx) to be a competitive low bitrate codec.

A presentation with slides occasionally changing works wonderfully in VP7. It'll use a couple hundred kilobytes on the first frame, plus any frame where it suddenly changes, but aside from that it won't use much/any bandwidth. The result is a video that looks like a 32bit gif animation(perfect quality).

All non-pathological codecs will do the exact same thing.

Really, Theora may get to MPEG-4 part 2 Simple Profile quality with a lot of work, but no way will it ever be competitive with H.264 or VC-1.

Read this:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146893

Re:Theora has improved

[Daniel Phillips]

only?! inst 3db about 50%? huge lag behind.

No, it's about 29%

(1 - (1 / 1.41)) * 100

Re:Theora has improved

[BikeHelmet]

If you are getting worse quality at lower bitrates with h.264 over an ASP codec, you are doing something wrong. H.264 was designed precisely to be better than ASP at lower bitrates.

Oh, let me assure you, I'm hopeless at configuring h.264 for low bitrates.

That's why I got someone that constantly reads the doom9 boards to run the tests. Xvid consistently blurred out more of the background stuff and devoted more bytes to what we were likely going to be looking at.

x264, even tweaked, had problems with far too much blockiness. Mind you, it could've been our choice of decoder. It was a while back, and ffdshow didn't have great h.264 support until the last year or so.

Maybe if we re-ran the tests now it'd be different? Or maybe not?

Re:Theora has improved

[BikeHelmet]

x264 pounds xvid into dust at low bitrates.

Send me to some demo videos then, and also links to all the settings used.

We researched it quite heavily a year or so back. All the "superior" h.264 examples were superior because they lied about their bitrates. In one example a clip was supposed to be 512kbit, but when we encoded it ourselves with x264 at ~800kbit, it came out smaller than the video that was supposedly 512kbit. (and still larger than it should've been)

The xvid was smaller than it, and superior in quality to our x264 encode. But if you have some examples to link to that are newer than roughly one year, send me the links and I'll look into them and pass them along.

No sense spreading outdated info, if things really have changed. I just don't buy that things have improved that much without proof. Results are easy to craft in your favour, if you have enough time to play with the encoder and source clips.

Re:Theora has improved

[mustafap]

>Nothing beats Xvid for low bitrates. (The bitrates which create ~350MB videos)

I had to laugh at that.

*Any* video codec will create files of ~350MB :o)

Re:Theora has improved

[PiSkyHi]

You sound quite well versed on codecs, but it just doesn't seem to fit my experience at all on a few points:

Nothing beats Xvid for low bitrates. (The bitrates which create ~350MB videos)

You've successfully said nothing about low bitrates by referring to the size of video instead.

In my experience, X264 has features which allow for a kind of blur effect that reduces blockiness on large same colour painted areas - Xvid doesn't have any of that unless the decoder has it added.

The other stuff you said sounds cool, but since you have lost credibility here, I can't take your word for it.

Re:Theora has improved

[DaVince21]

I have once encountered a 25 minute long 720p HD vid encoded in h.264 that was only 170MB big. I guess that's pretty good?

Re:Theora has improved

[cheftw]

My method of compressing a series of images can beat up your method of compressing a series of images any day of the week.

Re:Theora has improved

[benwaggoner]

Send me to some demo videos then, and also links to all the settings used.

We researched it quite heavily a year or so back. All the "superior" h.264 examples were superior because they lied about their bitrates. In one example a clip was supposed to be 512kbit, but when we encoded it ourselves with x264 at ~800kbit, it came out smaller than the video that was supposedly 512kbit. (and still larger than it should've been)

The xvid was smaller than it, and superior in quality to our x264 encode. But if you have some examples to link to that are newer than roughly one year, send me the links and I'll look into them and pass them along.

Even a year ago x264 would have been dramatically superior. Odd.

Anyway, sure. What's your frame size? CBR or VBR? Any other notable constraints?

Re:Theora has improved

[BikeHelmet]

I don't remember all the settings, but a few did stick in my head.

Video was 800x480 (odd size, I know; matches resolution of some upcoming handheld devices)

5.1 profile
subq 7
trellis?
VBR (2 pass I think?)
B/I/P Frames were enabled. (BIP...heh)

And I think motion estimation was set fairly low - 8 pixels? The source content didn't have a huge amount of movement.

That's all I can remember offhand. I'll have to get a hold of the guy that did it if you want more details.

Re:Theora has improved

[benwaggoner]

5.1 for 800x600? 8 ME range? I'm guessing you had some kind of configuration issue.

Did you check out the samples I posted?

Re:Theora has improved

[BikeHelmet]

Yes, I did. x264 clearly did the best job.

And no - 800x480.

It could've been a configuration issue, but since I know more about xvid encoding than h.264, I have to go with what other people tell me, and what I can glean off doom9.

Why promote an "inferior" product?

[bogaboga]

While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.

Ohh wait a minute...There is a Slashdotter who noted this as well.

Frankly, it bothers me big time. Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply because the standard is not going to improve if nobody uses it.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[siDDis]

Theora is great for embedded devices like cell phones since it is "cheap" when it comes to cpu cycles. For top quality video, Dirac should be used. I wonder when Firefox, Opera or Konqueror will have native support for Dirac.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[ardor]

Dirac too is inferior to h.264, while being several times slower.
Nothing beats h.264.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Anonymous Coward]

Repeat this to yourself until you understand it: having this option does NOT preclude using Flash or other video technologies!

Is it really so difficult for the masses of "all open source sucks" naysayers and skeptics that haunt slashdot to understand that having a COMMON, OPEN SOURCE, PATENT-FREE ALTERNATIVE is a good thing? No one is forcing you to use it.

Jesus F. Christ, slashdot used to be a place where you could go to learn and talk about cool open source technologies. Nowadays its all about the latest proprietary shit from Microsoft and Apple.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Phroggy]

While I am happy to see that Mozilla and Firefox are setting the standards, let me remind readers that previous evaluations have found the Theora encoders inferior compared to contemporary video codecs. In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.

The important thing is that we move toward open standards, away from proprietary solutions, because open standards allow us to do more cool stuff with them.

