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Browser Vendors Force W3C To Scrap HTML 5 Codecs
snydeq writes "Major browser vendors have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, forcing the W3C to drop audio and video codecs from HTML 5, the forthcoming W3C spec that has been viewed as a threat to Flash, Silverlight, and similar technologies. 'After an inordinate amount of discussions on the situation, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no suitable codec that all vendors are willing to implement and ship,' HTML 5 editor Ian Hickson wrote to the whatwg mailing list. Apple, for its part, won't support Ogg Theora in QuickTime, expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free. Opera and Mozilla oppose using H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues. Google has similar reservations, despite already using H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome. Microsoft has made no commitment to support <video>."
Apple also doesn't want to support anything doesn't have off-the-shelf hardware acceleration. Until Apple can buy chips to decode Theora that will work in the iPhone, Theora is a no go for them.
They don't know who to pay.
And Apple supports a different one in Safari 4. IE supports neither so the W3C might as well dictate unicorn farts since HTML5 won't be supported on most of the desktops in the world.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
This is essentially what is happening. FF3.5 shipped with support for Theora.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You can still make use of the tag in a cross platform way. Video For Everybody Is a simple set of code that uses the video tag with only two input files - an ogg and an mp4 - and lets the tag work for, well, everyone. IE6? Check. Safari? Check. iPhone? Yep.
It falls back to whatever method works for playback - including using Flash to play the h.264 if it needs to.
It's pretty funny to see so many people bitching about Apple not supporting ogg when Microsoft ignores the tag altogether. Everyone, start supporting the video tag today as widespread use is the only way to get big companies to fully adopt it - perhaps that will motivate Apple to someday support ogg.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> The W3C needs to ignore everyone and push forward with Ogg support in the spec
As much as I'd like Ogg Theora support all around, doing what you propose just leads to a useless spec (useless because implementors don't actually follow it, so you can't rely on using it).
> work with Nvidia and ATI and Intel, etc. to get h/w support for Ogg.
The issue is hardware support in the form of ASICs for decoding theora; none of the companies you mentioned are relevant to that. The hardware issue is on cell phones and the like, not desktops, in case you missed that.
The problem might be worked around somewhat by using DSPs and software decoding optimized for those DSPs, but that's not quite clear.
> my iRiver H10 mp3 player had Ogg support
Ogg Vorbis, not Ogg Theora. There's a huge difference in terms of computational complexity.
You seem to be somewhat confused about what Ogg is. It's just a container format. For a real life analogy, think shipping containers. They come in a small number of shapes and sizes, but each one can contain anything from lots of barbie dolls to lots of sewing needles to a single chunk of industrial machinery. Just because you have someone (say a toy store) who knows how to open a container and then sell the barbie dolls they find therein doesn't mean that person will be able to to open that same container and then make effective use of the industrial machinery or sewing needles inside. The situation with container formats and codecs is quite similar.
You do know that almost everyone without an iPhone can still access the web in much the sme ways as people with an iPhone.....right?? They use a web browser, of which there are many. One of the most popular being Opera Mini.
Normal people worry me!
Except it isn't just Apple blocking it. Nokia also sided against Ogg Theora, but then I guess that wouldn't be sensationalist enough for the /. crowd.
Neither is h.264 Apple's codec. apart from patents apples only other contribution was to give the MPEG group the MOV container for use as the MP4 container file format.
Opera mini isn't a web browser; it's a java-based image viewer displaying pre-rendered content from opera's caching proxies. It's designed for phones that can't handle a real web browser. Are you sure you want video with that?
If you look at actual mobile web usage, iPhone/iPod touch is at 64%. Nobody else comes close, though Android (also webkit) will likely see an increased presence in the future.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Ignoring the tremendous improvements in the Thusnelda branch, if YouTube suddenly switched from severe H.26whatever overcompression to stock Theora with optimal settings (and everyone had libtheora and HTML 5 browsers), no one would notice the difference.
Untrue. Xiph has made heroic progress with Theora, but it's still a decade-old codec design and bitstream, and it's hard to imagine it catching up with xvid, let alone a good H.264 implementation.
YouTube certainly has quality issues, but things can be bad in more than one way at a time. There's nothing that less efficient codec would help them with. Note their top bitrate is 1280x720p30 at 2 Mbps.
Some samples compared Xiph's latest demo clips, with the same source encoded with VC-1 and x264 are here:
http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare
x264 can do 640x352 with higher per pixel-quality than Theora can do at 400x224 at the same bitrate.
