Questioning Mozilla's Plans For HTML5 Video

AberBeta writes with this excerpt from OSNews: "We're on the verge of a serious evolution on the web. Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology. The answer to this is the HTML5 video tag, which allows you to embed video into HTML pages without the use of Flash or any other non-HTML technology; combined with open video codecs, this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardize the web. Sadly, not even Mozilla itself really seems to understand what it is supposed to do with the video tag, and actually advocates the use of JavaScript to implement it. Kroc Camen, OSNews editor, is very involved in making/keeping the web open, and has written an open letter to Mozilla in which he urges them not to use JavaScript for HTML video."

Comments

Waiting

[Parker Lewis]

Waiting for "Javascript is a cool language" zealots.

Re:Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

We're on digg nowadays, their JS is much cooler than /.

Re:Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript is a cool language. I've written more than a couple of browser extensions and intranet apps with it in my time and I'm one of those people that disables javascript for browsing the public internet. I consider running random 3rd party code to be an outright security hole, some people are willing to sacrifice security for the bells and whistles but only a complete moron disagrees with the premise.

You can probably guess that I personally am going to disable the HTML5 A/V elements and continue downloading video manually. That aside, browser based audio/video should provide basic playback functionality for the user without javascript enabled. The functionality should also be easily disabled or switched into "prompt to download" mode and finally, I don't want to use GStreamer for anything... ever...

Re:Waiting

[Toonol]

I'm not a zealot, and Javascript isn't that bad. I'd say the people that hate it are more unthinkingly zealous.

Javascript is MISUSED a lot, but hell, so is C.

Re:Waiting

[smoker2]

This has nothing to do with HTML 5 or the video tag. The javascript is used to create a fallback path for users who don't have a particular codec installed. It is not compulsory. Most linux machines install ogg theora with a media player package anyway, it's the rest of the world that need to download it.

Re:Waiting

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but you can (and should) create fallbacks without JS

Re:Waiting

[Simetrical]

This has nothing to do with HTML 5 or the video tag. The javascript is used to create a fallback path for users who don't have a particular codec installed. It is not compulsory. Most linux machines install ogg theora with a media player package anyway, it's the rest of the world that need to download it.

<video> support in all browsers is cross-platform (except Chrome, which AFAIK doesn't support audio/video yet except on Windows, but that's an omission they're working on fixing). The browser doesn't have to rely on system libraries for decoding Theora any more than for decoding JPEG. Firefox 3.5 or recent Chrome supports Theora on Windows just as well as Linux. Better in Chrome's case for now, as noted.

Re:Waiting

[Simetrical]

You can probably guess that I personally am going to disable the HTML5 A/V elements and continue downloading video manually. That aside, browser based audio/video should provide basic playback functionality for the user without javascript enabled. The functionality should also be easily disabled or switched into "prompt to download" mode

All of this is already the case. Try out Chrome on Windows, or Firefox 3.5 on (AFAIK) any platform. You don't need JavaScript enabled (unless the page author is a jerk, but that's always true), and you can download from the context menu as you'd expect.

Re:Waiting

[dave87656]

I thought the ogg codec was embedded in Firefox 3.5 so you wouldn't need to download it even if your platform didn't support it.

Re:Waiting

[xaxa]

With [ and ] instead of < and >, it goes something like:

[video src="something.ogv" controls]
    [object whatever whatever]
        [img src="fallback image" alt="fallback text"]
    [/object]
[/video]

The contents of the Video element isn't displayed in supporting browsers (same with the Object element).

Re:Waiting

[inline_four]

Running third party code in a sandbox does not have to be much different than processing a rich data format, such as video, with a piece of software. Are spreadsheets programs or data files?

Eyes wide shut

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The last time Mozilla added support for a tag that had some automatic animated behavior, the browser was still called Netscape and the tag was universally reviled. I hope they don't blink again.

But that said, does anyone really think video is a good idea? It's hard enough to get users to install the correct codecs to play back movies now. At least with FLV you've got a pretty standard platform which almost everyone already has installed. Adobe, for all their fuckups, has done a good job with Flash. Quicktime, OTOH, is not quite as accepted. And WMV, for whatever reason, is rejected by many users out of hand.

So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs? What are the distribution formalities required for that kind of thing? It sounds like a giant ball of baling wire stuck in a thresher. I'm tempted to let it alone.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[CRCulver]

Is the video tag supported in Gecko in a way that would make the video automatically start? I would assume that the user must click a Play button first.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Simon (S2)]

So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs?

No. The idea is to include the codec in the browser. But to allow that at reasonable conditions, the codec should be Free. The codec proposed for this purpose is Ogg Theora/Vorbis, an OSS codec build specifically trying not to use any patented technology. As you can imagine, Apple, MS and Adobe are not really happy about this, as they obviously would like their patented technology to be used in HTML 5, and because Apple and MS are not only video-codec-makers but browser-makers too, and not small ones, we can not just ignore them and go ahead with Theora. Implement the HTML 5 video tag in Mozilla with Theora looked like a good chance to get the open codec though, but this Javascript stuff post by Mozilla now makes it look like they have other plans.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

If the tag supports the ability to specify where the codec can be acquired from, the browser can prompt the user to install the codec if it's missing. (like a dtd tag in xml)

Re:Eyes wide shut

[nyctopterus]

Flash Video is unbelievably processor intensive (especially given it's pretty crappy quality), surely you've noticed that? Even on modern dual processor machines it can stutter and slow down other processes. If video could settle down like image formats, the web would be a better place for it.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad somebody said that: it certainly covers the way I was thinking about it. I can just see it now: a bunch of whining about "they released the HTML super awesome no flash video dealy but it doesn't support my [insert half developed lame FOSS codec here]".

Can you imagine going to a web site from a corporate locked down machine and attempting to install some untrusted codec? Sure, that will fly. Like BAG said, Flash works now and is damn near ubiquitous.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[jackb_guppy]

Personally, is not need, is already there.

But I like the idea that not loading Abode is good thing one less thing to do. I like the idea that browser will "bring" in the "accepted" codecs, maybe just import some of VLC. This will make installations easier and standardized, versus the load from here, then go here and download some more, and do not forget the PTFs on top of all of this. Last Window box I did - brand new system with system already preloaded [xp sp3], 7 1/2 hours to get it working will all the parts. 4 hours of that was just PTFs from MS.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[QuoteMstr]

The last time Mozilla added support for a tag that had some automatic animated behavior

Err, <script>? Still going strong today. Essential, even. Don't pretend this is a revolutionary change when in reality we're taking about an evolutionary tweak.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Sephr]

By default the user needs to initiate playing the video, but there is an optional autoplay attribute which can be used to auto-buffer and auto-play the video.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[QuoteMstr]

Can you imagine going to a web site from a corporate locked down machine and attempting to install some untrusted codec?

As opposed to Flash, which is pretty much the ultimate untrusted codec? It's a huge binary blob that has had numerous security problems, and which has a huge attack surface. Even ignoring declared vulnerabilities, Flash allows web pages to do things like access the clipboard and bypass XMLHttpRequest same-origin restrictions. In short, installing flash makes a web browser demonstrably less secure.

It's remarkable, then, that an administrator would be comfortable installing this Trojan octopus of a plugin while ignoring a far simpler open source video codec that he can verify and compile himself.

Really, it just shows that people will trust the familiar without seriously questioning it, at least until a crisis shows up.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Baseclass]

It's true, Flash content is choppier in Linux. I blame Adobe and their crappy plugin. If I download an .flv and play it in mplayer the problems disappear.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Sephr]

If Flash player was open source, then the same thing would be true for it. With openness comes choice.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[TheRaven64]

Try it on OS X. I have a 1.5GHz PowerPC Mac that struggles (and drops frames) with flash videos, but can play the same video, at higher quality H.264, in QuickTime at around 60% CPU load. On my x86 Mac I've not found Flash videos that drop frames yet, but I can play back 1080p H.264 at around the same CPU load as SD Flash video.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[jonbryce]

What about <img src="animated.gif"> ?

Re:Eyes wide shut

[multisync]

Can you imagine going to a web site from a corporate locked down machine and attempting to install some untrusted codec? Sure, that will fly. Like BAG said, Flash works now and is damn near ubiquitous.

So your corporate locked-down machine came with Flash installed on it? Or does someone with an admin password come and install or update it for you as required and permitted by your company's acceptable use policy? If the latter, why not install the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codec mentioned above instead?

Re:Eyes wide shut

[hardburn]

Anandtech tested the Zotac Ion with a dual core Atom with Win XP. Full screen Hulu videos were unwatchable at 1920 x 1200, even though the Flash code seems to be threaded pretty well. This same machine can handle 1080p Blu ray playback just fine. That's partially due to handling some of the DRM decryption on the GPU, but even if you strip the DRM, playback still has about 10% CPU utilization.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[siloko]

If I download an .flv and play it in mplayer the problems disappear.

Well what I do is start the stream and then pause it. Go to the dir where firefox saves its current streamed content (/tmp) and play the stream in mplayer there. Works perfectly even as the file is streaming . . . no jumps, no jitters, no CPU overload.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth noting that autoplay exists to stop authors from autoplaying videos using JavaScript. Because of that browsers will be able to prevent automatic playing of videos if user wishes so.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs?

No. The idea is to include the codec in the browser. But to allow that at reasonable conditions, the codec should be Free. The codec proposed for this purpose is Ogg Theora/Vorbis, an OSS codec build specifically trying not to use any patented technology. As you can imagine, Apple, MS and Adobe are not really happy about this, as they obviously would like their patented technology to be used in HTML 5, and because Apple and MS are not only video-codec-makers but browser-makers too, and not small ones, we can not just ignore them and go ahead with Theora. Implement the HTML 5 video tag in Mozilla with Theora looked like a good chance to get the open codec though, but this Javascript stuff post by Mozilla now makes it look like they have other plans.

Let's not ignore the fact that it would be much better to use h264 and take advantage of hardware-acceleration instead of going with a subpar format just because it's "open". Live in the real world like the rest of us.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[larry bagina]

an autoplay feature probably violates that (incredibly stupid) Eolas patent. Eola's has said they'll give a royalty free license for non-commercial use, but they sued Microsoft. IE, while closed source, is free and no more commercial than opera, safari, or firefox. The only browser that is commercial is opera mobile. They're motivation is money -- both Apple and Mozilla have plenty of it and Eolas hasn't licensed their "technology" to Mozilla.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[nyctopterus]

Nope, OS X (10.5) on a dual 2.8Ghz iMac. There's no excuse for Flash video's failures.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Sephr]

That patent is probably invalid as a standalone video opened by a video viewing program usually auto-plays the video without the user needing to push play.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

With openness comes choice.

Your hole or mine?

Re:Eyes wide shut

[beelsebob]

The point of the video tag is that it should contain some (as yet undecided thanks to infighting) standard codec, in the same way as an img tag should always contain jpeg, png or gif data, a video tag should always contain xyz, abc or nml data. Exactly what xyz, abc or nml should be is yet to be figured out.

Google and apple would like them to be h264/aac, because everyone uses that already, even more recent people using flash.
Mozilla would like them to be ogg theora/vorbis, because they're open, even though nothing actually supports them.