Remember RealPlayer? Remember all the bitching about what a piece of crap it was? People had to have it, even though it sucked, because a lot of content was only available in RealAudio format. Today, RealPlayer is all but gone, and you can play the same type of content using whatever software you like. Why? Because when Apple added Podcast support to iTunes, Podcasts suddenly became hugely popular, and virtually all of the content providers that used to offer only RealAudio now offer Podcasts instead. This means that users are free to choose whatever software they want, and competition will drive the software to improve.

In the same way, if web sites move away from Flash video players to using HTML5's video tag, it will mean users will no longer be dependent on Adobe's plugin to access the content. Unfortunately we still have patent issues to deal with; Ogg is unencumbered, but better quality codecs will be supported by most browsers, and if we can get content providers to get used to the idea of making their video content freely available (instead of wrapping it up in Flash), there can be competition among codecs too.

It's not a perfect world, but it's one step closer.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[pizzach]

I still do not why slashdoters think Theora has no worth as a baseline free video codec with less legal shackles? H264 is already in the standard. I doubt it's going to disappear. It would be nice if some free (as in beer) software could ship with a working video encoder that isn't illegal in some countries. Just toss the baby out with the bathwater guys...

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[ClosedSource]

Perhaps this happens because most of the discussion is focused on "getting rid of flash". If getting rid of flash is the key motivation for using it, who cares about quality?

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[the_other_chewey]

I wonder when Firefox, Opera or Konqueror will have native support for Dirac.

For Gecko (which means Firefox & friends): As soon as libogg supports it, which is pretty much
now. However, it isn't part of the upstream stable libogg yet, so it will not ship with Firefox 3.5,
but very probably show up in the version after that.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Randle_Revar]

>It would be nice if some free (as in beer) software could ship with a working video encoder that isn't illegal in some countries

It might be nice, but it ain't gonna happen, unless google or someone gets really altruistic and foots the bill or MPEG LA changes their mind about licensing.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[benwaggoner]

Theora is great for embedded devices like cell phones since it is "cheap" when it comes to cpu cycles.

Reference?

Anyway, it's actually not a good choice there becuse devices like cell phones tend to have ASICs for video decoding that support MPEG-4 part 2, VC-1, and H.264 Baseline, but not Theora. Trying to play back video on a phone in software is painful for battery life.

For top quality video, Dirac should be used. I wonder when Firefox, Opera or Konqueror will have native support for Dirac.

Direc has never been shown to be any better than Theora for content distribution bitrates. As an I-frame only production format, could be interesting (SMPTE VC-2). But no one has ever coupled wavelets to interframe coding efficiently.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Qubit]

It might be nice, but it ain't gonna happen, unless google or someone gets really altruistic and foots the bill or MPEG LA changes their mind about licensing.

Dude, pray for the SCOTUS to rock Bilski and dump software patents like a load of bricks. That will solve MPEG patent licensing issues, ATSC patent issues, codec this and codec that issues, the Microsoft FAT patents, and basically magical elves will rain down from the sky and give you bags of f*cking gold!

Okay, so I'm not sure about the gold, but the rest of it could totally happen. So think happy thoughts and hope for the SCOTUS to do the right thing.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove it! From what I've read, Dirac has the potential to leapfrog even h.264, because its designed to avoid patented algorithms by using older ones that no other format uses due to heavy CPU usage. I watched a talk on this once, but I can't seem to find it right now.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove it! From what I've read, Dirac has the potential to leapfrog even h.264, because its designed to avoid patented algorithms by using older ones that no other format uses due to heavy CPU usage. I watched a talk on this once, but I can't seem to find it right now.

Found it: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6553770180134916833

Do you really think that nothing beats h.624? No format will ever beat it? Hell, our brains are far more efficient at storing video. Lossy video compression will continue to improve for years to come.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I will give you 5 million reasons. License fees. 5 million bucks per year. Just cus you probably use a h.264 codec illegally does not make it work for a target as large as firefox or opera. M$ has one or two of the patents on h264 so they would be lining up pretty fast.

But there is a much bigger problem. Say Shuttleworth came to the party and said I will pay the fees. There is the license agreement. This agreement is not compatible with GPL or open source in general and will probably contain DRM clauses. (ie DVD players need to enforce zone DRM because of the license agreement).

And to top it all off in a few years there is a fee on *content* encoded with h264.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[ardor]

Actually, our brains do not store video. They idealize the contents in an abstract shape and store *this*. For example, if a video shows a spinning cube, you do not store the frames, but the notion of a spinning cube, nothing more.

As for Dirac, just look it up in the Doom9 forums.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternatively, the unwashed masses may balk at the lower quality video and demand providers return to flash, harming open source in the long run.

It is important to move to open standards, but doing so too early will do more harm than good.

As mentioned by a post above, a better encoder that fixes the majority of the problems with the theora codec is nearing a fully stable release - why not delay HTML5 video until then?

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[Phroggy]

It's important to get the implementation of HTML5 video working well first. I didn't mean to suggest that content providers should immediately begin switching all their content over; you're right that we're not ready for that.

Once the implementation is solid, and good codecs are in place, then content providers can start offering two versions of their content. Users can choose what works best for them, and once the benefit becomes clear, developers will work on improving HTML5 video.

Then we'll start seeing things like YouTube Podcasts, and people will come up with other cool things that couldn't easily be done with Flash video.

Re:Why promote an "inferior" product?

[BZ]

> Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's
> Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?

Because sometimes shipping a "good enough" product might be better than waiting till it's "perfect". For various values of "good enough" and "perfect". What constitutes "good enough" varies for different people, of course...

If the question is why Mozilla is not shipping H.264, it's because the patent licensing would make it impossible to ship it in Firefox while continuing to make all the source of Firefox open in the sense of anyone being able to build a browser from the source and distribute it.

Note that this last (not having everything open) is the approach Chrome has taken: the open-source Chromium has not H.264 support. Chrome ships an LGPL library in addition to the Chromium code (ffmpeg) that does H.264 decoding but that you then can't redistribute as part of a product without getting your own patent license.