My video compression blog
There are really only two significant video formats today for web streaming: Mpeg4/H.264 with MP3 or AAC audio is technically superior; Ogg/Theora with Vorbis audio is freer.
Ogg use on the internet is a rounding error at best; RealMedia still gets more use (very popular in internet cafes in China for some reason).
The three primary media formats/codecs are MPEG-4 + H.264 (QuickTime, plus Flash and soon Silverlight 3 via progressive download), RTMPe + H.264 (Flash uses MPEG-4 files but a propritary protocol), and Windows Media + VC-1. Move Networks + VP7 (ala ABC.com) also pulls in million of eyeball/hours a month, certainly more than Ogg at this point.
I'd say Ogg is #5 at best today. #6 if you count torrents and hence MPEG-4 part 2.
As for Microsoft support, that's becoming pretty codec neutral. Silverlight 3 (currently in beta) supports both H.264 and has a Raw AV pipeline allowing arbitrary codecs in managed code to be added to any Silverlight player. So adding Theora/Vorbis or any other codec, format, and protocol can be done inside the Silverlight sandbox by any third party.
My video compression blog
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
No, it is not. There has been no official statement from the YouTube team saying that. There's been one off-the-cuff statement to that effect by Chris DiBona, who is the open-source program manager at Google and does not work with YouTube (AFAICT). Subsequent requests for clarification failed to elicit any official statement. Peter Kasting of the Chrome team stated:
This is a quote from an actual Google employee, who incidentally happens to work on their browser and quite possibly knows their exact reasons for supporting both Theora and H.264.
Could people please stop spreading the misinformation that Google/YouTube believes that they can't use Theora because of its bitrate? It's completely unsubstantiated. Period.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Valid XML, all the time. Require that the tags balance, as in XHTML. This will make the document tree well-defined, which, at the moment, it is not. So all software that works on the DOM will behave consistently.
You're wrong. The document tree is well-defined in HTML 5. You don't need XML, you just need to follow the HTML spec. Of course, we can't force people to follow the spec, and the Web is currently full of non-conforming pages that include half-assed attempts at using bits and pieces of XHTML mixed with HTML. XHTML doesn't make anything better.
Errors put the browser in "dumb rendering" mode. Rather than a "best effort" approach, browsers should, upon detecting a serious error in the input, drop to "dumb mode" - default font, default colors, etc., after displaying an error message. Much of the incompatibility between browsers comes from inconsistent handling of bad HTML. So there should be a penalty, but not a fatal one, for bad code.
You're wrong. If your browser does this, users will use some other browser (regardless of whether it conforms to the HTML5 spec or not, because users don't care about that). You're right that broken code is a problem, but HTML5 addresses this by more clearly defining how broken code should be handled, so that all browsers can try to render even bad code in a consistent and compatible way.
No more upper code pages. The only valid character sets should be Unicode, or ASCII with HTML escapes. Chars above 127 in ASCII mode are to be rendered as a black dot or square. No more "Latin-1", or the pre-Unicode encodings of Han or Korean. So all pages will render in all browsers, provided only that they have some full Unicode font.
You're wrong. If you make a browser that doesn't support these other character sets, users will choose something else (see above). Of course everybody should be using UTF-8 these days, but we can't force them to.
Downloadable fonts. Netscape used to have downloadable fonts. The font makers bitched. Bring that feature back, despite the whining. No more having to express fonts as images.
It's back, but in CSS, not HTML.
WebForms. Get the WebForms proposal back on track. Any needed processing for input should be do-able without Javascript.
HTML5 includes Web Forms 2.
2D layout The "div"/"clear" model of layout was a flop. Horrors of Javascript are needed just to make columns balance. Absolute positioning is overused as a workaround for the limits of "div"/"clear". (Text on top of text happens all too often.) Tables were actually a better layout tool, because they're a 2D system. HTML needs a 2D layout model that can't accidentally result in overlaps. There are plenty of those around; most window managers have one. There's been a quiet move back to tables for layout, but people are embarrassed to admit it.
CSS layout has some problems. Balanced columns is certainly one of them (although tables certainly doesn't fix that). They're working on it, but this can be addressed by improving CSS, outside of HTML.
Better parallelism. Pages must do their initial render without "document.write()". Forcing sequentiality during initial page load should be considered an error. This will make pages load faster. Some ad code will have to be rewritten.
I'm not sure what you're talking about exactly, but this sounds like a JavaScript implementation issue and not an HTML issue at all.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
From the HTML5 spec:
"This specification does not specify which image types are to be supported."