Slashdot Mirror
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>."
See, this is something that open source accomplishes that stupid fucking arrogant businesses will never get. When something is obsolete or no longer needed, it gets ditched or replaced by something better. Don't keep it around because someone thinks that they have the right to continue being in business even though their shit is a decade out of date. Its a hard and cold life for the developer whose project gets ditched (And sometimes I feel bad for them), but in the end, the user wins big and things evolve.
But of course, the rest of the world lives in reality, so the user loses.
Fuck you Microsoft. Die already!
Fuck you Adobe. Die already!
Fuck you Java. Die already!
Fuck you too Realnetworks. Just because.
Perhaps it is a stupid question but why do the vendors have a say what goes into the spec and what doesn't? Isn't it up to them to choose to implement the spec fully or not? FFS just make it Ogg Vorbis/Theora and if Apple doesn't want to support it then Safari can just not support that part of the spec. It isn't like any of the browser are 100% complient anyway.
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.
Or perhaps their concern is precisely because of this fact?
So not counting Microsoft (which has had nothing to say on the matter, and therefore cannot be counted one way or another), the only party blocking this is Apple, and they're blocking it based solely on a trumped-up and prima facie invalid argument, and furthermore, an argument that has never once impeded any of Apple's past actions. In other words, "BAWWWWW they din pik my pet codec BAWWWWW i wants every1 usin only my codec BAWWWWW BAWWWWW BAWWWWW!"
Seriously, folks; QuickTime uses a plug-in architecture for a reason. If Apple were truly concerned about Theora and patents, all they'd need to do is implement it as a plug-in -something they should have absolutely no trouble doing, as it's their own architecture- which could then be trivially removed if the need ever arose. But no; this is a step back towards the bad old days of Not-Invented-Here syndrome at Apple.
It's not just Apple, though. MS will probably not implement Theora either. Google will not be using it for anything substantial because of substandard quality per bit. The fact is that nothing is gained by making it a spec requirement. Either vendors will implement Theora or they won't, having it in the spec won't change anything. So why even have it, if that's the case?
Theora is good enough. I'd rather have "good enough" than be stuck paying fees for 'IP' for what should be an open standard.
Fuck Apple too. They are as bad as it comes. No less than microsoft.
My understanding is that Apple doesn't want to work on QuickTime because it is buggy and no one wants to fix it.
You're right on a technical level, you really are. But wouldn't that make playing video on the web more like it was in the web 1.0 era? People would have to stay on top of codecs and go surf for these sorts of things. I believe flash won out originally because it was a seamless solution for the end users-- one plugin to rule them all.
Honestly, the solution you're suggesting is not unlike the way Silverlight/Moonlight handles media-- except that it does have a default/preferred codec.
Why, you could circumvent the lack of a video tag on IE (or anything else) by using the pluggable codec support in Silverlight 3 to provide a Theora codec. ;) And that won't require any proprietary tools and very little code- just (if the browser is IE, load the following silverlight control, point it to the codec and your theora video)
We might as well just keep using the object tag to embed media files and let the system figure out what's supposed to run it, if we're going to use system codecs. On Windows, WMP will do it, on Linux, mplayer (or gstreamer if the user is a sadomasochist), and on mac it will be Quicktime. I mean, it's progressive, in an absolutely regressive sort of way.
Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used
Which professional tools are these? Most video editing software I've seen uses either QuickTime or Windows Media for exporting, and both of these have (free) plugins for encoding Theora (and Dirac). You wouldn't want to use Theora as an intermediate format - something like MJPEG or Pixlet with no inter-frame compression is better for that - but exporting from most tools is pretty trivial.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
True, most of them probably don't care much about users. However, the stance of Apple and Microsoft in your post clearly is clearly negative for developers and users because it locks everybody into paying them. Google, Opera, and Mozilla, while they don't necessarily actively HELP users, they're not actively hurting them either.
I'm not normally the 'rah rah open source' type, but the way you present that, one of the choices is clearly better.
All that said, I think it's just fine to remove codecs from the standard. At least the way I understand things, they're keeping the audio and video tags and giving people a choice of codecs. Firefox is too big to ignore now, so most major sites will support them. Similarly, they can't ignore Microsoft or Apple, so everyone gets supported, people actually follow the standard, and we're hopefully all able to enjoy our new audio/video content.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
Besides all the professional tools do not support it so it wont ever be used. It wont ever be used because professional tools do not support. Its a catch-22 just like Microsoft Windows and Office. You can't ever leave the platform.
Like Microsoft said they wouldn't support ODT, throwing their weight behind OOXML instead?
Transcoding to any format shouldn't be a problem these days, ESPECIALLY one with an open spec, so there is no reason for a tool not to support Ogg.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
> Google, Opera and Mozilla won't support anything that puts them at risk of needing to pay
> royalties on the huge number of free downloads they give away.
That statement is hard to reconcile with the fact that Google is shipping H.264 support in chrome.
That discrepancy is easy to account for by noting that the MPEG-LA licensing terms for H.264 (see http://www.mpegla.com/avc/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf ) have a cap on royalty payments. Looking at the rates there, anything over 10 million shipping units is effectively a flat fee of $5 million. For this year, at least. It's not clear to me whether the cap applies across both parts (a) and (b) of the licensing agreement; if it does, then Google might hit the cap just due to the "2 cents (per view?) per youtube video longer than 12 minutes" bit.
Note that Opera has explicitly said that the licensing fee is why they're not implementing H.264 support.
Also note that Mozilla has explicitly said that while it can pay the licensing fee it's not clear whether the result would fall within the letter of the open-source licenses it wishes to use, and would clearly fall outside the spirit (in that the browser could not be redistributed by someone else without paying the same licensing fees).