Put another way, Mozilla is doing what it's doing so Debian can keep shipping IceWeasel without having to negotiate a patent license to have feature parity with Firefox. ;)

metavid.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Also has lots of interesting Theora/Vorbis content :)

Re:metavid.org

[Anonymous Coward]

Also has lots of interesting Theora/Vorbis content :)

It's flash, so no thanks. That and who the fuck wants to watch a bunch of US political BS? Yawn.

Re:metavid.org

[Psymin]

Depends on what you have installed. It can be flash, VLC, java, mplayer .. whatever.

Look up the controls attribute

[tepples]

If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.

HTML 5 Video states that a page can ask the user agent to show a built-in control widget (by providing a controls attribute) or hide it and provide its own widget that controls the video player through its DOM (by omitting the controls attribute).

Re:Look up the controls attribute

[Anonymous Coward]

If open video means a widget that site owners have no control over, like Quicktime video embedding, then commercial site operators aren't going to be too keen on it.

HTML 5 Video states that a page can ask the user agent to show a built-in control widget (by providing a controls attribute) or hide it and provide its own widget that controls the video player through its DOM (by omitting the controls attribute).

Not good enough. That still takes control away from the content provider, and gives it to the user.

Re:Look up the controls attribute

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor baby, you can't shove your application shit down our throats any more.
Cry me a river

Re:Look up the controls attribute

[Yfrwlf]

I know there is still a lot of crapware out there, but I think it's been reduced now days in comparison to the earlier Internet years, probably mostly due to an increase of software competition, not to mention open source software tends to have less or zero since it's easier to circumvent it. Someone sticking stupid ads in an installer package? Fork!

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[calmofthestorm]

I think apples are much tastier than apple trees.

Frame rate, looping, size...

[Twinbee]

Is it possible to set frame rate, size, and looping attributes inside the HTML? Does the video get anti-aliasing if the size is reduced?

How about lossless video? is that supported? What codecs are supported?

Re:Frame rate, looping, size...

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the specs yourself :-P

Yes, you can apply lots of transforms to the video. You can do sheer, blur/distortion, color correction. You can even do greenscreen style replacements.

Codec support is limited though since many of the common video codecs are not open.

Re:Frame rate, looping, size...

[Randle_Revar]

try reading the spec: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video

Re:Frame rate, looping, size...

[Twinbee]

Okay, if it doesn't crash my browser first ;)

Re:Frame rate, looping, size...

[Mystra_x64]

You can read multi-page version if that what you was saying about.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/html5

I hope it doesn't a quad core CPU to run

[Krneki]

With Adobe every year my CPU is more loaded when I'm watching Youtube or similar.
While using a different player, the movies uses 10 time less CPU cycles. I can't wait for something to replace that bloat from Adobe.

Re:I hope it doesn't a quad core CPU to run

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree 100%. I would _really_ like for Adobe to explain why it takes more than a ~1 GHz CPU to play low quality flash videos!!

Sometimes worse is better

[tepples]

In particular, the reference Theora encoder has inferior picture quality and network frame rate control as of 2008.

But as of 2009, Thusnelda is coming soon. The Thusnelda encoder has already fixed some of the problems that Theora inherited from On2's VP3, thanks in part to the flexibility that Xiph added to the Theora bitstream format. Sure, it's still inferior to x264 (50% bigger rate for same distortion as of about a month ago), but it's improving.

Why not wait until the standard is "up to par" with the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe's Flash?

Because sometimes worse is better. For example, worse can be better because it's Free and thus more available for deployment on devices other than PCs.

Re:Sometimes worse is better

[benwaggoner]

The Thusnelda encoder has already fixed some of the problems that Theora inherited from On2's VP3, thanks in part to the flexibility that Xiph added to the Theora bitstream format. Sure, it's still inferior to x264 (50% bigger rate for same distortion as of about a month ago), but it's improving.

Actually, 100%. And using a very non-representative clip (~10 seconds, no edits, low motion, no buffer constraint). No doubt Xiph and Monty have done heroic work with the bitstream and encoder they were given. But x264 and other H.264 and VC-1 implementations have improved a whole lot in the same timeframe, and keep on improving.

Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over.

[GreatBunzinni]

As soon as major sites such as youtube adopt this standard and drop that PoS adobe flash then flash will be practically relegated to crappy early 90s sites and annoying ads, which means that removing the flash plugin from any system will vastly improve your web experience. Good riddance.

Re:Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over.

[Omniscient Lurker]

And games. If minesweeper/solitaire won the desktop, games will keep flash around (on newgrounds at least)

Re:Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but eventually, there will be tools out there to make the creation of HTML / CSS / JavaScript games incredibly easy.
There are some tools out there, but they all do specific things, whether it is drawing shapes with divs or making pool out of divs, CSS and bullet points.

In fact, i just gave myself a good mission for the next few years, creating said libraries. :)

Re:Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over.

[aztracker1]

Well, creation tools are pretty limited, and it's still a plugin, but Silverlight/Moonlight is an option, with the latter being a FLOSS implementation.

Re:Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over.

[Omniscient Lurker]

I'm really hesitant to support silverlight/moonlight because I don't trust MS not to screw us over.

Re:Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over.

[aztracker1]

I always find that funny considering it's been about 8 years with mono, longer with samba, the latter used in a lot of NAS devices, and the fact that MS has provided a lot of contactually bound information to Novel in support of providing silcerlight to the linux platform, and even changed the licensing of ASP.Net MVC so it could be used with Mono.

Don't get me wrong, MS has done some shady things, but the development tools teams have been pretty supportive for the past few years, of course they've brought in more than a handful of open-source evangelists.

Re:Widespread adoption and annoying ads are over.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who modded this comment Funny? It's exactly what is going to happen; and I can't wait.

Re:Long live FF 2.xx

[Anonymous Coward]

You can turn it off. It's rather easy.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[sxpert]

yes, and no...
h264 will impose moneys to be paid to the MPEG-LA for each second of encoded video after 2010...
and that, my friend, is a big no-no

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anybody explain how to do Ogg Theora/Vorbis streaming in the real world?

On a small scale: what streaming server would you use? Darwin Streaming Server? Helix? WMS ;-)?
On a large scale: wich Content Delivery Network can you use to save your internet bandwidth?

