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

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?

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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: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.

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.

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: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.