Neither side can agree.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[FudRucker]

search http://freshmeat.net/ for youtube.dl

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Flash ever bother using the hardware (mostly, overlays) for showing video? As far as I can tell, it doesn't...

... And the same applies for the Mozilla <video> implementation. Watching their demo videos were always hilariously slow - slower, in fact, than Flash video.

Minefield m-c / win32

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Baseclass]

I use youtube.dl and it works like a champ (for YouTube videos anyway).
Hint: Pass the -b flag to get an mp4 file.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[gaspyy]

Can you say "FUD"?

I won't even bother getting into details, but flash can't get the clipboard contents, only set it (much like all other browsers). Don't get me started on your XMLHttpRequest argument...

Just one thing: check the number of vulnerabilities in Flash compared to the number of vulnerabilities discovered in your favourite browser.

I wanted to write more in-depth, but this is Slashdot, where people love to hate flash. I bet if it was made by Linus/RMS/Jobs, the same crowd would have worshiped it...

Re:Eyes wide shut

[QuoteMstr]

I won't even bother getting into details, but flash can't get the clipboard contents, only set it

Clipboard.getData().

much like all other browsers

Only IE, actually.

Don't get me started on your XMLHttpRequest argument...

Flash allows you to request content from sites that would be blocked by XMLHttpRequest. Can you refuse that statement or not?

I bet if it was made by Linus/RMS/Jobs, the same crowd would have worshiped it...

You inadvertently make a good point. If Linus or RMS had developed flash, its source would have been open sourced, and by now, its capabilities would have been integrated into the browser. We wouldn't talk about what "Flash" can do as distinct from something else, but simply about the abilities of browsers.

That's what the rich media part of HTML5 is all about: doing what Flash can do in a browser.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Simetrical]

Google and apple would like them to be h264/aac, because everyone uses that already, even more recent people using flash. Mozilla would like them to be ogg theora/vorbis, because they're open, even though nothing actually supports them.

Google Chrome supports OGG out of the box, as well as H.264. I don't think it's correct to cast them as opponents of OGG.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Simetrical]

Can you imagine going to a web site from a corporate locked down machine and attempting to install some untrusted codec?

All browsers that support <video> package the codecs they support in the default download. No user downloads are necessary. In the worst case, Flash can still be used as a fallback until all common browsers support <video>. After then, the author will just have to provide video in as many formats as necessary (hopefully, one) to ensure it will play in all browsers.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[asa]

The last time Mozilla added support for a tag that had some automatic animated behavior, the browser was still called Netscape and the tag was universally reviled.

Um. Wrong. That wasn't Mozilla (the organization) that added that. That was Netscape (both the organization and the product).

So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs?

No. Ideally the major browser vendors will all ship baseline codecs -- hopefully Theora+Vorbis in Ogg. Some vendors will (also) ship H.264+AAC in mp4.

I'm tempted to let it alone.

I'm sure you're not alone. If you're a content producer or a content distributor, I hope you'll change your mind when you see video as a first-class citizen on the Web rather than an afterthought trapped inside of plug-ins.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[asa]

You can read the specification here. The spec provides for and browser vendors are implement the autoplay attribute.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[asa]

Flash Video is unbelievably processor intensive (especially given it's pretty crappy quality), surely you've noticed that?

Yes. Flash, and its implementation of H264 can be very processor intensive. Theora can actually beat H264 in CPU usage under many circumstances.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmm, copy paste...

>> I won't even bother getting into details, but flash can't get the clipboard contents, only set it

> Clipboard.getData() [adobe.com].

And copy-pasting from adobe:

> getData () method
> public function getData(format:String, transferMode:String):Object
> Language Version : ActionScript 3.0
> Runtime Versions : AIR 1.0

Great fun, I'll do that again:
> Runtime Versions : AIR 1.0

And once more...
> Runtime Versions : AIR 1.0

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Allicorn]

The patent in question: 5,838,906, "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document"

Given the HTML5 video tag - in theory - puts an end to the whole concept of browser's needing to invoke outside (plug-in) help to play video, it would seem that the Eolas patent is not relevant here.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on!

I don't know why this guy/gal was modded 'troll'.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Achromatic1978]

Well what I do is start the stream and then pause it. Go to the dir where firefox saves its current streamed content (/tmp) and play the stream in mplayer there. Works perfectly even as the file is streaming . . . no jumps, no jitters, no CPU overload.

Wow, what an intuitive and streamlined user experience!

Re:Eyes wide shut

[John Dowdell]

re: "As you can imagine, Apple, MS and Adobe are not really happy about this, as they obviously would like their patented technology to be used in HTML 5"

From what I've seen, folk at Adobe are pretty neutral about Ogg Theora. If it serves peoples needs, and if it enables more communication, that's all for the better. Anyone can already publish their own H.264 video though... most of the benefit seems to be for new video tools which could avoid license fees for high-performance codecs. Future licensing changes for H.264 are murky to me, hard to predict. Biggest risk seems to be Theora-only websites, but most everyone seems to be double-encoding.

Still, the more choice, the better... no problem with Ogg Theora here!

jd/adobe

Re:Eyes wide shut

[FrankieBaby1986]

I think the problem is simple. Open h264 and aac. The internet was opened up for the benefit of civilized society. These codecs have had a good few years to make money, and our government is the one "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" in order to benefit society.

Seems fair to me that if one such 'discovery' would benefit the 'sciences and useful arts' (or society as a whole) in a much more dramatic way by being 'opened' after a time, then the government should be able to do that (obviously with limits, or under overwhelming need).

OR, just make patent and copyright terms reasonable again.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Flash ever bother using the hardware (mostly, overlays) for showing video? As far as I can tell, it doesn't...

Good point. Graphics cards that accelerate various video formats are pretty common. Shouldn't this be a standard feature of any video player? So 1080p would be impossible on most PCs for that reason alone. Wow, just wow.

Kinda sad that the only good thing I can say about flash is that (for low to medium quality video) it works properly. And that feature is enough to dominate the embedded video formats. Talk about setting a low bar.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the letter to mozilla and the video for everybody link at all before you made this post ?

Re:Eyes wide shut

[cerberusss]

The last time Mozilla added support for a tag that had some automatic animated behavior, the browser was still called Netscape and the tag was universally reviled. I hope they don't blink again.

The one major downfall of the blink tag was that it did not have support for an interval attribute.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[beelsebob]

Google have published articles stating that they could not use ogg for YouTube because it would double their bandwidth costs to maintain the quality they get from h264. They want the standard to include h264 video.

What I did miss out is ofc that MS would love it to include VC/1, but I think we're reasonably safe that no one will chose that option.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

could they put the codec as "external application"?

Re:Eyes wide shut

[RedK]

I think he meant .

Re:Eyes wide shut

[bendodge]

FYI, Flash isn't hardware accelerated either.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Simetrical]

Google have published articles stating that they could not use ogg for YouTube because it would double their bandwidth costs to maintain the quality they get from h264.

Chris DiBona said that on the whatwg list, but he's the open-source program manager at Google, not (AFAIK) part of YouTube specifically. As far as I know, it's not clear if he was giving official estimates from the YouTube team or speaking off the cuff. (It very much sounded like he was speaking off the cuff.) I'm not aware of any articles that Google has published about how much bandwidth Theora would use — could you provide links?

They want the standard to include h264 video.

Could you provide any source for that? Because various Google employees explained on the whatwg list why Chrome supported H.264, I've never heard of any of them advocating that the HTML 5 standard require it.

(Yeah, I know, this is Slashdot. I should replace "could you provide links?" with "you're making stuff up"/"that's BS"/etc., but I can't be bothered.)

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Ant P.]

Oh hey look, I can copy and paste from Adobe sites too!

In addition, the new Clipboard.generalClipboard object in Flash Player 10 can read and write the system Clipboard.

Just for the slow people among us (you, AC):

Flash Player 10 can read and write the system Clipboard.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[beelsebob]

My bad, it was indeed chris dibona's comment I was referring to. But yeh google are using h264 on youtube already, they're doing it for a reason. I would bet heavily it involves (a) people can play it (b) it uses less bandwidth than ogg.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[loufoque]

The hardware acceleration of h264 is nothing more the acceleration of discrete cosine transform.
It's basically usable to accelerate any video codec except experimental wavelet stuff.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[plnix0]

So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs? What are the distribution formalities required for that kind of thing? It sounds like a giant ball of baling wire stuck in a thresher. I'm tempted to let it alone.

Somehow you fail to realize that Flash videos don't work unless Flash Player is installed. There is no conceptual difference between requiring Flash to be installed and requiring a codec pack to be installed. If some level of extra browser support is going to be required, an open standard is far superior to proprietary junk like Flash.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Hurricane78]

Flash video IS h.264 most of the time. And yes, it is accelerated. What do you think the "Hardware Acceleration" option in the settings does? ^^

Re:Eyes wide shut

[SanityInAnarchy]

It does something, but not nearly what you'd expect. Play the exact same video file in Flash and in VLC, and you'll notice an order of magnitude (or two!) difference in performance.

And I'm pretty sure Flash is not using the hardware h.264 decoders that some devices are shipping with.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[visible.frylock]

Not sure if this works in linux

http://www.downloadhelper.net/

It's basically automating what you just said, it says it works in linux, but you know how that goes.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[dave87656]

So are we going to require browsers to install with codec packs?

Support for ogg is in the browser itself and requires no additional libraries or plugins. Of course there may be browser vendors (not naming any names here) which don't support standards.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[gd2shoe]

Here you go. You seem to have missed this:

"I blame Adobe and their crappy plugin" --Baseclass

Re:Eyes wide shut

[foniksonik]

Flash uses hardware acceleration for H.264 in Full Screen mode. Nobody encodes to FLV anymore for the last 2 years (or since H.264 was openly supported by Flash Player).

just fyi

Re:Eyes wide shut

[civilizedINTENSITY]

this is exactly why some people prefer open software to closed, its a quality issue

Re:Eyes wide shut

[civilizedINTENSITY]

its part of the "everything is a file" mentality, yes
but there really isn't such a thing as an intuitive interface, its *all* learned...just depends on which you learned first what you'll call intuitive

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Its safe to say that Google sent DiBona to "break the news" to the open source community that Thedora is DOA

Re:Eyes wide shut

[bemymonkey]

The main reason I can see for getting away from Flash is the awesomely humungous ginormous CPU usage. We're stuck in a situation where brand new computers (namely netbooks) aren't able to play back a simple web video without stuttering. The Youtube H.264 videos in HD mode? Slideshow, I'm talking like 2FPS.

Sure, some people are hoping for hardware acceleration, but that's just a temporary fix - what about the next iteration of Flash? Pop in a new Flash hardware accelerator you say? It's a freakin video. A computer that's able to render a screen full of complex polygons at 1024x600 (say, for instance, Unreal Tournament GOTY, or Warcraft III) can't play a simple video that's 800x480? I think developers took a wrong turn somewhere.

And just BTW, these machines also have no problem playing 720P H.264 files - _if_ they have a fast decoder installed.