What do you use to transcode your existing content? Do you need to hint your file?

Is it really streaming or is it progressive download (HTTP)? If it is streaming then what protocol is in use (RTSP/T? RTSP/U? RTMP? MMS?)?

Are there solution for Ogg Theora/Vorbis LIVE streaming or is it only Video On Demand?

Assuming I know WMV and ISMAv2 streaming what should I read to jumpstart into Open Video Standard?

This is a CPU hog

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on a Sempron 2600+ machine here and the cpu usage keeps hitting 100%. Flash videos play at 80%, what gives?

The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[AndrewStephens]

The video tag is great, but it has a fatal flaw (actually two fatal flaws, but one is much more important.) The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in? Already the browsers are going in different directions, with Safari using Quicktime to play h.264.

Hopefully it gets sorted out soon. Personally I would like to see h.264 adopted if the licensing issues can be sorted out.

I blogged about this issue a couple of days ago, if anyone is interested in a longer version of this comment.

(The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file - something none of the big content providers want. Yes, everyone knows how to do this with Flash videos, but the illusion of content protection is there.)

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither flash nor h264 will be opened unless competing alternatives gets strong enough. Implement html5 tags as options in your site and hope for the best.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

The big content providers don't want you to download their content, all the reason they are becoming ever more irrelevant. Welcome to new media.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[funkatron]

Personally I would like to see h.264 adopted if the licensing issues can be sorted out.

I'm sure there's a non-GPL implementation of h.264 that microsoft can use. Licensing shouldn't be a problem at all.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[ClosedSource]

Sure. We can look forward to content that is state-of-the-art garage quality.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[tobiasly]

The attempt to standardize on a single codec was correct, but now that it has failed the video tag becomes much less useful. At least with flash you can host a video and be sure that most of your audience will be able to view it. With the video tag, even when browsers that support it become widely available, which codec do you encode the video in?

Yeah, just like the lack of a single image format killed the <img> tag right? I think we'll see browsers coalesce around two or three codecs that all of them will end up supporting, plus they will all likely also hook into the OS to support whatever codecs it provides. Sure, it would have been nice if Theora was left as the blessed default, but with YouTube and DailyMotion supporting it you can bet it will become the de facto standard anyway.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[aztracker1]

umn, there are several non-gpl implementations of h.264. The issue is h.264 is patent encumbered, and it's use in free systems would have consequences for the likes oif Mozilla. MS is already adding h.264 support to Silverlight, to go along with VC-1.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file - something none of the big content providers want.

Bastards. The inability to right-click -> save images/videos is what I hate most about Flash. (Honorable mentions go to noise-making ads, and CPU-sucking ads.)

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

What "new media"? Sure youtube and it's like produce popular things, but are they anything more than a curiosity in any industry?

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[sootman]

(The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file - something none of the big content providers want. Yes, everyone knows how to do this with Flash videos, but the illusion of content protection is there.)

OTOH, there are "content providers" out there who won't mind this at all, and have large enough audiences that something good may indeed come from the <video> tag. Wikipedia comes to mind.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[Anonymous Coward]

There is the same problem with the img tag, eventually everything standardised on PNG. Same is happening with the video tag, but the standardisation will likely happen faster due to Firefox's Ogg support.

Re:The video tag has a fatal flaw - codecs

[cyclomedia]

>(The other fatal flaw is that the video tag makes it easy for people to download the original video file -
>something none of the big content providers want. Yes, everyone knows how to do this with
>Flash videos, but the illusion of content protection is there.)

Actually this is the beauty of it, whie i'm at it i suggest you read up on MRSS, in my ideal universe classic (non news/sport) tv channels are replaced with RSS feeds that link to video and audio streams with titles, descriptions and PNG thumbnails - and also link to other feeds and buy-the-dvd-box-set-from-amazon-click-here links too. Allowing anyone to mashup their own channel, link between them and share them. Because they'd all be open standards based codecs (and patent free, one can wish) then there'd be nothing stopping any tv set, radio, portable computer, mobile producer from integrating the capability into their device.

At first the cartels will fight it, and cling to silverlight, but like the move from DRM to "standard" MP3 (patent issues aside) podcasts/downloads that anyone can stick on any $5 mp3 player the same WILL happen with video and the artificial barriers to upstart TV and Movie producers will be toppled forever. Then the cartels will have to drop their DRM and regional restrictions and get on board, because 99% of devices on the planet will support the open-media-net (OMN, need a better acronym!) and they wont be able to blame them swedish pirates anymore for their lack of revenue.

It needs to be done now, before ACTA makes trusted computeing brain implants mandatory.

The demo at Dailymotion are developed by Mozilla

[feranick]

So it's not surprising....
From here: http://www.dailymotion.com/openvideodemo

Featuring:
* no flash involved
* only the new HTML5 video tag
* + javascript/CSS3
* + some svg filters too
* + animated PNG
* easy to maintain
* easy to extend
* demos and skin from Mozilla and Dailymotion

firefox linux link

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a link to a 64-bit linux nightly build that sorta works[the controls on the video don't seem to work real well]. The link in the summary wants to try to give you a 32-bit build which probably won't work for most people.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[Anonymous Coward]

youtube is old news. since they jumped in the pocket of the RIAA, megavideo is where its at!

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[zolf13]

And as any PHB will tell you "The customer ultimately pays the costs, one way or another."

Major Typo in the Article Title

[malevolentjelly]

Maybe I misread, but it seems to me that they're claiming this is somehow standards-based. This is a working draft that's basically implemented in a single browser... and it's not even complete. It's just amazing how everyone has already started trashing Microsoft for not implementing this "standard" when it's a complete paper tiger. This is an unfinished standard with no means of standard implementation.

This is not "standards" behavior. This is calling random firefox features "standards" while Opera and Webkit developers dig through the source code to create awkwardly almost-consistent implementations of the draft. This particular instance, where DailyMotion is concerned, is even branding HTML 5 as a Firefox feature. This is not what I have in mind when I think of an open web.

