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YouTube Hints At Support For Free/Open Formats With HTML5
shadowmage13 writes "After the recent post about YouTube, so many votes were put in for HTML5 using Free and Open formats that Google has already cleared them all out (to make space for others) and issued an official response (requires Google login): 'We've heard a lot of feedback around supporting HTML5 and are working hard to meet your request, so stay tuned. We'll be following up when we have more information. We're answering this idea now because there are so many similar HTML5 ideas and we want to give other ideas a chance to be seen.' Now all the top ideas are concerning copyright and DMCA abuse."
What's a more polite way to say, "be more like Vimeo"?
Video tags are easier to accelerate. They can be handled by just about anything. That means rather than being locked to Flash, it can be played with Xine/GStreamer on Linux, Quicktime on OSX, DirectShow on Windows, DSP codecs on your phone, etc.; it might also be possible to use VLC on any platform, although that defeats the "accelerate" part.
And of course, you've always got Flash as a fallback.
P.S. Posted before, but this might be of interest to someone: Javascript-free HTML5/Flash video embedding, which works on desktops as well as devices like the iPhone: http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
Youtube is pretty much the only reason I need Flash. If it was possible to watch Youtube videos without plugins it would be great. No more choppiness or Flash using 100% CPU. Playing some videos from internet shouldn't be rocket surgery so this is really about time. Flash seems almost purposefully bad on Linux.
VLC generally supports acceleration when os/driver/card support exists
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Plus releasing On2 tech as a standard without legal encumbrances, for everyone to take & implement freely, and opening its adoption as the HTML5 video?
That would be interesting...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Faster at all 3 if we use h264 because:
Hardware h264 encoders exist, and I bet google would use them – it would cut their power use massively
Hardware h264 decoders are common on just about all graphics cards
h264 can compress a video much more for a given quality than the current flash video they use
Not faster at all if we use ogg theora because:
Hardware Ogg encoders don't exist
Hardware Ogg decoders don't exist
Ogg barely uses less bandwidth than flash video for a given bandwidth
technically thats what ogg theora is, as it was on2's submission for mpeg4 standardization that was not selected, and that they later handed over to ogg.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
OGG Theora is based on On2 VP3.
On2 VP8 is a much better codec than VP3 ever was.
... you're telling me that I finally got Flash working on my 64-bit Ubuntu box for nothing??? (Admittedly, it wasn't really that difficult) To be honest though, it doesn't really matter for me since YouTube is still blocked in China, but it would be nice to see if this prompts the many streaming sites in China to embrace an open-standard such as this, but that will never happen since everyone continues to use IE6 here and I'm betting that IE will never implement HTML5 until it's long past finished...sooooo another 15 years before IE used HTML5? Bets anyone?
If you use zsh:
youplayer () {
mplayer "http://youtube.com/get_video?"${${${"$(wget -o/dev/null -O- "${1}" | grep -e watch_fullscreen)"}##*watch_fullscreen\?}%%\&fs=*}
}
If not:
youplayer() {
mplayer $(youtube-dl -g $1)
}
Most users *absolutely* do care about having hardware decoding – on their cell phone.
Hardware h264 encoders exist, and I bet google would use them – it would cut their power use massively
First, do you have a citation for this 'massive' reduction in power?
Second, Google's two main concerns in the case of video and youtube is bandwidth and codec licensing costs, not power. They've already become masters at power efficiency from their experience with their search server farms. Power is not the main issue here, the amount of streaming data they have to pump to the user is.
As for the licensing issues with h264, why do you think they're buying On2? They've seen the statements from MPEG-LA about future hikes to the cost of using h264 and have decided they need a viable alternative, ie. a backup plan.
We won't know for sure what is ultimately going to happen until a) MPEG-LA reveals sometime this year what their new fees will be for h264 licensing, and b) Google's On2 buyout is completed (until its complete neither party is saying anything).
Expect them to be 'following up when we have more information' within days of the finalization of the On2 acquisition, especially if MPEG-LA thinks that they've now got the market locked-in to their solution and decides to get greedy.
