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YouTube Revamp Imminent?
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube's latest blog post indicated that some changes are on the way. Google has opened up a call to submit and vote on ideas. HTML 5 open video with Free formats has dominated the vote, maintaining over twice as many votes as the next-highest item almost since the vote opened up. You may vote here (Google login required). Perhaps we don't even need to since their blog post comes suspiciously soon after their revised merger with On2. Could these improvements be a completely overhauled YouTube 2.0?"
and there's no technological reason it couldn't work on Firefox -- only political assholes who refuse to implement such support, even in countries which don't respect software patents.
Ok, so how is it going to help Firefox and an open web by implementing that support? First off, how does it decide which version to download? Is the main version going to be the "crippled" version without support or with support of proprietary add ons? What happens if someone downloads Firefox and gets sued because of the patented codecs? I don't think Mozilla wants headlines saying "Patent Troll sues user of Firefox" because already there are some people who think anything other than IE isn't a browser and must be a virus!!111!1!1 And a lot of these people are rather high up in business management and prevent tech guys who know what they are doing from giving their users a decent, secure browser.
And lets go beyond desktop browsers for a second, how many of us have other devices that have a web browser? Game consoles, music players, cell phones, and even set-top boxes have browsers. If we set a good, patent free standard, their web browsers can have it built in without having to pay for a costly license thus increasing the use of the standard. Think about images, there are a lot of images that would be great as an SVG, but due to some browsers not supporting it (like IE) it has little use. If the video codec specified that videos should be a in a free format, IE would almost have to use a free format if it supported HTML5, or miss out on video sites coded to the standard.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
"I think that, given Yutube's volume of crap, any codec Google chose would probably be on a blocklist."
There, fixed it for you.
(link NSFW)