This is really not impressive. The w3c is doing a terrible job of commoditizing dynamic content with this HTML 5 spec. It's jam packed with horrific cruft like the theora decoder, another rapidly changing and incomplete format that will now have to be picked up, developed, and optimized by any web organization that doesn't want to get lynched by the freetard brigade for not being "standards-compliant". It's amazing how they've found a careful balance to somehow simultaneously cock-block progress on video development while still being unusably bleeding edge with non-existent-to-partial implementations of technology.

If you really want to know how many of these BS standards are actually "Complete", use IE 8 and weep.

Re:Major Typo in the Article Title

[Mystra_x64]

Safari and Opera are implementing this too. However article itself is too "Firefox hyped". Opera started playing with long before Firefox, AFAIR.

Re:Major Typo in the Article Title

[malevolentjelly]

Safari and Opera are implementing this too. However article itself is too "Firefox hyped". Opera started playing with long before Firefox, AFAIR.

I know. I was pretty pissed when I took the Opera Video build over to Daily Motion and it refused to work for me. When they throw some wonky new half-cooked standard at me, I get pretty ticked. When they try to make me run Firefox, it becomes personal.

3 dB

[ivoras]

The meaning of "3 dB" is "twice". Decibels are a logarithmic system, used for two reasons: 1) because for large & weird systems it's easier to say "120 dB" then "a trillion" (of course, this works in certain sciences only), and 2) because our sensitivity to light, sound and probably other sensory input is logarithmic so yes, "3 dB" taken in this context can intentionally be parsed as "small". But for pre-set algorithms (i.e. made to a predefined spec), "two times" is actually a lot of space to fuzz over. You can only do so much before you need to change the very spec that makes Theora - Theora.

Re:3 dB

[yo_tuco]

it's easier to say "120 dB" then "a trillion"... " Then why not say 12 bel instead of that big 120 dB number?

Re:3 dB

[timq]

3 dB is a factor of ~ 1.41 times.

A factor of two is 6 dB.

Re:3 dB

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd mod you up, but my mod points just expired.

Re:3 dB

[ceifeira]

Depends on the reference. What is 0 dB? For sound pressure (for example), you're right. However 3 dB is a two-fold increase in watts (power).

Re:3 dB

[master5o1]

I can see your sarcasm, however, it appears to be that the standardised (whether de facto or not) is decibel and not bel. Even the dictionary for Firefox doesn't recognise bel as a word.

Re:3 dB

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what your working with. Just straight amplitude, 3dB = double. If you're working with power, then 6dB=double.

But.. audio uses the amplitude scale.

What does dB even mean in this context?

Re:3 dB

[Anonymous Coward]

Other way 'round. 3dB is double the power. 6dB is double the amplitude.
Comes from 10*Log(2) and 20*Log(2).
Audio uses both and the traditional -3dB points come from the fact that power is halved there.

Re:3 dB

[entirely_fluffy]

from wikipedia:

A decibel is one tenth of a bel, a seldom-used unit.

Re:3 dB

[EvanED]

Even the dictionary for Firefox doesn't recognise bel as a word.

To be fair, the dictionary for Firefox at least for a long time didn't recognize "okay" as a word. (I don't know whether it doesn't now because they've added it in FF3 or because it's in my personal dictionary.)

The dictionary for Firefox is about the last place I'd turn to see if something is actually a word.

Re:3 dB

[master5o1]

I don't recognise okay as a word either. Why write two extra letters when ok works fine?

Re:3 dB

[EvanED]

I don't recognise okay as a word either.

Doesn't make you right... dictionaries all do.

Why write two extra letters when ok works fine?

For me, mostly force of habit. I figured that "okay" was the original form and that it was shortened to "OK" in particularly informal writing, so I used "okay". (I later found out that this isn't the case and that O.K. is the original form.)

Also, no dictionary I've looked in recognizes "ok" (lowercase; it 'must' be "OK"), so using "okay" allows it to fit more smoothly into a sentence flow IMO.

Re:3 dB

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can see your sarcasm, however, it appears to be that the standardised (whether de facto or not) is decibel and not bel."

bel is the base unit. Just like a meter. decimeter, decibel.

"standard"

[Lord Bitman]

While this new "standard" format is open, it's also something with almost zero support, especially across legacy browsers.
This means Flash is here to stay, even /with/ new javascript capabilities.

Any License that will Prevent Transcoding?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a really naive question.

Is there any License that will prevent transcoding original video produced by me, to another format, like .flv?

I'd like to make my videos open source only, including the "container".

Re:Any License that will Prevent Transcoding?

[Qubit]

Is there any License that will prevent transcoding original video produced by me, to another format, like .flv?

Hmmm... is transcoding a "derivative work" ? If so (and I'm not sure one way or the other) then something like CC-By-ND should do the trick.

I'd like to make my videos open source only, including the "container".

Hmm... now if you just want the video to remain in an open format, absent the general Fair Use rules that would allow someone to use short excerpts of your work in a file formatted as "Ultimate Proprietary Format 9000" or whatnot, I wonder if you could GPLv3 the sucker. If the video is available as GPLv3 only, then to quote from that license:

Each contributor grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free patent license under the contributor's essential patent claims, to make, use, sell, offer for sale, import and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of its contributor version.

So if I take your video X in an open file format and then transcode it to another open file format to make a new file Y, then I'm golden. But if I transcode X using H264 to make Z, then the entity 'Z' cannot be used, run, or sold without possible patent infringement claims, so Z is not valid for distribution under your license.

IANAL, and these are just my random mutterings. Be warned!

Re:Any License that will Prevent Transcoding?

[TheTurtlesMoves]

This is Format shifting. In most countries this is fair use. So generally no, there is no such license.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[crabboy.com]

Disclaimer: it's my site

Which, Youtube or Omploader? HAR!

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Youtube is a free service.

It's about time

[petrus4]

We've badly needed a system with support for open video formats, and without
the Flash prerequisite, for a long time now. This could potentially
dramatically increase FreeBSD/Linux's market share, as well. I've been
without Flash support since I first installed a month ago, and altho I've
since learned how to install it for FreeBSD, it is not a trivial process.

I am grateful to the Firefox developers for making this change, and can only
hope that YouTube in particular decide to support it, since that is probably
the main site where this could potentially end up being used.

