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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>."
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?
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. They are as bad as it comes. No less than microsoft.
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.
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
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 ;-)
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yeah, they are actually concerned about bandwidth (Theora will take more) and encoding time (Theora will take more (especially given presently available encoders)).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
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;
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.
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.