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>."

Comments

Why do the vendors have a say?

[ditoa]

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.

Re:Why do the vendors have a say?

[hansraj]

Perhaps because there is no point having a standard if no one is willing to adopt it.

Re:Why do the vendors have a say?

[Radhruin]

The stated reason is that, if vendors will refuse to implement a portion of the spec, that part shouldn't be in the spec. The spec isn't supposed to force vendors to implement something, it's supposed to be a common set of rules that everyone can follow, and mandating Theora is counter to that goal.

Re:Why do the vendors have a say?

[causality]

The stated reason is that, if vendors will refuse to implement a portion of the spec, that part shouldn't be in the spec. The spec isn't supposed to force vendors to implement something, it's supposed to be a common set of rules that everyone can follow, and mandating Theora is counter to that goal.

Sure, but there needs to be a way to distinguish between:

• A) refusing to implement because there are sound engineering reasons not to do so
• B) refusing to implement because doing so would make it harder for a company to lock people into proprietary formats

No standards body worthy of the slightest respect should ever concern itself with that second category.

I am not fond of putting it this way, but I think what really needs to happen is for the average user to grow a pair and realize why Item B is not in their interests and never will be. So long as the masses of users have no understanding of these things, it is always going to be an uphill battle to maintain an Internet that is as free and open as possible.

Re:Why do the vendors have a say?

[beelsebob]

The problem is not that apple won't adopt it, it's that apple *can't* adopt it, and nor can nokia, and nor can sony erricson, and nor can RIM, and nor can any of the other smart phone makers. There is *no* hardware support for decoding Ogg Theora, that makes it totally unsuitable for the task at hand. Even ignoring the submarine patent risk and the fact that it's far worse quality than h.264.

Apple's concern

[commodoresloat]

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?

Re:Apple's concern

[evanbd]

They build enough iPhones that, if they announced to vendors that they wanted such a chip, it would get built.

Re:Apple's concern

[TheRaven64]

Theora is a bit different from Ogg in this respect. Theora is based on VP3, which was both patented and commercially distributed for a number of years. If VP3 had been infringing someone else's patents, then they would likely have sued back when a company was making money from it. The patents that were required to VP3 were released by On2 under a free, irrevocable, license and then (I believe) allowed to lapse.

Dirac is in a weaker position; it is believed to be patent free, but no one has done a patent search to make sure and it is not based on an existing codec.

Re:Apple's concern

[Binary Boy]

Absolutely - the notion of "submarine patents" rising up, should Theora take off, is not a new idea, and not specific to Apple. By mandating Theora in HTML5, you'd be risking the years of negotiations on the spec on the bet that there are no such patents - a bet I'd be surprised if any good Slashdot reader would take.

As others have pointed out, HTML has never mandated a specific image format reference in an IMG tag; a type of plugin referenced in OBJECT or EMBED; or the type of resource referenced in an A tag; it's outside it's scope. Let the standard focus on its scope, and let the market hash out the rest - it's not the end of the world to not have a single, mandated codec - in fact, I'd argue that having such a thing would unnecessarily limit our options - Theora is, to be kind, not the most efficient codec on the market; and the situation will likely only get worse. Don't hamstring HTML5 by hitching it to any particular codec.

Re:Apple's concern

[Daniel_Staal]

Exactly. I hear 'royalty free' and I think of GIF, which was also royalty free... Until it wasn't. Which was an absolutely huge mess.

Honestly, if I were Apple and the Theora foundation offered a $100-per-million-device license saying basically 'we swear we are the sole authority on Ogg Theora, and you have a license from us to implement it to the spec' I'd be much happier than without it. Because then I'd have a set contract, spelling out the cost, and that if someone then comes along and says 'wait, we own this part of the spec, and you owe us $Xbillion' I could turn around to the Theora foundation and say 'Your breach of contract just cost me $Xbillion, and I expect you to pay that.' Basically, at that point the risk is Theora's, and not Apple's.

Apple is unwilling to take the risk that there are IP problems with the spec. It would take a lot of costly research and examinations for them to prove there aren't any, and there is no real benefit to them to spend the money and time. Translation: At free, it costs to much.