So where were we? HTML5 Video? Ogg Theora? The big question here is: Will it run smoothly on a PIII-class CPU?

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true, indeed. Just ask my laptop :)

Re:Eyes wide shut

[porl]

sure does. i've been using it for ages. works a charm.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[OolimPhon]

Because hardware acceleration depends on the user having the hardware - which most of the population doesn't. H.264 is much heavier on the cpu than other formats if you don't have the hardware.

Re:Eyes wide shut

[popra]

Just so you know, the Clipboard.getData() points to the AIR documentation which is a very different beast when compared to the Flash browser plugin. Also flash apps in a web page are subject to cross domain security policies (see: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_9_security.pdf ), the added benefit is that the target domain is able to control who's allowed to make cross domain calls and who's not (by default no one is allowed, much like in a browser).

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Your right it is CPU intensive irrespective of the OS and they rarely acknowledge the problem. Download a flash vid and play it in VLC and it works at a reasonable CPU usage (That's for test purposes as I know its im[ractical doing that all the time.)

Re:Eyes wide shut

[Anonymous Coward]

Clues for the clueless:

The clipboard.getData() you linked to is an AIR method-that's not the normal version of Flash 99% of people have.

Flash allows you to request content from sites that would be blocked by XMLHttpRequest-this in itself is not a bad thing; it's only a bad thing if it opens security holes by doing so. If the security model is superior to XMLHttpRequest's same origin policy(which this is), that's *better* for the developer.

You obviously have little experience in AS so you are in no position to make a valid comparison of what Flash vs. HTML 5 can do.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[Colin Smith]

Our browsers are javascript virtual machines. The web is now being delivered through javascript and not in any meaningful way through HTML.

 

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[Repossessed]

That would be the entire point of HTML 5. To bring HTML back to the forefront.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML is the content, CSS is the way to display the HTML content and Javascript is the way to interact with it all.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[Bigjeff5]

Our browsers are javascript virtual machines.

No they aren't, there is no such thing as a javascript virtual machine, the language isn't built that way. What our browsers do is act as a javascript interpreter, which is entirely different. You wouldn't say web browsers are HTML virtual machines, because they aren't. They are HTML interpreters. Javascript is much more closely related to HTML than either of them are to Java. The two have more in common with a language like Python, which is also an interpreted language.

Java is more like a bastardized hybrid of compiled and interpreted languages.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[lannocc]

You are right that HTML is (should be) dead. Long live XML! I don't care for XSL-FO, though, so continue to use CSS for presentation.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[lannocc]

HTML is the content, CSS is the way to display the HTML content and Javascript is the way to interact with it all.

My buzzwordy description for this is Data-Presentation-Mechanics. It's much like the programmer model of Model-View-Controller only applied at a different abstraction level. I believe HTML is near a dead-end now anyways. A proper browser supporting XML (and the related XLink, XForms, etc.) could accomplish anything HTML currently can do, with the added benefit that your (XML) data can speak for itself! Continue to use CSS for styling though, as XSL-FO is too complex for me to support right now. Use XSLT to do data tree transformations if necessary. Add an ECMAScript engine for interactivity. <shameless-plug>i'm writing an XML browser in Java to do all this, using existing open-source frameworks where possible</shameless-plug>

Data -> XML
Presentation -> CSS
Mechanics -> XLink, XForms, JavaScript

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[Jartan]

It won't happen. For whatever reason web devs seem almost desperate to force everyone to use javascript. Anyone who uses NoScript notices this quickly. So many pages I go to are expressly designed to break without javascript. They scramble html links to the point that they aren't even written properly till javascript is enabled. OP is correct HTML is dead. HTML 5 won't save it because the web devs dont wan't to save it.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[maxume]

How do you reconcile this thinking with the implicit html5 statement that xhtml was a failure?

(My perspective as a slightly interested spectator indicates that a significant reason for the failure of xhtml was the requirement that all content be well-formed...)

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[lannocc]

Well, my perspective is probably a bit off the mainstream. To me, web browsers have strayed from their primary purpose: browsing and linking content, aka data. I find that most data generally is well-formed, since if it weren't it wouldn't be very useful to a computer. Why do we spend so much time writing HTML or XHTML to interact with data on the back-end that is generally well-formed?

As far as dealing with existing web pages that are in HTML and not well-formed, well there are tools like HTML TIDY that could be used as a front-end to any XML browser expecting well-formedness.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[maxume]

Well, computers aren't the ones using things like news articles, blog posts and comments; humans are. And humans are the ones generating them. And humans are lazy. And capricious.

A big part of html5 is that the algorithms for dealing with ambiguous content are built into the specification, essentially bringing the functionality provided by Tidy type tools into the spec (part of the process of getting this right was creating multiple implementations of the proposed spec, so there is some chance that it will actually work pretty well). To me, having browser implementers do heroic things to show as much data as possible it going to be a better experience for users than the one where any mistake by a content creator or generator ends up in a screen saying "Ooops!" rather than something that is most of what they are looking for.

I'm not trying to be a negative Nancy, but I don't feel bad pointing out the pitfalls that came up when some other folks tried something similar to what you are talking about (even though there is some likelihood that you are well aware of them).

If you aren't devoted to the break-on-errors aspect of XML, you should make that a lot clearer when you talk about it.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[visible.frylock]

Assembly isn't dead you young punk. All your fancy "compiler" does is just create assembly code anyway. I could code circles around you whippersnappers using punch cards! Now get off my lawn!

Now in seriousness, the difference between assembly/higher-level vs html/js is that, while higher level languages were legitimately needed and represented progress, javascript today is being used to make things happen, by view-time execution, which are essentially predetermined and have no business needing scripting. Things like simple menus, and even links for god's sake.

Maybe by 2020, we'll actually have some standards for things like <menu> tags. Although I'm sure there still won't be any public domain reference implementations. The standards bodies consider that beneath them. Oh, I know a good one: maybe by 2020, we'll realize that, even though using <table> for layout is dumb, that it is completely natural and intuitive to organize things in rectangles, and we'll finally get over our dogmatic anti-rectangle propaganda.

OT: if I selected PLAIN OLD TEXT (TM), then why do I have to escape lt's and gt's?

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[hunteke]

Uhm, no. Javascript makes HTML more alive, but without HTML, Javascript couldn't communicate with the user. It is through HTML that Javascript lives. Put differently, a web page can exist without Javascript. It can't without HTML.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I like to think of it in terms of Structure (HTML/DOM), Spatial (Size & Location: CSS), Decoration (colors, fonts, etc...), and last but not least, BEHAVIOR, which is all JavaScript

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

depends on which javascript you are running, and where, doesn't it?
running javascript via rhino on java, it sure is running on a virtual machine
actually, i think that its more fair to say that interpreters are a bastardized form of virtual machine, since virtual machines and garbage collection are older than interpreters

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

XML is dead! long live JSON! but wait, why not combine data and code? JSON is 1/2 way there, javascript is functional already...why not use mod-lisp? build scheme into the browser? hehehehe!!!

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[Tangent128]

HTML remains the GUI layer for Javascript.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[lannocc]

I like to think of it in terms of Structure (HTML/DOM), Spatial (Size & Location: CSS), Decoration (colors, fonts, etc...), and last but not least, BEHAVIOR, which is all JavaScript

That's a good way to put it. As it is, though, "Spatial" and "Decoration" always seem to go together in one spec (CSS, XSL-FO). Do they have to? I'm not sure...

I would say that BEHAVIOR is more than JavaScript. To describe that the <a href="..."> tag should link to another document when clicked is also behavior, something that xlink aims to address.

Re:HTML is dead... Didn't you notice?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I tend to put (static) decorative attributes into CSS files since this is information that really doesn't change. Spatial information is calculated as a function of screen.width and screen.height. Being dynamic in nature it is assigned via JavaScript. A way around this would be to do the work upfront once (one of my general principles, actually), and then merely use JavaScript to control the loading of the screen size appropriate CSS files. I would then have decorative.load_always.css, and a dir tree of screen resolution CSS files only one of which gets loaded. Still a separation, although better use of CSS (as well as space-time tradeoffs).

Totally agree that an anchor tag link *is* (perhaps even the WWW's primordial) BEHAVIOR thing. Some RESTful types even go so far as to propose using the sum of the links a page has as the best definition of its state, and do away with state variables completely. I'm not that good/pure, but I do see it as one possible and interesting optimization strategy. Variables are quick and useful, sure, but a foreach is better than a for in so many ways.

Heretic that I am, in review of my current project I see that I've attached onclicks to tags (which calls an event handler, which checks for the id). I'm actually not using even a single anchor tag for its stated purpose. Too much AJAX? Does a site need more than one "page" if it can rewrite its elements? I honestly don't know. I enjoy exploring paradigms, yes. But I'm certainly not an authority.

I appreciate the XLink reference. In my current reincarnation (which cycles about every other fiscal quarter) I'd use their terminology to refer to all of my links as multidirectional in general, and specificly cyclic in nature.

[Definition: Using or following a link for any purpose is called traversal.] Even though some kinds of link can associate arbitrary numbers of resources, traversal always involves a pair of resources (or portions of them); [Definition: the source from which traversal is begun is the starting resource] and [Definition: the destination is the ending resource]. Note that the term "resource" used in this fashion may at times apply to a resource portion, not a whole resource.
[Definition: Information about how to traverse a pair of resources, including the direction of traversal and possibly application behavior information as well, is called an arc]. If two arcs in a link specify the same pair of resources, but they switch places as starting and ending resources, then the link is multidirectional, which is not the same as merely "going back" after traversing a link.

My links all involve dojo.xhrget, handleAs: json. I use lots of callbacks.

My next reincarnation, should I be happy enough to find someone willing and able to bankroll my journy, would be into the world of LAML (Lisp As a Markup Language). For those with ACM Portal access, and for the rest of us:

ABSTRACT
Functional programming fits well with the use of descriptive markup in HTML and XML. There is also a good fit between S-expressions in Lisp and the XML data set. These similarities are exploited in LAML which is a software package for Scheme. LAML supports exact mirrors of the three variants of XHTML 1.0, SVG 1.0, and a number of more specialized XML languages. The mirrors are all synthesized from document type definitions (DTDs). Each element in a mirror is represented by a named function in Scheme. The mirror functions validate the XML document while it is generated. The validation is based on finite state automata automatically derived from the DTD.

The LAML Hello World:

(load (string-append laml-dir "laml.scm"))
(laml-style "simple-xhtml1.0-transitional-validating")
(write-html â(TM)(raw prolog)

(html 'xmlns "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
(head (title "Hello World"))
(body (p "Hello" (a â(TM)href "http://www.w3c.org/" "W3C")))))

(end-laml)

Video tag

[Adrian Lopez]

A lot of video producers like to rely on the fact that Flash makes it difficult to download videos to your hard drive. I wonder how they'd react if a major online video provider were to provide its content through a less restrictive method such as the video tag.

Re:Video tag

[malevolentjelly]

A lot of video producers like to rely on the fact that Flash makes it difficult to download videos to your hard drive. I wonder how they'd react if a major online video provider were to provide its content through a less restrictive method such as the video tag.