Eye of the Beholder

[Sloppy]

[smarmy]An objective evaluation of H.264, VP6 and WMV9 show that they are still not as free as Theora. While we hope that these codec's patent holders will continue to work on this defect and catch up, as of 2009 it is still premature to say that any of them will ever be "up to par" with Theora, which totally stomps those other codecs in all freeness tests. Why promote an "inferior" product?[/smarmy]

Now for a little less smarminess: we're talking about interchange formats, used on the fucking internet where you don't know what OSes and archs either side is using. I know Theora is portable to everything and usable by everyone. I don't know about those other codecs. If you want to use WMV9 for your internal security camera, that's totally fine, but on the internet how could something like that be useful? What's the use in serving video in a format that people can't play? Theora doesn't have that problem.

Re:Long live FF 2.xx

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be like you; in fact, I still dislike the "awesome" bar. However, support for Fiirefox 2 is gone and the world moves on. I have learned to live with the "awesome" bar.

1 small step 4 OSS kind, 1 giant leap 4 the world.

[cyberbill79]

A long journey starts with one small step. By having a major browser support it and a large site promote it, we are watching the process happen. Yes, it will be slow and take some time to be perfected. But of all the sites, slashdoters should be able to see what is to come. I am very surprised with many of the responses posted, though there are a number of Anonymous trolls out there. Remember how long it took for Mozilla to become Firefox? The time it took for Linus' Linux to become so embedded in today's speech? The speed of the process and the amount of people contributing to today's projects have increased. It's only a matter of time. You are the voice of change. I have migrated large numbers of users from IE to Firefox just with words. Use the technology, send feedback to the developers. Join the project if you feel you have the time. All of you understand how our OSS world operates. We are the community that will move these technologies forward. Let us do what we do best... break it every way we know possible. I'll see you on the other side.

Poor performance of Firefox's audio and video

[Dwedit]

So far, I have been completely and utterly unimpressed by Firefox's built in audio and video features. I'm using 3.5 Beta.

Whenever it plays a WAV file, it plays for a few seconds, then skips audio and runs at 100% CPU usage, then plays again. Sounds like a really bad buffering issue, like they can't get something as basic as buffering correct. Audio which is intended to loop does not. OGG Vorbis files also skip the same was as WAV files.

Video performance is dismal, even worse than Flash player. Videos skip and take more CPU power to play back than other players do. Upscaling the video is done slowly through software, even though Overlays surfaces have been around since 1997 with the NVidia Riva 128.

From what I've seen, in terms of CPU usage, the best video player for the web is Windows Media Player, using non-microsoft video codecs (FFDshow).

Re:Poor performance of Firefox's audio and video

[Artemis3]

The dailymotion demo video works perfectly on mine (3.5b4pre), but i have seen similar posts in the MozillaZine forums, so i suspect their theora player is not very optimized, or it could be a windows thing, as I'm using 64 bit Ubuntu; Athlon X2 6000, 4g ram, 9800gt.

Re:Poor performance of Firefox's audio and video

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've seen, in terms of CPU usage, the best video player for the web is Windows Media Player, using non-microsoft video codecs (FFDshow).

MPlayer.

Re:Poor performance of Firefox's audio and video

[evilviper]

Upscaling the video is done slowly through software, even though Overlays surfaces have been around since 1997 with the NVidia Riva 128.

Yes they have. And Flash added support for them... when??? Still less than a year ago. And Flash is a MATURE bit of software that's been used for video for many years now. Firefox with video is still just a beta yet.

Re:Poor performance of Firefox's audio and video

[Dwedit]

Flash's overlay support would be great if it actually worked. It doesn't improve performance by much, and is unavailable before Actionscript 3.0. I once tried to add Full Screen + Overlay mode to some really old flash content. Fullscreen worked fine, even on content published as Flash 8, but overlay mode didn't work at all, no matter what I tried.

Re:Poor performance of Firefox's audio and video

[BZ]

Fair points on most (though a lot of work has gone into the sound sync issue since the last beta; I'd be curious to find out how the rc does for you when it comes out). But the overlays issue is not that simple. If you just want to render video to screen, they're the way to go. If you want to allow your video to play nice in your HTML+SVG+video webpage (e.g. applying SVG color filters to the video, or svg masks, or CSS transformations, etc, etc), then overlays no longer cut it. You can do it with 3d graphics, and there are plans to move to GL for a bunch of this stuff in Gecko. But that's its own level of fun, especially on the devices where it really matters (handhelds of various sorts), where 3d hardware is just appearing.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[mokus000]

All that means is that the viewers aren't the customers.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[Criminally Insane Ro]

The W3C needed a media standard long ago. Also nice would be flv decoders builtin to the browsers, and flash's "stealing my mouse and keyboard clicks" would be gone forever!

Apple will probably stick with H.264

[Yvan256]

because the iPhone/iPod touch have hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding, which means smooth video playback with a very low power requirement.

Re:Apple will probably stick with H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple will probably stick with H.264 because they have patents in it.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[hairyfeet]

And is there any decent and easy to use encoders for these formats? With flash it is butt simple to convert it to .mpg, .avi, etc and there are tools like VideoDownloader extension for Firefox that will automatically convert it from the browser based on your preferences.

Last time I went looking for Ogg and Matroska converters (about a year ago) I just couldn't find any that had the ease of use and multiple format conversion like there was for flash. I doubt this will get much traction unless there is a butt simple GUI based way to convert the video into the format of your choice, preferably from your browser because it is just too damned nice and convenient to be able to format shift for your PSP, iPod, etc and have it on the go.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[Daniel Phillips]

There are some other sites which have had support for a while now, such as omploader [omploader.org]. It would be nice if some big sites like youtube get rid of flash too, but I'm not holding my breath.

Right, offering ogg video at least as an alternative on youtube would be a real blow against evil, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, the don't be evil part of google left with this guy while Eric, Larry and Sergie never really found it expedient to buy into that concept.

Glad someone is doing this!

[motang]

Huge news, it blew me off my chair when I read it this morning! I am glad that Daily Motion is doing something like this, more kudos to them!