In other words, it's Apple-baw

[Millennium]

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.

Re:In other words, it's Apple-baw

[DECS]

Perhaps you're not aware that there are already Ogg+Theora etc plugins for QuickTime, and that anyone can install them for free.

Some of the reasons Apple has no interest in using FOSS codecs are:

- Codecs are bleeding edge technology, and FOSS is typically behind the curve (as Theora is)
- Codec algorithms are patented to high heaven and impossibly difficult to vet for patent submarines.
- Nobody sues FOSS until a monied company adopts it. Apple doesn't want to be the target.
- There is already a technically superior, non-patent encumbered, world wide standard with ubiquitous silicon support: ISO/MPEG
- Apple has already spend years investing in AAC/H.264.
- Apple doesn't want to double its development efforts just to perform pointless political posturing to satisfy people who don't pay for anything.

Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model

[SplashMyBandit]

FYI: Not only is Java Open Source, it is actually 'Free Software' and has been for a while now. The license of Java also always gave a grant for compatible implementations, even when it was not Free Software (hence GCJ/Classpath, Kaffe etc. were never under any threat). For this reason I usually recommend Java rather than other equivalent technologies (which I shall not name lest its proponents tarnish me as 'troll'). Yes, it is a shame in this day and age we cannot even standardise on video codecs due to competing business interests ("my business is more important than my users)".

Fuck Apple too...

[E IS mC(Square)]

Fuck Apple too. They are as bad as it comes. No less than microsoft.

Re:Fuck Apple too...

[morgauxo]

What history?

The history of Apple proprietary hardware which they only recently (mostly) gave up?

The history of Apple suing clone makers out of existence?

The ongoing history of Apple locking iPhone users into their app store, dictating what apps are and are not acceptable, making exclusive agreements with a wireless carrier and enforcing said carrier's rules on what one can do with their connection even AFTER they have PAID FOR IT?

Hey.. I hate Microsoft but at least they don't care what CPU I run Windows on or what apps I run in Windows so long as I bought it per-seat!

And today we read about Apple playing their part in wrecking an effort to get an open standard for internet video. Looks like a continuation of history to me!

Re:Fuck Apple too...

[FingerSoup]

I do... Here's a rundown:

Microsoft has gained popularity through theft of technology(GUI From Apple, their defense was "We stole it from Xerox, not Apple), Backdoor licensing agreements (IBM PC-DOS/MS-Dos), and anti-trust in general (How many competitors has Microsoft bought out or used "creative innovations" that break the original software [java, Internet explorer/HTML Standardization], in order to remove competitors?). They continue to use shady business practices to force PC manufacturers into selling windows licenses with every pre-built PC, regardless of what the user wants on their machine.

On the other hand, Apple has been releasing proprietary, non-upgradeable hardware, forcing their users to pay a premium for the hardware, then forcing an upgrade to the customer, causing them to buy all new hardware, for most of the company's history since the Mac was invented. Apple's Proprietary business deals have stagnated their platform several times, but their "creative marketing' has always managed to create enough fanboys to turn almost every Mac user into a smug elitist bastard who points the flaws out in everyone else's product except their own. Microsoft has also been making progress in that marketing strategy, but has yet to achieve Apple's market share in holier-than-thou egotistical bastards.

In recent years, they have both been proponents of DRM at some point, both support their own proprietary formats (Microsoft with WMA/WMV/ASF, Apple with Quicktime, and AAC), and are both patent whores.

In other words, both companies have had their evil dealings, and I'd say brainwashing and gouging end users is just as bad as dirty business tactics. When people finally realize that a computer is a computer is a computer, the Operating system wars will end, and the world will be happy with it's interoperable bliss.

Of course I think that day will come when I start blowing sunshine out my ass. Business is too cutthroat to allow that level of convergence.

Re:Fuck Apple too...

[morgan_greywolf]

On the other hand, Apple has been releasing proprietary, non-upgradeable hardware, forcing their users to pay a premium for the hardware, then forcing an upgrade to the customer, causing them to buy all new hardware, for most of the company's history since the Mac was invented. Apple's Proprietary business deals have stagnated their platform several times, but their "creative marketing' has always managed to create enough fanboys to turn almost every Mac user into a smug elitist bastard who points the flaws out in everyone else's product except their own. Microsoft has also been making progress in that marketing strategy, but has yet to achieve Apple's market share in holier-than-thou egotistical bastards.