I think that's rather simple. The video tag would only be popular with free and amateur content. Flash (or Silverlight) solutions will continue to dominate the more popular commercial comment that needs to be protected. If videos were trapped behind theora playlists with commercials in-between, advocates would make solutions to circumvent the commercials and demonetize the model of the very companies who took the risk to support it.

Basically, any major media company that buys into HTML 5 video tag will be strangled by the advocates who pushed it on them in the first place, monetarily. When the production studios offering the content find out that a free video application that plays their content without commercials (hypothetically) exists, they will pull out and said video site will collapse. Colloquially, it's a trap. Commercial content needs protection because those watching it on the web do not own it.

Furthermore, there will be a minor codec war. Firefox will probably only support theora, Safari will only use h.264 (Apple will flatly refuse to use theora), same for google chrome, perhaps. Then, Microsoft will support the tag in IE, but provide support for WMV in the video tag (and possibly h.264 if we're lucky, since it's now licensed in Windows 7). So, the video tag will slowly become just as crazy as the plugin-based video players of Web 1.0... except they will be written in slow javascript instead of the fast native code of the past. Primarily, because no one has agreed on how to do it so it isn't a standard.

Re:Video tag

[Jamie's Nightmare]

I disagree. Have any other embedded video techniques made it any easier? Was it easier to rip video files embedded with Real Player, Windows Media Player, or Quickslime? In almost all cases, the videos are cached to the hard drive with an FLV extension. On occasion I've ripped videos simply by coping them out Opera's cache without even needed to look at the page source. For the less savvy users there are a variety of freeware and commercial tools available from websites like Snapfiles. There are even extensions for Firefox made for a similar purpose.

Re:Video tag

[Scrameustache]

A lot of video producers like to rely on the fact that Flash makes it difficult to download videos to your hard drive.

A lot of video producers don't know about FlashGot.

Re:Video tag

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of video producers are oblivious to the fact that Flash makes it easy to download videos to your hard drive.

There, fixed that for you. All I have to do to save a Flash video to my hard drive is play it. My browser will automatically save it to ~/.mozilla/firefox/Cache

Re:Video tag

[spud603]

Not all the time. Try that with Hulu or Megavideo.

Re:Video tag

[Anonymous Coward]

What's secure about mv /tmp/Flash* ~/Vidoes/ ?

and for those poor souls on windows there are numerous tools to save flash video

Re:Video tag

[Simetrical]

Basically, any major media company that buys into HTML 5 video tag will be strangled by the advocates who pushed it on them in the first place, monetarily. When the production studios offering the content find out that a free video application that plays their content without commercials (hypothetically) exists, they will pull out and said video site will collapse.

Such an app could be written for Flash video too, and probably has been.

Furthermore, there will be a minor codec war. Firefox will probably only support theora, Safari will only use h.264 (Apple will flatly refuse to use theora), same for google chrome, perhaps. Then, Microsoft will support the tag in IE, but provide support for WMV in the video tag (and possibly h.264 if we're lucky, since it's now licensed in Windows 7).

Google already supports Theora and Vorbis in Chrome (as well as H.264). Apple doesn't, but has previously claimed this is because of the risk of getting sued, and that's getting flimsier every day Google doesn't get sued, so we'll have to see how that plays out. God only knows what Microsoft will do; but hopefully the worst will be that you provide one type of content to IE, and one type to everyone else . . . just as with the rest of the web.

So, the video tag will slowly become just as crazy as the plugin-based video players of Web 1.0... except they will be written in slow javascript instead of the fast native code of the past. Primarily, because no one has agreed on how to do it so it isn't a standard.

Nothing performance-sensitive is written in JavaScript here. Everything involved in actually playing the video is native code.

Re:Video tag

[asa]

A lot of video producers like to rely on the fact that Flash makes it difficult to download videos to your hard drive.

They aren't relying on this and if they are, they're just plain silly. You can either grab a Firefox extension to download Flash files or you can just do a Tools->Page Info and Save from the Media tab.

Re:Video tag

[asa]

Not all the time. Try that with Hulu or Megavideo.

There are other add-ons and apps that make downloading Hulu content easy. Try Download Helper for Firefox or some of the for-pay apps.

Re:Video tag

[isilrion]

Basically, any major media company that buys into HTML 5 video tag will be strangled by the advocates who pushed it on them in the first place, monetarily. When the production studios offering the content find out that a free video application that plays their content without commercials (hypothetically) exists, they will pull out and said video site will collapse.

Not necessarily. It may be more convenient to stream it rather than to save it. Think about it, why would I want to download a video, if not to watch it when I can't otherwise access it? Why would I upload a copy of the video, when it could be easier to email a link? Why whould I go to the trouble of removing [unobtrusive - assuming that they are] commercials from a video I'm going to see only once?

Now, I can only give you my own anecdotal experience. I come from a country with very limited bandwidth (Cuba, but there may be others). If I can't let a 2-minutes video downloading overnight, the I can't watch it, commercials or no commercials. And if I download it, I really don't care if it has commercials, as ignoring a few seconds of them is easier than to cut it out (or, if the commercials are "interesting", showing them to other people may be fun by itself).

Right now, I'm in France for a few days. I have good bandwidth. I want to watch videos, and listen to music. And I want to watch them online. I don't want to go to the hassle of downloading them, see that I don't like them, and delete them. I want to click play. I want to show the clips I like to my advisor - not by downloading them to a pendrive and giving them to her, but just giving her a link.

Of course, I'd also want to download the clips I like, so when I return to my country, I can show them to others that would otherwise be unable to watch them, and to preserve the really special ones in case I lose the link or they get taken down.

If HTML5 takes off and it makes watching the clips even easier (specially for the "2-minutes-video-downloading-overnight situation"), it'll be even better - and I seriously wonder why would someone who can watch the videos online would choose to go through the trouble of downloading and storing every single thing he sees.

Colloquially, it's a trap. Commercial content needs protection because those watching it on the web do not own it.

Commercial content doesn't need anything. Commercial producers want DRM, because they fail to see a way to profit (or maintain control) without it. But you have other kinds of copyrighted content already on the web (text and images), where the users can, and ocassionally, do, save to their disks, but it is by no means what they commonly do. If video and audio were as ubiquitous as images are today (in terms of client requirements), there would be little reason to save everything one sees online.

Re:Video tag

[DevoidOfWindows]

And, for that, there is NetVideoHunter.

Re:Video tag

[maxume]

Or they feel like it leaves a high enough bar that Joe Everybody is going to spend his time coming back for more instead of watching stuff that he has already downloaded.

Re:Video tag

[bigngamer92]

If (user.can(see it on their computer)){ user.can(download it) }

Re:Video tag

[spud603]

Doesn't seem to work for hulu...

Re:Video tag

[Hurricane78]

That point is not completely correct. Correct is that the producers use it, because they imagine it would make it difficult. Incorrect is that it really is difficult.
Because in reality, every noob (and I mean has seen YouTube for the first time, does not know what the start menu is, kind of noob) does just enter "youtube video download" in Google, and gets dozens of different solutions, that are as easy as "click download, click run, start it, click 'download video', finito".

Re:Video tag

[Hurricane78]

They feel wrong. Go to YouTube, and look a bit trough the comments. There you see total noobs recommending total noob tools to other total noobs. Those tools may be primitive. Like installing an app for it. But they work well. Especially if you actually never really used your computer, like these people have.

It's just some companies selling expensive snake oil wannabe-DRM flash playing systems to stupid executive managers. That's all.

Re:Video tag

[maxume]

And what percentage of youtube users do you think even use the comment system?

Re:Video tag

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. Flash video is pretty trivial to download. Most sites that use Flash video actually use HTTP to download the videos, so they're very easy to rip. Even those that use Flash Media Server are pretty easy to rip as well - you just need slightly different software.

The only reason that anyone perceives Flash (or Silverlight) as being in any way protected is pure ignorance.

Re:Video tag

[civilizedINTENSITY]

you must be the same insightful anon coward, there can't be a rash of such suddenly appearing, can there?

Re:Video tag

[xaxa]

And what percentage of youtube users do you think even use the comment system?

What percentage of those users do you think know how to save an image (e.g. right click, save image)? Firefox 3.5 uses the same interface to save a video.

Re:Video tag

[maxume]

Even FLV that is loaded by an swf player object (the more paranoid will increasingly stream it rather than sending a file over raw http)? After all, we are talking about the fact that flash raises the bar on saving video files.

Re:Video tag

[jez9999]

There, fixed that for you. All I have to do to save a Flash video to my hard drive is play it. My browser will automatically save it to ~/.mozilla/firefox/Cache

I seriously doubt that live FMS-style (I use Red5) streams get saved to your hard drive in a handy dandy FLV file. You'll need to work a lot harder to rip them.

Re:Video tag

[WindShadow]

Given that there are scripts, at least in the free software world, which do this with major sites, it's not clear what you have in mind here. Video from most popular sites can be downloaded and saved, even transformed to other formats. But there is little need to do so, since the content remains online (usually).

None of this prevents use of DRM formats as well, although I doubt someone who wants their content to spread would use them. There's lots of room for everything to coexist.

I thought DRM was the issue

[fermion]

My understanding is that the reason that people use flash and silverlight for video is so that people cannot save, reuse, and redistribute the content. Even if these are not used for DRM consideration, flash is often a much smaller file than the other codecs.

I am unclear on how the video tag is going to make things better. It seems I can already play most codecs in my browser, using, for instance, quicktime. Alternatively I can download the file and play it trough VLC, an open source solution.Of course, as mentioned, the reason that video is played in browser is prevent the user from saving it and pirating it.

I know that 'cloud computing' requires that all file types be accessible though the browser so that the user never has control over any data, even their own, but i question the wisdom of this as a universal principle. Certainly most users do not have the technical expertise to control their own computing environment, but does this have to be a universal principle? Can't IE and Safari and Chrome be the browsers for the populous, while Mozilla is the browser for the people who know what they are doing. I am not saying the video tag is bad, just that if there is confusion over the use, perhaps it is legitimate confusion.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[blincoln]

My understanding is that the reason that people use flash and silverlight for video is so that people cannot save, reuse, and redistribute the content.

I've run across very few streamed videos that can't be downloaded. In the olden days I'd use something like WireShark or Network Monitor to get the URL of the content. Nowadays it's much easier with various Firefox extensions.
As far as I know, the reason most sites use Flash or whatnot is because they want the video to be streamable and start more or less instantly. In modern Western society, if you can't start watching the video immediately, how likely are you going to be to remember to watch it after it's downloaded 15-30 minutes (or more) later? The whole (business) idea is to keep peoples' attention, like with television. If they "switch channels", you've lost your advertising opportunity.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[Sephr]

First of all, "Flash" isn't a codec. If you are referring to H.264; in most tests, it is beaten by Theora in bitrate/quality.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

I've run across very few streamed videos that can't be downloaded.

No such thing. If it's streamed, they've written all of the bytes to you; you've downloaded it.

So the question becomes "how can I replay the video", and that's where we hit the stumbling block; it's not always an easy question to answer.