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Will you pay the 5 Million yearly license fees so firefox/mozillia etc can provide free legal support....

Thought not.

Oh and soon there will be a fee on *providing* content in h.264.

And I left out all the other parts of the license agreement that firefox would be forced to follow before they would be given a license. And this would make it incompatible with GPL or even open source in general.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[supernova_hq]

Holy hell google is fast to update!

I remember when I was still using hotmail and it took them nearly 5 years to get firefox support working properly.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[supernova_hq]

dude, someone ABOVE your post already mentioned youtube.com/html5
So much for your theory of it not happening.

Now if only I can figure out how to install firefox 3.5 in ubuntu...

Still too slow...

[bemymonkey]

...for every netbook sold so far. The demo page gives me a slideshow, in what looks like the same quality as YouTube's H.264 videos in non-HD mode. The YouTube videos run (barely) OK, by the way.

Why is streaming video so taxing? Ripping those same slideshow videos off of the website and playing them back with VLC or MPC delivers absolutely smooth video with minimal CPU time used (compared to the pegged 100% in-browser). Why is online video so processing-heavy that hardware still sold a year ago (which has no problem with 720p H.264 - without hardware acceleration) can't play it?

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[darkvad0r]

Just download the .tar.gz fromn mozilla's site, uncompress it and launch it. Nothing to install.

On topic : Flash, Firefox, online video.

[AbRASiON]

Ok this is ,....fairly close to on topic, sorry to diverge slightly.

We really really need to take a much better look at online video playback within Firefox, browsers in general and flash.
More and more video is being presented in a window via flash, it's taken over where ASX / ASF / Mov / MPG once dominated for better and for worse.
Flash (and or ALL internet video playback!) needs several changes.

Firstly, I need more goddamn control over it, I'm sick of having to manually buffer!
I want to click a video and I want it to pre-stream at least 10 or 15 seconds and then start playing, if this means delays, FINE but I'm tired of deliberately playing a video, then pressing pause to wait for it and tabbing off somewhere else for 5 minutes.
Ultimately we need a much better 'control panel' for embedded flash video, since it's used so often now.

Secondly: Tab control, tab focus and application focus SERIOUSLY needs looking at!
I can not use control tab, control shift tab, control page up etc with Firefox on some sites with embedded flash video, the player plugin steals focus of my keyboard input and it's bloody infuriating as I navigate with the keyboard constantly, I can control tab away from this tab, right now to Gmail, then back - I can do it for 90% of my tabs but hit a flash video one and focus is stolen, keyboard input is bunk - Adobe, Mozilla? Fix this!

Thirdly: Similar to the second, many of us have dual monitors now! - I want to maximise my damn flash videos on monitor number 2, be able to tab out of Firefox / whatever, work on a word document, explorer, whatever and not have the flash video shrink down back to regular embedded size!

Finally: We need a standard layout, I can't stand it when someone embeds a youtube 'basic' video interface on their page and the full screen option is missing, I need to click the video, which opens the real feed over at youtube.com and then I can full screen it.

Also it's in-efficient, I don't want it auto streaming, I don't want to have to click videos twice or pre-buffer or whatever, I swear 30% of the videos I open, I download them one and a half times for one reason or another, I live in Australia - I can not afford the bandwidth to keep doing this!
For the love jesus can someone please please solve complaint 2 and 3, it's driving me batty! Is there a 3'rd party decent plugin for flash out there?

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[gmack]

Firefox 3.5beta for Ubuntu is here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=195473&package_id=231607

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[howlingmadhowie]

the first hurdle any video codec for a browser has to pass to be considered as a standard is it has to be freely implementable. you can't have restrictive patents on standards. for that reason, h264 isn't even in the running. it could be technically perfect, it has no place being used in a tag

Mozilla Corp. is subject to US patent law

[tepples]

But x264 and other H.264 and VC-1 implementations have improved a whole lot in the same timeframe, and keep on improving.

But unlike Free implementations of H.264 and VC-1, Theora is here now. Mozilla Corporation is based in the United States, and the U.S. patents on H.264 won't start expiring until 2024.

Re:Mozilla Corp. is subject to US patent law

[benwaggoner]

Sure, but they could just license the patenets for $2.5M/year and be good to go.

Re:Mozilla Corp. is subject to US patent law

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're missing the point of promoting open standards.

You forgot gamma

[tepples]

Depends on the reference. What is 0 dB?

In signal-to-noise comparisons, 0 dB is the power of noise.

However 3 dB is a two-fold increase in watts (power).

But audio and video signals are stored as levels, not powers. In audio, levels represent voltages fed to the DAC, and power varies with the square of voltage. You need a four-fold increase in power to represent a two-fold increase in level; therefore, an improvement of 6 dB in SNR is roughly one more bit of accuracy. And in video, this exponent is slightly greater than two.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Google already have an internal (I think) demo of youtube with video tags, it was in their Google I/O Day 1 keynote: http://code.google.com/events/io/

So it's possible.

Dirac

[Yfrwlf]

I hope it's not too long before Dirac and other better-than-Theora video codecs also are implemented by Firefox and other browsers, so that websites can also start using them as well.

There's also YouTube's HTML5 demo

[damg]

I'm surprised there was no mention of YouTube's Flashless HTML5 demo page. I think it's a bit more popular than Dailymotion.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[master5o1]

Still matches the quality that youtube provides...with its shitty downscaling and lulz. YouTube's Hiqh Quality isn't better than Theora...at least not on any video I have seen.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[noundi]

Just to add, it's gratis and not libre. No matter what you do you have to view the ads (given that they're niftly crafted and not just a dumb jpeg banner). Naturally there are different types of gratis and gratis in this context simply means that you're not paying for the service, but instead somebody else is in exchange for exposure to you. That means one thing: your attention has monetary value. In a sense of trade you're exchanging a fragment of your attention with whatever gratis content you're viewing. So no, it's not free. Not in theory but ultimately in practice and in almost all cases free is solely libre, and gratis is just another word for "not paid with money".

Trade has many complex routes. Just because you don't understand it it doesn't make it nonexistant in the case of YouTube, or any other "free" service.