Meanwhile, we Linux/Ubuntu smug elitist bastards continue to point out flaws in everyone else's production, including our own, constantly taking the defeatist attitude that Linux is "not ready for the desktop" despite the fact that, at this point, it's easier to install than all competitors' products and easier to admin, maintain and upgrade than all competitors' products,

Re:Fuck Apple too...

[Lorien_the_first_one]

It's not just easier, it takes far less time, too. Install Windows Vista with all the updates, drivers and service packs? 6-7 hours. Linux? Maybe 30 minutes with updates. Ok, you might think I'm slow, but I try to be thorough.

Apple does not seem to want to update QuickTime.

[Futurepower(R)]

My understanding is that Apple doesn't want to work on QuickTime because it is buggy and no one wants to fix it.

Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model

[nausea_malvarma]

We have been taught to fear destruction, and praise creation, without realizing the two functions are complementary. Like a tree must be pruned before it can bear fruit, the death of outdated technologies forces us to innovate, and thus destroying creates. When flash and silverlight die, newer, better technologies will fill the void. I echo your call for said entities to die already. Death is beautiful.

Re:A solution: system codecs.

[malevolentjelly]

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.

Re:Then html5 wont exist

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model

[DECS]

The mention of Apple managed to spleen together two unrelated ideas: "expressing concerns over patents despite the fact that the codec can be used royalty-free."

There is no relationship between worrying about patent submarines and Ogg being royalty free. This is simple idiot-targeted editorializing. Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone. Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial. Its entire business plan is based on pushing users to do Google searches as that $50M in search fees is its only source of income.

The only good news is that Apple owns the mobile web with the iPhone, so it can pretty much establish HTML5 itself and provide Flash-killer standards-based video without any help from Firefox.

Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model

[CSMatt]

Are you serious? YouTube rejecting Theora for quality issues? Have you been to YouTube recently? YouTube doesn't seem to give the slightest care about video quality.

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.

What HTML 5 should have been

[Animats]

What we really need in HTML standarization:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• WebForms. Get the WebForms proposal back on track. Any needed processing for input should be do-able without Javascript.
• 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.
• 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.

Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model

[NoCowardsHere]

Besides, W3C doesn't say which image file formats are allowable, why should it specify a codec?

I think this is a really good point. I mean, I have no idea if it's true or not... maybe they do specify image file formats, I have no f*****g idea. But it certainly makes sense. The standard should define how web developers specify images, and how browsers should handle them, but the actual file formats are left up to the market to work out. Same thing with video... makes sense, right?

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. (Though I guarantee you'll see trolls coming out of the woodwork with all sorts of wacky patent claims if Theora ever becomes really big.)

So, Apple will support one; Mozilla will support the other; Microsoft will support none; and VLC will release a super-duper ninja plugin that runs in any browser and supports both, plus 1001 other obscure formats for good measure. People will look around and see who's suing whom and how successfully, and eventually one or two formats will become so common that a browser developer would have to be stupid not to accept it -- the video equivalent of JPEG and GIF.

Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model

[maxume]

Yeah, they are actually concerned about bandwidth (Theora will take more) and encoding time (Theora will take more (especially given presently available encoders)).

Re:Things to learn from the Open Source model

[fatalGlory]

I agree strongly with this. There was a long period where we could count on firefox, but not IE to render PNG files with transparency (boy, do I remember), or a large portion of the CSS spec. Didn't stop anyone from using transparent PNG files and standards-compliant CSS in their design if they wished, they just had to know that it wouldn't look good in IE (a show stopper for many). But IE e...v...e...n...t...u...a...l...l...y caught up.

I say implement the tag, give the web developers what they want. Let them host the video in multiple formats and just serve up the appropriate one based on the detected browser or the user's preference (as many sites already do anyways). Ideally history would repeat itself and all the dominant browsers will eventually be able to handle all the major formats used with the tag.