The more convoluted setups include encryption and well known protocols and such, but most of these have already been broken (especially Microsoft's, but others like streaming DRM'd media over RTSP have been as well). Some of these are as easy as dumping straight to a file, which most media players know how to play back. Other times, you have to peel away a couple of layers of protocol and encryption and then save the stream.

The simpler setups (like the ones you can often find with Flash-based players), they just stream the media to a file and play it as it's downloading and delete the stream later. In that case, it's just as easy as grabbing the copy from your browser's cache.

As with video, there are as many different setups as there are atoms in the known universe, but all of them operate on well understood principals, and none of them are unbeatable, some are just better than others at keeping users at bay. Until DRM and the related streaming protocols are so complex that it takes more time to break it than it does to just buy the media, it's useless, and hackers have proven time and again that they're up for the challenge.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[tepples]

If you are referring to H.264; in most tests, it is beaten by Theora in bitrate/quality.

What "most tests" are you referring to? The author of the story that you're most likely thinking of had to publish a correction to clarify that the original results were caused by ffmpeg defects that favored one codec over the other.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[Sephr]

No, I just mean most tests. Google search for various Theora vs H.264 comparisons. Many of them show Theora having higher quality for the same bitrate.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[asa]

Here are the only two real-world comparisons I know of. Both have Theora making a pretty good showing. Beating H264 in all cases? Not at all. Good enough to replace H263 and H264 at YouTube, absolutely.

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

http://people.xiph.org/~maikmerten/youtube/

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[JavaTHut]

"Flash" isn't a codec. If you are referring to H.264

Doesn't Flash use use On2 VP7 as its codec?

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[Simetrical]

My understanding is that the reason that people use flash and silverlight for video is so that people cannot save, reuse, and redistribute the content.

People use Flash because there's no easier and more widely-supported way to embed video into pages.

Even if these are not used for DRM consideration, flash is often a much smaller file than the other codecs.

Flash is not a codec. <video> can support any codec just as well as Flash can.

I can download the file and play it trough VLC, an open source solution.

People want to embed videos in a page, not just make them available for download. Compare how convenient PDF and HTML are: HTML is right there in your browser, integrated and customizable without having to use another app.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[asa]

The Flash Player plug-in contains a number of video decoders. In addition to the most recently added h.264, it's got Sorenson Spark (H.263) and On2's VP6. I think that Flash Player 6 was the first to support video and that was Sorenson Spark. Then in Player 8, I think it was, they added VP6. In player 9 they introduced h.264. They haven't removed support for the older codecs to provide backwards compatibility.

Re:I thought DRM was the issue

[civilizedINTENSITY]

seems backwards trying to say Theora is to H.260 as PDF is to HTMl, when the roles are pretty much reversed. Theora is good enough, while H.260 is better on paper. HTML is good enough, while PDF is better, especially if you want to go to paper ;-) I like to browser HTML, sure enough i do! But I want my text books and reference books in PDF, thank you very much.

View this in Firefox 3.5 for best results:

[Anonymous Coward]

<video>goatse</video>

Re:View this in Firefox 3.5 for best results:

[Sephr]

<img src="goatse"/>

Oh wait, I forgot, browsers don't have an AI that lets them block images/video/sound based on how offensive they might be to you.

Re:View this in Firefox 3.5 for best results:

[Sephr]

I also forgot to mention, but <video>goatse</video> would just display the text, "goatse".

Re:View this in Firefox 3.5 for best results:

[Baseclass]

<video>goatse</video>

goatse video?

<video>2girls1cup</video>

There, I fixed that for you.

Somebody help me on this

[Glonk]

Some random Mozilla Hacks (note the word Hacks) blogger posts some code that web developers can use to implement HTML5 video (which does not use javascript, contrary to the implications in this article and summary?) and also provide a fallback path for non-HTML5 Video browsers (IE, Opera, etc). Their particular method of providing the fallback code uses javascript to determine browser capability, and uses Flash if HTML5 Video is not there.

Why is this upsetting to anyone? The implication from the summary is this is a less "open" way to do it, but last I checked Javascript/ECMAScript is a standard that all browsers implement already.

I cannot fathom why anyone would be so upset by some blogger providing JS-implemented video fallback implementations.

Re:Somebody help me on this

[Destined Soul]

That's because this is slashdot, where few people actually read the linked stories before posting their thoughts on the summary.

Re:Somebody help me on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this person wants tags , , , , , , etc. (The last one made it halfway through microsoft marketing's standardization before the IE8 folks implemented it)

Wait, that's dumb? Yeah, I agree with everything you wrote. This Camen guy is a complete Kroc.

Re:Somebody help me on this

[Quantumstate]

It is cleaner and easier to use a method which just uses html to get an identical effect without needing javascript. If you compare the two methods I think you would agree. I don't see why there is such a big fuss though.

Re:Somebody help me on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this person wants tags <novideo>, <nocodec>, <nomonitor>, <nohtml5videobuthasflash>, <nohtml5video butprobablymaybe hasquicktimeontheirsystem sogivethatashot outsideofthebrowser whydontya>, <ohitswmv sojustgiveuptryingtoplaythis becauseyouarentusing IE8WHICHISAWESOME onWINDOWSSEVENTHEBESTEVAR>, etc.  (The last one made it halfway through microsoft marketing's standardization before the IE8 folks implemented it)

(spaces because of slashdot's lameness filter, trying again since 'plain old text' means 'html'. grr.  Then I couldn't reply, so this took a while to post.)

Wait, that's dumb?  Yeah, I agree with everything you wrote.  This Camen guy is a complete Kroc.

Re:Somebody help me on this

[Anonymous Coward]

It is much more effective if the system can fall back on older standards, kinda like how object and embed works.

Having to use JavaScript is a bad thing because people tend to disable it often because the browsers of yester-era ruined it by sucking with JavaScript security that led to things like NoScript.
Do i need to go on?
In saying that, even if a person had JavaScript disabled, and they had an older browser, it will still show an error.

Now that i think about it, it probably isn't like that if this person had to sit and write out code to detect a browser.
Why is this even happening?
Surely video should never show it's innerHTML unless the tag isn't understood? Just like Iframe, just like Object, just like Embed, etc.
I hope this isn't the case, because if it is, it is going against one of the fundamental rules of HTML: ignore that which you do not understand. (in reference to elements)

Re:Somebody help me on this

[Simetrical]

Some random Mozilla Hacks (note the word Hacks) blogger posts some code that web developers can use to implement HTML5 video (which does not use javascript, contrary to the implications in this article and summary?)

HTML5 video does provide a rich JavaScript API to allow programmatic manipulation of the video by script. This is, in fact, potentially a great advantage it has over Flash and other solutions. So it can use JavaScript, although it doesn't require it for basic functionality (e.g., "when the page loads, download and display a video with controls to allow the user to play and pause it").

Re:Somebody help me on this

[Simetrical]

Why is this even happening? Surely video should never show it's innerHTML unless the tag isn't understood? Just like Iframe, just like Object, just like Embed, etc.

This is exactly correct. The HTML 5 standard specifies that "Content may be provided inside the video element. User agents should not show this content to the user; it is intended for older Web browsers which do not support video, so that legacy video plugins can be tried, or to show text to the users of these older browser informing them of how to access the video contents." JavaScript is therefore not theoretically necessary for fallback to work.

However, if the browser supports <video> but not the specific codec used, I'm not aware of any way to arrange for fallback without JavaScript. This is the situation that, for instance, Wikimedia is in: it refuses to use H.264, only Theora, so it can't just use plain old <video> and rely on element-level fallback. Safari wouldn't work right in that case.

Plugins are Still the Answer

[phantomcircuit]

The video tag should be run by plugins, they would need to conform to a single standard interface. PLay/Stop/Pause/etc. The key would be having two mechanisms for display, a method which returns a pixmap (so that it would work with X Forwarding) and a version that was accelerated.

the PLay/Stop/Pause interface would be entirely part of the DOM.

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[Sephr]

That is what we have codecs for..

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[tepples]

That is what we have codecs for..

But then who provides implementations of codecs for every combination of CPU, operating system, and browser?

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[Sephr]

So plugins are always cross-platform now?! Plugins are programs for the OS which integrate with the browser. I think phantomcircuit and you are referring to (Firefox) add-ons, which are run by the browser and usually are cross-platform as they use XUL/XBL/JavaScript.

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[tepples]

So plugins are always cross-platform now?!

They have to be provided for each platform, or they won't come into wide use.

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[asa]

The video tag should be run by plugins,

The whole point of the video tag is that it is an HTML tag and not a plug-in solution. The plug-in solutions already exist today and web developers and browser vendors think that's sub-optimal.

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[phantomcircuit]

That is ignoring the basic problem though. There are many video formats. Does it make any sense that the browser only supports a single one as firefox 3.5 is doing?

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[Draek]

Yes. Every other format can work as a separate codec, but only one is needed as a baseline.

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[asa]

So plugins are always cross-platform now?!

They have to be provided for each platform, or they won't come into wide use.

Windows Media Player? Silverlight? QuickTime? If by "each platform" you mean, and the previous poster's "cross-platform" comment means what most people mean when they say cross-platform at slashdot -- Mac, Windows and Linux, then I think you're wrong.

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[asa]

That is ignoring the basic problem though. There are many video formats. Does it make any sense that the browser only supports a single one as firefox 3.5 is doing?

Firefox currently only supports one video decoder, Theora, and one audio decoder, Vorbis, but there's no reason it won't include additional decoders. Dirac is being talked about and there are others. Think about images on the Web. There are jpegs, gifs, and pngs. Gifs are going away and we're basically seeing jpegs and pngs. There are many image formats. Does it make sense that browsers are only focusing on 3?

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[tepples]

Windows Media Player? Silverlight? QuickTime?

Those three didn't catch on nearly to the same extent as FLV. I wonder why.

If by "each platform" you mean, and the previous poster's "cross-platform" comment means what most people mean when they say cross-platform at slashdot -- Mac, Windows and Linux, then I think you're wrong.

Linux != Linux on x86. And Opera for Wii includes Flash 7, which can play at least H.263 on YouTube.

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[phantomcircuit]

there are patents and royalty requirements on most of the video formats

Re:Plugins are Still the Answer

[civilizedINTENSITY]

don't forget SVG!

Everyone using Firefox 3.5, see this

[Anonymous Coward]

Demo of video and SVG support in Firefox 3.5. That's why video being built-in to HTML5 is important.

Re:Everyone using Firefox 3.5, see this

[Felix Da Rat]

So web developers can cause motion sickness?

Don't get me wrong, that is really impressive, and if it's easy to do, great. But who decided that making a video spin was a good idea?

Re:Everyone using Firefox 3.5, see this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much that spinning videos are "good", but more as a demo as to how you can manipulate video.

Just think several years into the future, you can have a pseudo 3D environment (think VRML, but better) in a browser that can have angled videos playing.
It is about being able to bend, twist and twirl videos in any way you want.
And being able to detect those positions for things like simple object detection led to an awesome demonstration that i can't find... (it was the guy waving iPhones around and it was placing dynamic content and scaling them)

Re:Everyone using Firefox 3.5, see this

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of the advertising ("rich media") applications.