-- http://embedded-computing.com/fujitsu-full-h-264-codecs
That's half a Watt encoding HD, a general purpose CPU would be consuming tens, or even a hundred watts to do that.
H264 is an open standard as well in many ways as many academics and companies have contributed to it. it is literally the best because everyone has worked on it for years and years and years. the only potential pitfall is that en/decoders might be covered by patents.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
H264 is an open standard
A standard that requires shelling out $$ for a license to use it isn't 'open', not by most people's definition of 'open'.
en/decoders might be covered by patents.
There should be no 'might' in that sentence. Patents on h264 is the reason for MPEG-LA's very existence. They hold more patents on it than you can shake a stick at.
That mountain of patents and the control it gives its owners is *precisely* the problem with h264.
What's a more polite way to say, "be more like Vimeo"?
How about "I know a lot of people who, to put it mildly, aren't a fan of video games. Can you make subtle changes to your policy so that videos of video games end up all but banned?"
Background: Vimeo bans use of its service for commercial purposes; this rules out any video uploaded by the video game's publisher. Vimeo also rejects videos uploaded by anyone other than the author; this rules out videos of game play uploaded by anyone other than the video game's publisher because they're "derivative works".
Can you explain why it would be a mistake? If we were to assume for a second that performance on the client end would be exactly the same, then what would be the mistake in using standards instead of a proprietary stuff?
But anyway, it will provide some benefits. They're already encoding all their video in h264, but they're using Flash as the player, which is pretty inefficient. For one thing, Flash means no hardware decoding. Also, Flash itself can be a bit of a resource hog. Providing the same video stream but allowing the browser to hand it off to a better decoder will be much better.
That's half a Watt encoding HD, a general purpose CPU would be consuming tens, or even a hundred watts to do that.
They wouldn't have to put that into the youtube web-servers, because, as you said later in your post, they'd only have to do it once. They would certainly pre-encode all the videos and put them on storage somewhere (cloudy place).
Also: noone forces them to use an embedded device, even if the chip was specifically made for use in such.
But you are missing the BIG "gotcha" like what happened with Ogg...hardware support. Sure MP3 in "patent encumbered" but you know what? I can buy an MP3 player at Walgreens for under $15 so as a consumer I don't care. We have the same problem here, in that pretty much every single GPU released in the last few years supports H264 out of the box. Both the onboard that came with my PC as well as the 4650 I paid a whole $35 for has hardware support for MPEG 2/4, DivX/Xvid, WMV 7-9, and H263/264 out of the box. Nothing for me as a consumer to mess with, and even on a quad core having the video accelerated makes for a nicer experience for me, so the patents? I really don't care as a consumer.
And THAT right there, that is the gotcha that will most likely screw Theora. You see FLOSSies care about things like patents, the Average Joe? Hell he never comes in contact with them. It is just like how the average Joe don't give a crap about DRM unless it bites him in the ass. But unlike DRM I don't see this ever actually biting the consumer in the ass, so I don't see them giving a crap. The producers, OTOH, will just pay off the licenses if they are big, or if they are small will more likely hope that users will still come to them even if they don't use what everyone else does, which with the rise of netbooks and how many of the newer ones are getting decent GPUs like the new AMD Neo and the Ion, might not work.
After all if your competitor's content places nicely on my netbook thanks to GPU acceleration, but yours don't? Well I probably wouldn't come back to your site. That is the problem I think many FLOSSies here don't get. Frankly the average user don't give a wet fart about "free as in freedom" because if they did they wouldn't be buying all the proprietary software they currently do. As long as it goes when they push the button that is all the user cares about, and the others have acceleration and Theora don't. Sorry to be the bearer of that bad news, but dealing with retail for going on 15 years that is pretty much how the "average Joes" think and behave.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Problem is, whether we like it or not, h264/mp4 is the standard, because every dvd player, blu ray player, laptop and toaster oven already support it. The same reason Mp3 became the standard portable audio format, not because it's free, or better or gives blow jobs but because everything and everybody already supported it.
