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

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.

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:

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: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

[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

[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:3 dB

[timq]

3 dB is a factor of ~ 1.41 times.

A factor of two is 6 dB.

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: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.