Re:Everyone using Firefox 3.5, see this

[TheQuantumShift]

Looks good, but my min complaint against flash is still present. Absurd CPU usage. Maybe offload some work to open GL and the 3d accelerator and it'll be more attractive.

No it's not; quite the opposite, actually

[Nicolas MONNET]

Try using those HTLM5 features w/o JS:

• local storage
• DND
• Cross-document messaging
• Canvas tag

The key is Google/Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

If we can get Google to go along with Theora, we'd be all set.

Youtube is the only reason I have Flash. I avoid "Porntube" type sites because of the security vulnerabilities found in Flash.

Re:The key is Google/Youtube

[asa]

If we can get Google to go along with Theora, we'd be all set.

Google is going along with Theora. Chrome will (does in test builds) support Theora+Vorbis in Ogg.

Re:The key is Google/Youtube

[SanityInAnarchy]

Check out http://youtube.com/html5

I'm pretty sure that's vorbis/theora.

Re:The key is Google/Youtube

[koiransuklaa]

Chrome is a minor detail that will not turn this boat into one direction or the other. When the AC said 'Google' he was referring to Youtube supporting Theora.

Re:The key is Google/Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

No, i'm pretty sure it is H.264. Just check out the source and you will see the MP4.

Is this what you really want?

[westlake]

this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardize the web.

Innovation and standards often pull in opposite directions.

There are always cracks in the façade. Opportunities for the entrepreneur. The committee moves too damn slow.

I don't think the geek imagined the web evolving as it has - into communities like MySpace, Twitter, and so on.

It would be easy to imagine Windows media and gaming coalescing around portals like Windows Live! and Steam.

By the time the geek standardizes the hell out of the web the real action will have moved elsewhere.

 

Re:Is this what you really want?

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're going to wait for Flash Video to die?

Who's killing it, besides HTML 5?

And what the hell are you even getting at??

Re:Is this what you really want?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

The committee moves too slow, but open source tends to move organicly, sending tendrils out in all directions at once with 3 month cycles. Nothing moves as fast as open source. Its wild, but its *fast*. Many, if not most, of the tendrils don't root, so there is a burnout cost to the speed. It wouldn't be effecent if you tried to do it commercially that way, for sure.

I'd suggest that nobody really expected the web to evolve as it has, but communities are closer to what geeks expected than you seem to think. It was first a communication tool, helping to link together researchers (very much a community even before the web). It would even be fair to say that now, today, regular people are starting to use the web for the same purpose that we geeks were using it in the days of bulliten boards and dialup 2400 baud modems, i.e., community. Who was surprised, really, that email was the killer app? Then the instant messenger? Again, if you think geeks didn't see this coming, I suggest you don't know geeks, or you our history.

ActionScript Decoder Rings

[Anonymous Coward]

Given Adobe's love for all things ECMA, their video decoder is probably written in ActionScript.

If you can't stream, you can't...

[tepples]

You can probably guess that I personally am going to disable the HTML5 A/V elements and continue downloading video manually.

How do you "download" a live stream of a live event, such as a news conference or a sport competition? And how do you plan to deal with video providers who offer streaming for 0 USD or downloads for 20 USD, and no other video provider offers the title you want? If you switch the browser into "prompt to download", you get the first five seconds.

That aside, browser based audio/video should provide basic playback functionality for the user without javascript enabled.

Don't worry; it does.

Re:If you can't stream, you can't...

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you "download" a live stream of a live event, such as a news conference or a sport competition?

Currently VLC. One day, this will work...

ffmpeg -i http://stream_in_url/ stream_out_file.ogv

And how do you plan to deal with video providers who offer streaming for 0 USD or downloads for 20 USD, and no other video provider offers the title you want?

See above. There's not too much commercial "content" I care for and any that requires something like rtmpdump, I'm not going to bother with anyway.

If you switch the browser into "prompt to download", you get the first five seconds.

That's not really a browser problem, it's upto the provider to make clear what their terms are.

Don't worry; it does.

Who's worried? I already said I'd be disabling audio/video in the browser. If I'm worried about anything it's the prospect of having to maintain a firefox build without gstreamer -- hardly a major concern.

RTFA

[Chris Pimlott]

Good news, someone wrote up a letter pointing out the drawbacks... it's the last link in the summary.

Re:RTFA

[Glonk]

I understand why they don't agree with the practice, but this is hardly front-page Slashdot news. The summary is, if anything, very misleading. This has NOTHING to do with Mozilla's plans for HTML5 or web openness, it's everything to do with some nameless blogger disagreeing with another nameless blogger's implementation of video fallback.

This is non-news, to say the least.

When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[tepples]

But to allow that at reasonable conditions, the codec should be Free. The codec proposed for this purpose is Ogg Theora/Vorbis, an OSS codec build specifically trying not to use any patented technology.

Unfortunately, Theora still needs twice the bitrate as H.264 to deliver the same quality, even with the "Thusnelda" rewrite of the encoder. It's not like Vorbis, which surpassed MP3's rate-distortion curve early on. Using Theora for video to avoid H.264 patent problems is like using IMA ADPCM for audio to avoid MP3 patent problems. Google would probably stick to H.264 for YouTube because the bandwidth cost outweighs the royalty cost of having H.264 support in Chrome.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[d235j]

Unfortunately, Theora still needs twice the bitrate as H.264 to deliver the same quality, even with the "Thusnelda" rewrite of the encoder.

Not really. Thusnelda is noticeably better than H.263 (which is what YouTube used to use) and it's more like a 15% higher bitrate [and that's probably higher than necessary]/

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't the obvious solution be to use the video codecs on each platform. Windows, OS X and Linux all have the codecs available. Win 7 and possibly OS X have h264 built in. Ubuntu has a really easy to use installer for codecs (which will grab h264 if needed). There really is no reason not to use the facilities built into the platform.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[Daemonax]

Why is anyone worried about the quality of videos your going to watch in your browser? The vast majority of those videos are not going to be interesting enough to want to see them in full HD glory. I would rather see Ogg because it's a free standard, and if we lose quality in order to save bandwidth I don't really care when it comes to the type of videos that I watch via my browser.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[asa]

"Unfortunately, Theora still needs twice the bitrate as H.264 to deliver the same quality, even with the "Thusnelda" rewrite of the encoder."

Except that statement is provably false if by no other facts than that neither Theora nor H264 quality scales linearly with bitrate.

Beyond the obvious fail in your claim, you're also just wrong.

See this comparison and this comparison to see how Theora compares to the most popular real-world implementations of H264 on the Web.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention even the cheapest bottom of the line GPUs nowadays comes with H.264 hardware acceleration by default. I paid a grand total of $50 for my HD4650 and it gives me H.264, DivX, and WMV hardware acceleration out of the box. Does Theora even have hardware acceleration for the big three (AMD Intel Nvidia) GPUs yet? With the rise of Netbooks/Nettops and green computing hardware decoding of video is obviously where the market is headed.

Even with my nice AMD dual the experience is simply more pleasant to decode H.264 1080p on the GPU than the CPU, not to mention the modern GPUs use less juice and generate less heat than the CPUs, which when the average temp in AR this week has been 100f in the shade, that matters. So if the Theora foundation doesn't get out hardware acceleration for the big three and get the GPU manufacturers to bundle it like they do the current big three codecs (H.264, DivX, WMV) then I can see Theora ending up a non starter. It also has to be efficient on the bandwidth with so many ISPs looking at caps. From what I've seen H.264 gets better size per bitrate than Theora.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[nxtw]

Why is anyone worried about the quality of videos your going to watch in your browser? The vast majority of those videos are not going to be interesting enough to want to see them in full HD glory.

That's a bullshit assumption. I watch streaming video on my TV from sites like Hulu and YouTube, and the higher quality video, the better.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[asa]

Unfortunately, Theora still needs twice the bitrate as H.264 to deliver the same quality, even with the "Thusnelda" rewrite of the encoder.

That's not my experience. See here and here for some real-world comparisons. H264 can be better than Theora -- though not majorly so, but in the real world at sites like YouTube, H264 doesn't stand out from Theora for most cases.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[asa]

Why is anyone worried about the quality of videos your going to watch in your browser? The vast majority of those videos are not going to be interesting enough to want to see them in full HD glory.

That's a bullshit assumption. I watch streaming video on my TV from sites like Hulu and YouTube, and the higher quality video, the better.

Yes. You are part of a small but growing minority but even so I expect that Theora+Vorbis high-def content at comparable to H264+AAC bitrates would be satisfactory. Check for yourself here if you've got a Firefox 3.5 pre-release.

For the overwhelming majority of Web video, and for the overwhelming majority of Web users, though, Theora+Vorbis won't just be satisfactory, but will be virtually indistinguishable from what users are already quite comfortable with.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[asa]

Does Theora even have hardware acceleration for the big three (AMD Intel Nvidia) GPUs yet?

Not yet, but there's no reason that they couldn't or wouldn't if there was good reason (like an increase in the use of Theora on the Web.)

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[nxtw]

Unless Theora is close to H.264 or even VC-1, I don't think it's acceptable. I don't want to use mediocre technlogy just because it is open source and patent-unencumbered.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[SanityInAnarchy]

The problem is, how will you obtain the rights needed to distribute the proprietary versions with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and every major browser?

Because if they don't come with the browser, we're going to have the same problems the old-school QuickTime/WMV/etc had.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[Hurricane78]

Not only that, bun in autumn, we will have smartbooks which run for 10 hours, use 1-2 watts total, and decode full-hd H.264 (and other, but no Theora) videos with hardware acceleration. All on a platform that is pretty much a smartphone CPU with an additional mobil GPU (from nVidia). For $100-$200.

In the long run, Theora will be completely irrelevant, and H.264 will be the new GIF format, or be freed.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[TheTurtlesMoves]

The problem is that the FIREFOX users has to pay the royalties. And soon content providers also have to pay extra fees as well.

For Firefox to have the h.264 "legal" it would cost at least 5Million per year.

But the real rub is the contract that *must* be signed for the license. Not only would it be totally incompatible with open source, free, and freedom. But would require all sorts of extra "controls" to be added to all playback implementations. Like dvd zones and other such rubbish.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[civilizedINTENSITY]

all other things being equal, the higher the quality the better, sure
of course things are never gonna be "all equal", there is a give and take
I watch Hulu and YouTube, sure
I'd rather see smaller files, than better quality
i've seen 700MB xvid versions of movies (that would fit on a CD!) that are plenty good enough even when watched on my new HD LCD
all i'm saying is that once its good enough, sometimes there are other factors to optimize

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[civilizedINTENSITY]

But would you be willing to use technology that is almost indistinguishable, even if its open source? Or does it need to have that elite banner flying with a brand name for it to be considered? Are you willing to use mediocre, poorly implemented technology just because it is commercial, closed software?

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[koiransuklaa]

In the long run, Theora will be completely irrelevant, and H.264 will be the new GIF format, or be freed.

I think you will find out that the world has changed in fifteen years. Many people, consumers and suits, have learned a lot since GIF and are interested (or at least aware) of these issues.

