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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>."
No, if something being royalty-free were a downside they would not have included a BSD userspace with OS X. While Ogg Theora is royalty free, there are no -known- patent violations. As I recall back when Vorbis was getting off the ground, the implication was made that people with patents wouldn't care unless it got off the ground and then they would start looking for violations.
Basically, Theora and Vorbis are huge unknowns with potential patent bombs in them, regardless of what the developers and /. thinks. And all it takes is someone with a patent and the muster to enforce it and everyone who implemented them in their browser suddenly has a huge problem.
How about making the browser use system (DirectShow on Windows, whatever-it's-called on Linux) codecs, so everybody could be using whatever codec they want. Look, a lot of media players on Windows (like WMP and MPC) use DirectShow, so thew users can install additional codecs.
Why they want to include the codecs in the browsers. This way is worse. If system codecs were used, then the sites could choose whether to use h.264, ogg or some other codec, like XviD.
Also, this way all of the patent/license/whatever issues for the browser vendors would go away. And if the users are watching video files on their computers they most likely have codecs already installed.
Vendors never actually mean what they say. Here are the real reasons:
Apple won't support a codec that's incompatible with its huge installed base of ipods and iphones. They don't care about royalty fees because most Safari users pay for an OS X licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.
Microsoft won't support a codec that makes the web more reliable for non-Windows users - especially Linux users. They don't care about royalty fees because all IE users pay for a WIndows licence, and they want the free browsers to look sub-par compared with theirs.
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.
Nobody actually cares about end users or developers. If you think they do, you're kidding yourself.
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
As was argued by the original author, you're left in a situation where if Ogg were specified in the standard, you'd have folks who followed the standard at a disadvantage in quality and/or bitrate.
Besides, W3C doesn't say which image file formats are allowable, why should it specify a codec?
E pluribus unum
Fuck you Microsoft. Die already!
Fuck you Adobe. Die already!
Fuck you Java. Die already!
Fuck you too Realnetworks. Just because.
Not "Just because". Fuck Real for producing crappy software that doesn't fit in anywhere at makes it annoyingly non-trivial to download things I want to watch.
Fuck Adobe for Flash. Seriously, I don't need vector graphics in my web browser. I'd love to have embedded .wmv/.avi/.mpeg files, whatever, because I can play those with mplayer which DOES NOT SUCK. As opposed to flash.
Fuck Microsoft for being the great browser market retardant. And in general for writing shitty software which doesn't do what I want it to (heck, I can't even get XP to install; epic fail).
And fuck Apple for being such control freaks. Well, first, fuck 'em for not helping fix this browser shit. Secondly, fuck them for being a worse control freak than Microsoft could ever be. I recently played with an iPhone (display/sales demo); among the top 25 apps in the store is one that displays scantily clad women, which are "as naked as Apple will let us get away with". FFS, Apple. Don't decide whether I'm going to watch porn on my phone. And you include a web browser---is that porn-filtered too? Assholes.
But don't fuck with Java. It's free software. It works for what it does: sorting algorithm animations and interactive Rubik's cube algorithm display. Java is OK, when used in moderation.
Flame on ;-)
Well, YouTube has three sets of settings:
Low bitrate H.263 + MP3
HQ bitrate H.264 + AAC-LC
HD bitrate H.264 + AAC-LC
The low bitrate, for whatever reason is keeping to the specs they've been using since launch, which are using the xvid implementation of old Sorenson Spark H.263 v1/MPEG-4 Part 2 Short Header. Maybe for device compatibility? Anyway, That's a codec about as old as the Theora bitstream, so we wouldn't expect it to be much better.
But I don't know that YouTube thinks it's "good enough" - they're offering higher quality modes, and that's what you get by default on the iPhone and other platforms. For whatever reason they're keeping around a legacy version, likely backwards comaptibility with some clients that don't do H.264 for whatever reason.
For the their high quality streams, Theora isn't competitive in quality. And for the highly compatible streams, Theora isn't competitive in compatibility.
So YouTube saying that Theora doesn't make sense for them makes sense to me. Therora doesn't an advantage in quality or compatibility for the streams they're doing.
Also, Big Buck Bunny isn't the best clip to extrapolate from, as it's really high quality lossless animation. To really see what YouTube needs to handle, try some lousy webcam, DV, and VOB rips. That's where H.264's in-loop deblocking filter give it a big advantage over other codecs, because it just gets smoother intead of blocky as the content gets more challenging.
Not to dismiss the excellent development work Xiph has done on Theora. The posts have been a fascinating read. But it's not plausible to me that anyone can make a business case for Theora over H.264, VC-1, or ASP licensing is available; the reduced bandwidth costs would be bigger than the actual real-world licensing fees for the real world examples I've thought of.
Theora's sweet spot would be in cases where MPEG-LA codec licenses simply aren't available for whatever reason. I imagine a fully refined Theora decoder would need fewer MIPS/pixel than H.264 High Profile, and perhaps even Baseline. But even in those cases, VC-1 Main Profile will probably offer similar performance with significantly better efficiency.
My video compression blog