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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?"
Fortunately, my operating system (Windows 7) supports open standards such as H.264, unlike Linux, which depends on proprietary Adobe Flash for web video support.
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.
shut the fuck up loser. If you support Quicktime and ogg vorbis, 100% of html 5 browsers will handle it. Or wait a couple years and use Quicktime. Ogg Vorbis is about as useful as a dick on a bottom.
"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)
What? I'm on Ubuntu, and I'm happily watching Youtube videos. More likely is that you're stuck with the OS equivalent of tying your door closed with string because you can't be bothered to learn how to use a Yale lock, making excuses like 'I'd love to, but Yale locks don't support barn doors yet'.
If you want to run Windows, fine. We're happy for you. But don't make silly moronic excuses if you're not happy.
Are you also mentally disabled? ...
Youtube is about one of the few sites using flash video whose content you can access easily on any OS using FSF-certified free software. Let's ignore the proprietary plug-in for Linux and Gnash because it is real crap. You still have webs, perl scripts, python scripts, emacs modules,
In the end it turns out that flash video sites don't make that much of an effort to obfuscate where the video actually is.
Yesterday, I wrote a ksh script to fetch Japanese porn in about 10 minutes of HTML/JS reverse engineering and network sniffing. I see no more flash in my future. Especially when I make it crawl the sites for me so I don't need to even visit them.