No amount of bitching and whining on slashdot or the w3c mailing list will change the reality of the remainder of the planet. It's the way it is and at the end of the day it's a video codec, not genocide, so there's really no harm in accepting it and getting on with supporting it ourselves.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Well, and only when Adobe makes it work.
That's the important thing -- HTML5 can be improved by any browser. Flash can only realistically be improved by Adobe right now, at least until Gnash becomes relevant.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's certainly better than "closed" in that ffmpeg and x264 have excellent en/decoders because they didn't have to reverse engineer it.
No, they didn't have to reverse engineer it, but they did have to violate the patents on it though. Fortunately, this 'violation' is only enforceable only in certain parts of the world, not all of it, so implementations like ffmpeg and x264 can exist (if MPEG-LA had global reach, they would have shut these projects down a long time ago).
Better, but not quite good, at least in my book.
A good standard is one that anyone can implement, anywhere in the world, without the need for anyone's permission, or the need to hand over blood-money to anyone just for the 'privilege' of implementing a 'standard'.
Implementing a standard shouldn't be a privilege, it should be a right, otherwise its not much of a standard.
I'm not sure to what extent this is "storm-in-a-teacup" status, but the DMCA has been frequently abused on YouTube as a means of censorship -- not just by corporations, but by individuals. So has "false flagging" -- a video says something you disagree with? Flag it as inappropriate.
Both of these seem to be handled somewhat mechanically by YouTube. For a good example, search for "What Islam Fears: Laughter," but it's much more common than that -- particularly, creationists like to use it to get atheist videos removed, when their votebots fail to reduce the video's score significantly.
Most recently, VenomFangX (remember him?) pulled a neat little trick in which he false-DMCA'd someone, then dropped it when a counter-notice was filed and accused this person of child molestation, using the personal information from the counter-notice to personally identify him.
So far, I see a ton of comments about HTML5, and that's well and good, open standards are important. But freedom of speech is more important. Granted, it is YouTube's right to censor whatever they wish, but this doesn't seem to be YouTube doing the censoring, or indeed a conscious choice on the part of any human at YouTube -- it's individuals abusing YouTube's flagging and DMCA notice system.
Of course, if Google notices this, expect the next wash of comments to be complaints about the new channel pages -- fair enough, given I don't know a single person who prefers it to the old system -- but not nearly as important as these two issues.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You did not mention openness in your post, so I have no idea where you stand on that. Your post is factual, though.
People need to remember that h264 is not a free format! This is why YouTube videos are limited to ~10 minutes. A free format should be preferred in this case. Also, HTML5 is intended to be an open format. Video and audio codecs that are used with HTML5 should also be open, or the whole system is no longer open. An open format, when available, should always be selected here regardless of quality.
I'd like to point out here that, while people are always comparing Theora to, say, h264, and saying that Theora loses, you have to remember that Theora is still a quality video codec. Sure, it may not be as good, compression-wise, as h264, but it's not so much worse it shouldn't be considered. And it's open.
Google, with YouTube, has a great opportunity here to shape the future. Ogg Theora would never even be considered by anyone else, but if Google starts using it for YouTube, so will everybody else. HTML5 should have specified it from the beginning, but the WHATWG didn't have the power to back it up. Google can do it for them.
Actually, accelerating Theora is high on our priority list due to it being one of the few codecs that Redhat can sponsor and ship.
We have no plans to add h.264 acceleration to any GPU driver at the moment, although patches are welcome.
The hardware can decode h.263 (Theora) just as well as it can decode h.264.
~ C.
When open-source video drivers begin to get video acceleration for modern formats, Theora will be first on the list due to Redhat's endorsement. h.264 will not be supported in default builds on many distros.
Additionally, if you're using fglrx, you aren't getting video acceleration (fglrx doesn't support it using the standard APIs) so it doesn't matter which codec you use.
Oh, and Android has Vorbis support out-of-the-box. I don't think we lost, not at all. :3
~ C.
So if something is widely accepted we shouldn't change it? A world that runs like that will, by definition, have exactly zero progress.