I can't speak to Apple and Microsoft, though I think their patent concerns are valid at least in their minds. But I think you're reading a lot more into the actions of Google, Opera, Mozilla than is there (and reading some things in that are _definitely_ not there in the case of Google).
What we really need in HTML standarization:
Apple have patents on H.264. If I buy a license to include H.264 in my browser apple gets some of the money.
Getting a license for H.264 off MPEG-LA does *not* protect you from liability of other patents that may cover the standard that they don't have (MPEG-LA).
Apple don't have any fear of patent litigation with theroa. They want everyone using a standard they make money on.
Wait till later --when the fees go up and even content needs a charge....
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Because that comes with strings attached. And thats 5M per year.
The biggest string will be no secondary distribution allowed. I would not be able to include FF in my linux distro for example.
The next biggest string is that they can change the terms anytime they want...
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
What's really funny is, Youtube has pretty poor H.264 quality.
By tweaking x264 settings(B-frames and motion detection in particular), I've encoded videos to the same quality as Youtube at 1mbit.
(Mostly FRAPS vids of me playing games)
Microsoft really isn't "pushing" Windows Media that much anymore. Zune and Xbox already support MPEG-4 and H.264, as will Silverlight 3 and Windows 7.
Well they're not pushing it too hard anymore, but that's really because they already lost on the audio side. Their hopes for locking up online music sales died when the major labels agreed to sell without DRM. Video may not be all that far behind.
Anyway, the point was never to have high licensing costs, but to build relationships with media companies while strengthening their vendor lock-in.
Interesting, considering that I don't remember ever hearing about ASP or AVC hardware decoders until after those formats became popular. It would seem that the popularity of the codec defines whether a hardware decoder exists, not the other way around.
The browsers need to start supporting free codecs now. Streaming h.264 is free for now, but that party is going to end at the end of 2010. If YouTube has to start paying royalties for every h.264 stream they serve up you better bet the whole game is going to change.
Theora/Dirac/Whatever start looking real good when consider that it keeps the web "free". Imagine if you had to pay everytime you served up a jpeg on your website? If you want to serve video from your site in a couple years, you may have to. I say we pick an open format now, to avoid all that headache now.
When 60+ percent* and increasing of all mobile web journeys come from iPhones, the other platforms fade away. You're mistaking the United States as a proxy for the entire world.
Da Blog
Patented means proprietary, please to not try to make words mean things that they do not.
No, patent means patented. There's a qualitative difference between a format for which there are public and publshed interoperable standard, and one where the implementation details are private or only avialable under a specific license. You may not care for either model, but it's certainly a meaningful distinction, and a longstanding one in the digital media world. When people in the vieo industry speak of an "open standard" they mean publically available specifications and patent licenses available under RAND terms. A propritary codec would be used to describe, say, RealVideo 10 or Apple's ProRes, for which there isn't bitstream documentation or RAND licensing availble.
With an open standard, everyone's on equal ground in building interoperable implementations without any reverse engineering, and has equal abilty and pricing for licensing the patents.
The issue of whether those patents have a fee or not is obviously important, but somewhat orthogonal to openness. One could certainly have a free-to-implement technology that isn't documented, and hence wouldn't be considered "open."
And Theora is certainly patented as well; On2 has released their patents under an extremely flexible license, but they're still valid.
I repeat my assertion that Ogg Theora is already good enough for me, and likely is good enough for many besides myself, who do not care much about 3 DB more or less of streaming bandwidth, and who do care about freedom from proprietary restrictions and patent fees for video codecs.
I've never heard streaming bandwidth described in dB. Interesting metric; so 3 dB would be ~2x bandwidth difference at the same quality? Kind of elegent; I normally talk about that in terms of percentage, but since improvements are measured in dB, it could apply either way.
FWIW, codec engineers sweat blood for a 0.1 dB improvement. The cable industry has spent multiple billions of dollars to upgrade to H.264 set top boxes and infrastructure to get that ~3-4 dB improvement of H.264 over MPEG-2, expecting a much bigger payoff due to additioanl channels/services they can sell with those savings.
Anyway, if Theora does what you want it do, use it with my blessing. Good enough is by definition good enough. Like I said earlier, I work on Silverlight, and we've already got the infrastructure in Silverlight for 3rd parties to add new codec and format support in managed code.
My concern is mainly that a lot of people seem to be thinking that Theora is capable of things it isn't and won't be capable of. To whit:
Theora isn't ever going to be competitive with H.264 High Profile in compression efficiency. While it's certainly capable of futher improvement, H.264 implementatiosn are improving rapidly as well, so I doubt it'd ever need less than 2x the bandwidth for a particular quality level compared to best H.264 implementations at the time.
For the business models I've run some quikc numbers on, the extra bandwidth cost of Theora would cost more than any H.264 license fees saved.
Thus mainstream media sites, like YouTube, don't have any business reasons to adopt Thera; it'd be a net negative on their profitability.
If you think I'm mistaken on any of the above, I'd be very interested in disucussing your perspective. If you're asserting that there are markets where the above factors don't matter much, then I agree with you.
But if it's really important for this community to have a competitive codec without patent licensing requirements, then Theora (at least a Theora 1.0 bistream compatible version) may be a distraction.
I don't have a lot of hope for Dirac either; I've not seen any indication of a new approach to the challenges of marrying wavelts with motion estimation; once your intra and inter block sizes are radically different, things get quite challenging. Theora is likely to remain a superior choice than Dirac.
My video compression blog