In the long run closed formats are only better for the guys who own the patents. There are 6 billion people and thousands of corporations that would be better off with open formats.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[nxtw]

The situation you describe isn't what's actually happening. Theora isn't close to H.264.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[nxtw]

By using H.264 instead of MPEG-4 Part 2, you can have equivalent quality with smaller files.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[fulldecent]

See this comparison and this comparison to see how Theora compares to the most popular real-world implementations of H264 on the Web.

WP:NPOV violation

From http://xiph.org/:
Our purpose is to support and develop free, open protocols and software to serve the public, developer and business markets.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[civilizedINTENSITY]

You mean to say, "I won't believe it could be."

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Again with the "but its better by 3%", my point is that once it looks fine, and it fits on a CD, the question of quality and size are done. What's next? You shouldn't believe that size and quality are all that matters. What about computational complexity? What about availability of source?

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[nxtw]

Again with the "but its better by 3%", my point is that once it looks fine, and it fits on a C D, the question of quality and size are done.

Who uses CDs for video distribution?

"looks fine" is entirely subjective, but in subjective tests, well-encoded H.264 looks better than well-encoded MPEG-4 Part 2. Why settle for "looks fine" when we can get "indistinguishable from the source" at the same file size? If everyone settled for "good enough" a decade ago, we'd be stuck with 128 kbit MP3s and MPEG-2.

You shouldn't believe that size and quality are all that matters. What about computational complexity?

Not a problem - this is 2009. It's worth spending more time encoding if there's a significant benefit in file sizes and/or picture quality.

What about availability of source?

What are you talking about?

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[nxtw]

You mean to say, "I won't believe it could be."

Bullshit. There is no evidence showing that Theora is better than H.264.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[civilizedINTENSITY]

And if presented with evidence, I humbly suggest you'd still say "bullshit" regardless of the merit of the evidence. This is the definition of bias.

Re:When bandwidth costs more than MPEG royalties

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I'm afraid that we can't establish sufficient common context to make further communication meaningful. It was interesting, though.

1)In terms of using CDs for video distribution, they once where used (SVCD, etc...), and this is a format I would like to see brought back. I would certainly buy them :-)

128 kbit MP3s are an excellent example, thank you. I should have used them (and SVCDs) in my first post.

In subjective testing, your results are at odds with my results and results I've seen posted. Therefor I just don't believe your results. Thats the thing about subjective tests, they aren't very objective.

"It's worth spending more time encoding if there's a significant benefit in file sizes and/or picture quality."

Yes, true. But its also true that its a waste of time if the benefit moves from "good enough" to "better than good enough". Resources spendt pass good enough should be spendt in areas "not yet good enough". You seem to be implying, "It can never be good enough." Someday I expect you'll be using 16 x 256 bit octo-core, ultra-threading cpus to check your email, proclaiming, "Its not fast enough! I need more cores to read email!"

And finally: You don't know about Open Source?

Sorry, no plug-in for you

[tepples]

If the tag supports the ability to specify where the codec can be acquired from

The pluginspage attribute of the <embed> element already supports this, as does the classid attribute of the <object> element. But whenever I try to follow the link, all I get is "Sorry, we don't make a plug-in for your combination of CPU, operating system, and web browser."

Why install Flash and not Theora

[tepples]

So your corporate locked-down machine came with Flash installed on it? Or does someone with an admin password come and install or update it for you as required and permitted by your company's acceptable use policy?

Both.

If the latter, why not install the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codec mentioned above instead?

Because as of June 2009, watching Theora video is not necessary for doing our jobs. An SWF player, on the other hand, is necessary because some of the manufacturers whose products we resell use SWF for their web sites.

H.264 > H.263

[tepples]

Thusnelda is noticeably better than H.263 (which is what YouTube used to use)

Exactly: used to use. Since then, YouTube serves HQ and HD videos in H.264.

Windows N versions; Linux other than x86

[tepples]

Wouldn't the obvious solution be to use the video codecs on each platform. Windows, OS X and Linux all have the codecs available.

Windows XP N and Windows Vista N don't come with codecs. And how are you sure that Linux has all the codecs available even on CPU architectures other than x86, such as those used in PowerPC-based set-top boxes or ARM-based handhelds?

Ubuntu has a really easy to use installer for codecs (which will grab h264 if needed).

But if the operator of a web site resides in the United States, and he recommends the use of software whose use in the United States would infringe a patent, MPEG-LA could make a case against him for contributory patent infringement. As for relevance of the United States in the first place: Google, Mozilla, Slashdot, and I are all based in the United States.

Re:Windows N versions; Linux other than x86

[Anonymous Coward]

And how are you sure that Linux has all the codecs available even on CPU architectures other than x86, such as those used in PowerPC-based set-top boxes or ARM-based handhelds?

According to gentoo-portage both ffmpeg and gstreamer work on tons of platforms, including arm and power pc. On portables you'd usually expect the software to undergo a certain amount of customisation to suit the hardware. Video decoding is frequently moved to a dedicated low-power chip on these architectures.

But if the operator of a web site resides in the United States, and he recommends the use of software whose use in the United States would infringe a patent, MPEG-LA could make a case against him for contributory patent infringement.

Firstly, I should clarify that although h264 is my fist choice, I do not think it should be used exclusively. The point of using the platform's built in codec support would be to allow the borwser to play everything that gets thrown at it (moreso on Linux than say Windows).

Secondly, I doubt that supplying a video and assuming that the user will invest in software to play it legally would be illegal. There are a lot of music sites that sell mp3s (also a patented format), none of them check that the user has a patent license.

Re:Windows N versions; Linux other than x86

[Hurricane78]

As far as I see it, ffmpeg is available for alpha, amd64, hppa, ia64, ppc, ppc64, sparc and x86:
http://packages.gentoo.org/package/media-video/ffmpeg
Which means it also runs on MacOSX.
It even runs on the iPhone, which has a ARM 1176 CPU:
http://www.wickedpsyched.com/ffmpeg
And of course there is ffdshow for Windows.

Is that enough? ^^

Re:Windows N versions; Linux other than x86

[tepples]

ffmpeg is available for [lots of architectures]

But it comes without a patent license. As far as I know, the only well-known video codecs it comes with that aren't patent-encumbered in the United States (home of Mozilla and Google) are motion JPEG (patent expired) and Theora (patent freely licensed by On2).

Re:Windows N versions; Linux other than x86

[solafide]

I've run it on OS X. mplayer works on os x too.

Really...

[PortHaven]

"We're on the verge of a serious evolution on the web. Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology"

What you're saying is HTML is going to add the ability to do what people have been doing for 5 yrs with Flash.

I am sorry if I have serious doubts. I am still waiting for CSS/DOM to be fully and uniformly supported across all browsers. And fear that HTML 5 spec has the potential to become a nightmare if it suffers from a lack of uniformity.

Open Source is NOT the holy grail. It's a good thing. But only if it's done to a uniformity of standards.

Re:Really...

[asa]

What you're saying is HTML is going to add the ability to do what people have been doing for 5 yrs with Flash.

No, what we're saying is that video is going to become a first-class Web citizen that can interact with the rest of Web content in ways that Web developers want. Flash's video is locked inside the plug-in prison and cannot be well integrated with non-flash (real Web) content. Bringing video (and audio) to HTML means that real Web content like other HTML, JavaScript, SVG, CSS, etc. can interact with video and improve on what people have been doing for 5 years with Flash.

Re:Really...

[hkmwbz]

Are you completely nuts?

A guy working for Opera at the time started HTML5. Mozilla has been heavily involved, as has Google. If anything, Apple has been stalling because they didn't want patent-free video competing with QuickTime!

Your "standard" is not free. And who cares if Apple is crippled because they chose to push patent-infested nonsense?

Which specific search result are you looking at?

[tepples]

Google search for various Theora vs H.264 comparisons.

Because you provide no URLs, I'll assume that you mean the top ten Google results from http://www.google.com/search?q=various+Theora+vs+H.264+comparisons, as viewed in the United States. One of the results states: "the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version". Another implies that Theora doesn't scale to high resolutions: "Theora does have a major weakness with regards to HD video: the maximum motion vector length is only 16 pixels." Another result implied that Google would rather pay the royalties than the bandwidth.

Misinterpretation

[93 Escort Wagon]

and actually advocates the use of JavaScript to implement it.

The writer of that linked piece makes it pretty obvious his goal is for the video to work for everyone - and the javascript code is therefore used to basically find a method the current user's browser can support without it being obvious to the user (e.g. not forcing the end user to download the video and view it in a separate player, which the OSNews letter seems to want to push on the user).

In other words, he's thinking about the user's experience first.

The author of the submitted story, on the other hand - as with the one from a few days ago that lamented Chrome's lack of purity regarding HTML5 video support - is more interested in Ogg zealotry. That's fine, if it floats your boat - but let's not dance around and obfuscate this. Make it very clear you want the Ogg format used - and ONLY the Ogg format used. Then the rest of the world (outside of Slashdot) can choose to continue ignoring you, just like it's been doing for the past few years.
 

Re:Misinterpretation

[Kroc]

A number of inaccuracies here. No, the OSNews article does not want people to download the video instead. It merely summaries my letter, which asks that Mozilla do not advocate JavaScript to do video fallbacks, but instead use my code (Video for Everybody) that does the same thing even better and without any JavaScript. I'm thinking of the user's experience first by creating a solution that doesn't require JavaScript.

Re:Misinterpretation

[Simetrical]

No, the OSNews article does not want people to download the video instead. It merely summaries my letter, which asks that Mozilla do not advocate JavaScript to do video fallbacks, but instead use my code (Video for Everybody) that does the same thing even better and without any JavaScript.

What if I don't want to encode video in proprietary H.264 format? What happens if a browser (I don't know, IE9?) ships with support for <video>, but doesn't support either Theora or H.264, only some third format? Does your solution break in those cases?

Re:Misinterpretation

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not Kroc, but a quick glance at the code and even the most minor knowledge of HTML make it clear this is not the case. The <video> tag lists multiple possible sources for the same video along with the type of each source. If all (well, both in this example) of those fail, any sane browser will use the fallbacks.

If you do not want to use H.264 then, (1) pragmatically, your video is not for everybody and (2) you might be able to find a Ogg Theora player implemented in Flash. Throwing a Theora file at video player plugins is probably a waste of time (it would work on my computer and most other Linux computers...).

Re:Which specific search result are you looking at

[asa]

One of the results states: "the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version".

Actually, that's not "one of the results." That's a blog post I made where I offered my personal opinion after viewing the comparison tests. If you're going to quote my, please be a bit more honest about it. Thanks.

Re:H.264 H.263

[asa]

tepples, you claimed that H.264 requires twice the bitrate to achieve the same quality. d235j responded that it only took15% more bandwidth to achieve the same quality and you failed to respond to that. Also, for the last several years h.263 was "good enough" for billions of video views from hundreds of millions of users. Theora is considerably better than h.263 and very close to h.264. Your claim that it requires twice the bandwidth to math h.264 just doesn't hold water with the overwhelming majority of video content online today. For real-world online video content, both standard and high-def, Theora holds its own against H264. It might not be better, but at comparable bitrates, I'd wager you couldn't find more than 2% of the Web population who can appreciate the differences. Oh, and Theora is getting better with every passing day AND in my experience it beats H264 in decoding CPU usage.