License fees paid to A doesn't protect you from B

[jonaskoelker]

With h.264, Apple is [protected against patent suits] because they've licensed the format.

Really? So if vendor A and vendor B has a patent, and user C buys a license from vendor A, then vendor B can't come after user C and say "hey! We have a patent. Pay us or stop what you're doing!"... no?

If that's true, I'm founding a shell company which is going to sell me patent licensing.

If that's false, then Apple paying license money to vendor A isn't going to protect them against suits from vendor B.

HTML really, really sucks...

[jonaskoelker]

Actually, no version of HTML is really suited for "web applications" but that's how we roll anyway.

It also sucks for text and markup...

Let me explain. Consider your average LaTeX document: rendered it beautiful fonts (computer modern roman ftw), sane hyphenation, lines that are around 66 characters long (which is optimal for readability, I hear), and probably tons of typographic considerations I don't know about. Plus, it's easy to do columns that are nice to look at.

The web: has no standardized beautiful fonts (you may set up your client to use CMR), forcing your own fonts on sites may break their CSS, has no support for 66-char lines, no columns, no good way to make use of wide screens without making lines very long (see also: no columns), and the browsers seem to not care much about doing typographic work.

In LaTeX, you can define your own semantic markup. In my stdlib.tex I define \mathbold to either \mathbb or \mathbf, depending on whether I want a bold Z or a blackboard-bold Z to represent the integers.

In HTML, you can't define your own semantic markup. Also, people don't want semantic markup, they want pixel-by-pixel positioning.

The only thing HTML seems to be really good at is the "Hyper" part. And that's more a function of HTTP than of HTML.

I wonder if we would have been better of by using NeWS (Sun's Networked Windowing System; no relation to NNTP) instead of X, and running remote NeWS clients instead of fetching HTML pages.

That way, the remote client can have its pixel-by-pixel layout; we can still transport them via HTTP so the "Hyper"-part will still be there. We could also have native-looking widgets, and people could update the widget library independent of the w3c or the NeWS Standards Organization or whatever.

It's not that I hate the web. I think the hyper is great. It's just that I want a better medium for text, markup and language. And a much, much better medium for applications.

Re:Other sites with support exist as well

[cheftw]

I tried this - mod parent insightful

Real support or just hot air?

[Qubit]

Is there any indication that Google is interested in making that demo into a supported playback mechanism for all videos on YouTube? If so, that would be a huge benefit for Free Software OSes like Ubuntu.

Some samples

[benwaggoner]

Heck, just whipped out some short 320x240p30 400 Kbps encodes for WMV, x264, and xvid. To avoid arguments about tuning, I pretty much just turned on ever expensive feature that might improve quality; these are all much slower settings than you'd use in production, but shows what the best current implementations are generally capble of.

Looking at the VC-1, I recall we've been much more focused on higher bitrates and resolutions than this in the last few years. But even still it outperforms xvid.

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/.Public/SMPTE%7C_320x240%7C_400Kbps

Re:Some samples

[BikeHelmet]

Wow, that xvid sure looks awful! h.264 is clearly superior there!

I'm not convinced xvid can't do slightly better with tweaks. Perhaps even better than VC-1. (We were getting artifacts close to your VC-1 encode with our xvid encodes; but we had a bit higher bitrate... and also higher resolution)

I'll have to go and ask the guy that ran the tests to re-do them with a new version of the encoder, and a new ffdshow.

Re:Some samples

[benwaggoner]

I intentionally picked some hard video.

These are also unconstrained VBR; real world encoding would use a peak bitrate, and if streaming would even be CBR, which would make xvid even less competitive.

Maybe for a next step you cold define your scenario in some more detail?

Re:Some samples

[BikeHelmet]

Certainly. Three clips were chosen.

The first was the first few minutes of Firefly's first episode. It's quite dark, and has a lot of area that can be blurred out totally without noticing it. But this should've helped h.264?

The second was a home video of a cat drinking out of a glass by using his paw. The (orange) cat was sitting on an orange shag carpet.

The third was a FRAPS recorded video of a battle in Saga Frontier 2. I recall h.264 handled the interface better, but it completely blocked up the graphical stuff. (effects) Xvid made a complete mess of the text/interface, but prioritized the graphical stuff instead.

I'll get back to you once I've re-encoded at least one of those with up to date software.

Re:Some samples

[BikeHelmet]

Alright, figured it out. I emailed the guy, and he told me it was the decoder. (ffdshow) The chosen settings were fine. Even the encodes are fine.

About a month after the tests, a new version was on CVS that didn't have the same issues with 5.1 profiles. He didn't think to email me, so I've been spreading outdated/false info. >_<

I pulled one of the h.264 encoded vids off a backup drive, and it looks just fine now. It just wouldn't decode properly back then, and since ffdshow didn't crash(and quality did improve as options were tweaked), we didn't clue in to it being decoder error.

Go figure. The one time I really heavily research something, a software bug nails me. And now my stupidity gets preserved on slashdot for all eternity! Oh well - that's irony, I guess. :P

Oh, and if you're still interested in the clips, I can upload them somewhere - but since they now agree with you, the only thing of interest would be the lack of horrible artifacts in the xvid version.

Why one codec?

[Yogiz]

Could someone explain why it depends on the browsers what codecs are supported? Wouldn't it be more effective, if browser was just for linking the video on the net with local playback capabilities and allowing all videos to be played that can be played using the codecs installed on the system? Wouldn't it be better for the standard to be completely codec-agnostic? I mean the browser isn't going to be the player anyway as far as I have understood and will be using a local backend for playback.

Re:License fees paid to A doesn't protect you from

[macslut]

Your shell company isn't going to work because you'd never sell the license to Apple. Microsoft would sell a license, and Apple would know that if challenged, they could sue Microsoft, but more importantly, they'd know Microsoft has fully gone through all the legal complications and challenges if they're at the point of licensing. This is one of the big things that MPEG does. For what it's worth to you and the others, as a user of Apple products, I don't like the lack of compatibility with open formats at all. I'm not making excuses for Apple, I'm just saying why Apple is doing what they're doing. And yes, it sucks that they don't invest in supporting these formats...but it's almost exclusively a legal investment they need to make.