Unequal standards

[Anonymous Coward]

These days, flash is basically a VM for JS plus a bunch of drawing and playback APIs. Why would you demand that firefox does things without JS that flash does with JS? That simply makes no sense.

Video in Firefox works with absolutely zero JS. If you want to create fancy dancing interactive controls, yes you'll need JS, but basic playback doesn't require it... Meanwhile flash needs actionscript3 to do anything at all.

Re:Unequal standards

[civilizedINTENSITY]

astute observation. if you weren't anonymous i bet you'd be +3 insightful by now, and heading on up

fallback is broken, DONTFEELLIKEFIXING

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, MozHacks included a link to a non-Javascript method after the article. To learn how to implement HTML5, webcoders should read the HTML5 spec anyway, not some semiofficial blog by someone at Mozilla that may not even be an HTML5 expert.

TRWTF is
* that video fallback is broken in Firefox and
* Mozilla's dismissive handling of the issue:
#487398 <object>-element within <video>-element is not ignored is about fallback content being played even when the surrounding <video> has loaded. In other words, when you wrap an OGG object into an OGG video, the object starts playing in the background and you hear its sound. Mozilla inexplicably marked this RESOLVED INVALID after Anne commented that the HTML5 spec is a bit loose on what is required at that point. Not rendering fallback content when the wrapper can be rendered isn't strictly enforced by the spec, more likely by oversight than choice. It only says

User agents should not show this content to the user; it is intended for older Web browsers which do not support video, so that legacy video plugins can be tried, or to show text to the users of these older browser informing them of how to access the video contents. (HTML5 spec draft)

So apparently "should not show" can be interpreted as "but may play the audio if they feel like it", and if something can be interpreted as conformant with a loose reading of a spec that makes it "not a bug" for Mozilla.

I will still use the standard method of scriptless fallback chains, because I value accessibility and I respect people's choice to disable javascript. Please do HTML5 a favor and bug Mozilla about acknowledging a bug as a bug and debugging it.

Re:fallback is broken, DONTFEELLIKEFIXING

[Anonymous Coward]

(replying to self)
I wonder if that's why Camen's code doesn't include any fallback for OGG? Linux users won't like that. An OGG object could at least be included by, erm, Javascript until Mozilla fixes that bug.

And a Cortado object or applet. Cortado is robust, it plays OGG video flawlessly, and for being Java it has an OK UI and is even fast. Wikimedia and metavid.org use Cortado. Something like this:

<!-- Java Cortado (OGG): object -->
    <object classid="java:com.fluendo.player.Cortado.class" codetype="application/x-java-applet" archive="/player/cortado.jar" width="..." height="...">
        <param name="url" value="http://path/to/video.ogv" />
        <param name="seekable" value="true" />
<!-- Java Cortado (OGG): applet for very old browsers (IE<5), unsupported in html5) -->
            <applet width="..." height="..." archive="/players/cortado.jar" code="com.fluendo.player.Cortado.class">
                <param name="url" value="http://path/to/video.ogg" />
                <param name="seekable" value="true" />
                    <!-- more fallbacks go here.... -->
        </applet>
    </object>

Also note that the only video-enabled version of Opera, the old 9.63 video build, doesn't play the <video> because it doesn't understand <source>. But Opera isn't too keen on supporting HTML5 anyway. They were the forerunners once but now they have other plans.

Safari's video player has no controls, so there should also be some custom controls (Javascript only :/ ):

    <div id="controls1" style="display:none;">
          <button onclick="$('playerwrapper1').currentTime-=5;"><img src="/player/rew.png" alt="&lt;&lt;" /></button>
          <button onclick="p=$('playerwrapper1'); p.pause(); p.currentTime=p.startTime||0;"><img src="/player/stop.png" alt="&#x25a0;" /></button>
          <button id="controls1_play" onclick="$('playerwrapper1').play();"><img src="/player/play.png" alt="&#x25ba;" /></button>
          <button id="controls1_pause" onclick="$('playerwrapper1').pause();"><img src="/player/pause.png" alt="||" /></button>
          <button onclick="$('playerwrapper1').currentTime+=5;"><img src="/player/fwd.png" alt="&gt;&gt;" /></button>
          <input id="controls1_slider" type="range" min="0" max="1800" value="0" style="width:500px;" onchange="$('playerwrapper1').currentTime=this.value;" />
    </div>
    <script> //TODO do this only when Safari detected:
            $('controls1').show(); // prototype.js syntax
    </script>

Code is tested on latest Firefox, Safari, Chromium and on IE8.

Re:fallback is broken, DONTFEELLIKEFIXING

[Anonymous Coward]

...plus some script to update the controls:

            if (player = $('player1')) {
                if (!player.currentSrc){
                    $('controls1').hide();
                } else {
                    $('controls1').show();
                    slider = $('controls1_slider');
                    slider.min = player.startTime;
                    slider.max = player.duration;
                    if (Math.abs(slider.value-player.currentTime)>=0.1){
                        slider.value = Math.round(player.currentTime*10)/10; // epsilon and rounding to avoid jitter and for text input fallback
                    }
                    if (player.paused) {
                        $('controls1_play').show();
                        $('controls1_pause').hide();
                    } else {
                        $('controls1_play').hide();
                        $('controls1_pause').show();
                    }
                }
            }

So, is it really theora only?

[Ilgaz]

When I decided to try video element with Safari 4, it failed miserably because I forgot to install Xiph plugins this time. It is what the ordinary user will live and trust me, they would have no clue/care what Xiph plugins are. I really don't know about Windows land although I believe there must be some windows media framework codecs like quicktime one.

The reason of rejection of Quicktime, Real, WMV was basic. They were huge compared to Flash and in case of Windows Media, the vendor company had childish policy of not supporting other operating systems rather than theirs. In fact, with todays Intel Macs, there is no official "full feature" windows media player. Quicktime wmedia codecs aren't enough especially if they can't do DRM.

I would say "Go talk with Apple and let them tip Quicktime for your codec pack" but thanks to lamer virus writers abusing the scheme, Quicktime doesn't do it anymore and users are all instructed to "stay away from manual codec installations".

Flash has H264, something years ahead of VP3 (Theora) and supported down to cell phones, even Nokia S40 dumb ones. I think their "revolution" will fail miserably and this time, Apple and Microsoft or the "evil media empire" won't be easily blamed.

If video element can't do H264 because of political reasons, I can really say it is failed even before starting. They reference Youtube demo HTML5 video element, well Google has money to spare, bandwidth to spare, billions of dollars to spare. They can even offer "Cinepak" and it wouldn't make a change. Will they reject IE/Flash users on Youtube telling them to install some open source browser? That is what matters.

Re:Which specific search result are you looking at

[Bigjeff5]

I dunno, it looks like the #3 result on the google search to me, and the quote looks like a direct quote from the blog.

Also, through the entire blog you say h.264 is superior to theora after performing your own subjective tests.

I'm not sure what is dishonest about the quote. It's a completely accurate and relevant statement, since the GP was not referencing any specific test and only said "most tests", your own non-scientific test is probably exactly the type of test the GP was talking about. The GP also said these tests show Theora as superior, and they do not. Everything I have seen shows Theora at slightly lower quality and less efficient compression for the same bitrate.

It is encouraging that it is getting close though.

Re:H.264 H.263

[Anonymous Coward]

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/update-on-open-video-quality/

Bandwidth==cost

[benwaggoner]

It's not just about quality, it's about efficiency.

Assuming a threshold for "good enough" quality and buffering time, a less efficient codec means:

Users need 2x the bandwidth to have adequate buffering time

Bandwidth costs are 2x higher.

So, there can be a real impact in terms of reduced audience and increased costs.

Also, comparing Theora with H.264, I think 2x may actually be understating the diffrence.

I made these samples, comparing to Xiph's examples. As you can see, x264 was able to deliver quite a good experience with better per pixel quality, at 640x360 at the bitrate Theora struggled at 400x224 with.

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare

Re:H.264 H.263

[benwaggoner]

Theora is over a decade old; it definately can beat H.264 in software decoding.

But if you didn't see this:

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare

As for "if it was good enough in the past..." rule, most web video gets reecoded every 18-24 months to take advantage of more efficient codecs to improve qulaity or reduce bitrates. For real businesses counting.

I recommend people don't focus on YouTube too much as an example of the web video industry. It's very much an anomly in both business model and particualr being subsidized by Google at such a sceale and getting access to Google's very cheap bandwidth. Also, Most YouTube clips aren't watched even a dozen time, so the cost of encoding time can be bigger than the cost of delivering the bits, so they don't tune their encodes for maximum efficiency, but for rapid transcoding.

YouTube does plenty of things that wouldn't make sense for anyone else. They're not really an example of much beyond YouTube.

Typical "Open" software advocacy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is typical of what happens in the so-called "open" software movement, where rather than actually pushing for things to be open, they instead want to pick a winner who isn't actually winning in the marketplace.

So just like they are making the EU push Firefox on all Windows users, and tried forcing Real Player and Quicktime in the EU on all Windows users, so too they now want to get everyone to stop using Flash and instead use JavaScript.

Now, I'm not Flash's biggest fan either... but it's not like JavaScript is going to be better. If I had to trust Mozilla or Adobe... I'll pick Adobe any day of the week.

I am a genius

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously.

javascript to autodetect, and put in a video tag or flash player.
noscript tag to provide links to each, or something.

It's not the end of the world

Re:Which specific search result are you looking at

[maxume]

"One of the top ten Google results" seems like the reasonable interpretation of the "One of the results" statement in GP comment (versus "One of the video comparison results").

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

[sjames]

I tried a test with the audio tag today in Firefox 3.5b4. I pointed it at an icecast server with an ogg stream. It wants to load the entire "file" before it will play. Naturally, that won't work for an endless stream. Secondly, if the stream has an intro, the tag plays the intro and then stops.

If you're going to support audio and video as web tags, is a streaming source REALLY that unexpected? Considering that the ogg/vorbis libraries are designed around streaming (even when reading from a file), it would seem OBVIOUS that the browser should stream the source rather than download and then play. It would also seem reasonable to support concatenated ogg streams. VLC has no problems at all with the same stream.

Give up already.

[Anonymous Coward]

You got served brother.

Re:Which specific search result are you looking at

[civilizedINTENSITY]

from my experience, at the same bitrates, Theora is somewhat sharper. you see detail that H.264 fuzzes out.

Javascript maybe bad

[sdiz]

Javascript maybe bad, but the blogger's so called solution is even worse.

Mozilla meet Videolan

[TheKidYo]

Dear Mozilla.org,

I would like to introduce you to my good friend videolan.org who may have some people who can help you with your open source video project.

Yours truly,
Another Frustrated Web Developer

Re:H.264 H.263

[Anonymous Coward]

-> "Also, for the last several years h.263 was "good enough" "

What? was there any serious option besides Flash a two years ago? year ago? six months ago? give me a break. It was not good enough, it was what could be had.

If you go to the trouble to go to a new whole new format and your fixed costs are mostly bandwidth and the quality is better, H.264 makes all the sense. Even 10% in youtube scale is a lot of money.