YouTube Offers Experimental Opt-In HTML5 Video

bonch writes "YouTube is now offering the experimental option to view all YouTube videos using HTML5 in H.264 format. Supported browsers are Chrome, Safari, and the ChromeFrame plug-in for Internet Explorer. Captions, ads, and annotations aren't yet supported but are coming soon."

Comments

Should be a selling feature...

[Orne]

Captions, ads, and annotations aren't yet supported but are coming soon.

The three most annoying features of YouTube won't display? Where do I sign?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Monkeedude1212]

Well, you could sign into an account on YouTube and turn them off.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[mcspoo]

Some of us are deaf, and would much rather Youtube caption their videos. You don't HAVE to watch it. That's why it's called CLOSED CAPTIONING. Don't like it? TURN IT OFF.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[rumith]

Here

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

I find adverts the most annoying "feature", and it's not just because they are adverts.

If you're watching a video in full screen mode in Youtube, the advert flashes up. Move your mouse to kill the ad and the video stalls, but the audio carries on playing. Eventually after a good 10 to 15 seconds the video starts playing again in time with the audio. This irritating "feature" is on my Linux (official 64bit Flash) AND Windows (official 32it Flash) setup. Adobe haven't written decent code in years (I say that as a user of other Adobe stuff).

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

The three most annoying features of YouTube won't display? Where do I sign?

Captions? They are opt-in, and they can be very useful for hard of hearing people (if the video creators do add them, that is...)

Agreed on the others, though.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Qwerpafw]

To clarify, from the site

Additional Restrictions (we are working on these!)

*Videos with ads are not supported (they will play in the Flash player)

Ads will still play, and will in fact inflict flash on you. There's really no good way right now to force people to watch advertisements if the whole video is H.264 (since you could just scrub past the ads), so I can understand this, even if I don't like it.

What they'll probably eventually do is break the video up into a bunch of shorter videos, with ads in between. Then they can load each part in sequence, and enforce a timer on the ad portion so even if you scrub through the ad you still have to wait for the timer.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Nick Novitski]

If only. That sentence means that any videos with ads will display with the usual flash player, even if you opt in to the beta.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to see Firefox unsupported. Maybe that will show Mozilla that they really should buy a license for the best of the most superior codecs currently known -- H.264.

If a patent license is required, hell, by all means buy it and stop talking crap about Free codecs (as in Speech)! That's also why Google pays the Mozilla Corporation hundreds of millions of USD.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[jollyreaper]

Well, you could sign into an account on YouTube and turn them off.

And let them track how many cute, fluffy kitten videos I watch? Er, I mean how many boob videos I watch? And car crashes. And explosions! People falling off skateboards. Grr, manly videos! That's right. Anyway, I think not.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Aladrin]

I don't see that option anywhere. Can you elaborate?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[kent_eh]

Er, I mean how many boob videos I watch?

Youtube has boob videos?
Any time I follow a link that claims to be a boob video (purely for research purposes, of course), it has been pulled for TOS violation.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[bhawbaker]

better hope you'll never become deaf someday

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[slim]

Good to see Firefox not opting into a system that pushes us towards a non-free de-facto standard.

We don't want to sleep walk into a situation where anyone who wants to encode video that they expect to be widely usable, must pay for a non-free license.

True, Firefox walks a fine line, because it could lose market share, in which case it will all be in vain. We need ubiquitous, cheap chipsets that support Theora - or something else free. That won't happen if everyone just rolls over and pays for H.264.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

I though the OP was referring to the crappy popup that video publishers can pepper YouTube videos with "LOLOLOLOLOLOL TEH NXT BIT IZ TEH PHAT!!!!!"

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Yvan256]

And if they don't want to mess around with the licensing terms, just embed VLC player and be done with it. Firefox not supporting H.264 helps Flash Video to survive.

If Firefox doesn't care that Flash can play H.264 videos then they shouldn't care that VLC can play H.264 videos.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[gad_zuki!]

>The three most annoying features of YouTube won't display? Where do I sign?

Im sure the HTML video tag will be wrapped within a flash box to produce ads and stupid annotations.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Gratuitous" boob videos are pulled, but there are some with a high enough educational value that they stay, for instance that show how to do breast exams. (Also available are pelvic exam and, for the ladies (and gay guys), prostate exam videos.)

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[StripedCow]

Youtube has boob videos?

Hint for (new) competitors: support these videos and you'll quickly grow bigger than youtube!

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, I mean how many boob videos I watch?

Youtube has boob videos?

Any time I follow a link that claims to be a boob video (purely for research purposes, of course), it has been pulled for TOS violation.

Meet Shay Laren:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyadBDomkyg

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[kangsterizer]

the videos that are using them are also not displaying

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[kangsterizer]

No. It's Google supporting a licensed codecs instead of an open one which is "helping flash survive".
Heck, it means if you dont have millions you cannot buy an h264 license thus cannot play HTML5 videos. If you think a bit more broadly, about all the custom HTML clients, you might realize that h264 is an horrible choice for ones who aren't working in a big company (or a company at all)

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[poetmatt]

deafies aren't the only ones who want captioning, but I do support it. There are lots of times where I'd like youtube muted and/or if they had captions in another language it would ease translation, and also enable youtube to be a useful teaching tool for other languages. Meanwhile I'd rather see ogg as an option over H264. H264 is an improvement over flash, but that issue will rage on for a while.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[snowraver1]

Meet youporn.com

[...]you'll quickly grow bigger than youtube!

Haha, I see what you did there.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[BZ]

It's not just a matter of money. It's a matter of Firefox not being able to be redistributed by downstream distributors unless they _also_ buy the license. As in, it would effectively stop being free software in the "can modify and redistribute" sense.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[maxume]

You might as well toss in a request for a pony, and for world peace.

(Do note that the debate has essentially ended, there will be no codec specified in html5)

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Firefox doesn't care that Flash can play H.264 videos then they shouldn't care that VLC can play H.264 videos.

Adobe is the company behind Flash Player, not Mozilla. Adobe has also almost certainly payed or will be willing to pay their h.264 dues.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[P-Nuts]

I don't think H.264 is patented in the UK. Why can't we have a version of Firefox that supports it?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Firefox doesn't care that Flash can play H.264 videos then they shouldn't care that VLC can play H.264 videos.

Actually, there's two differences. First of all, Firefox doesn't come with Flash; Flash is a plugin that's installed by the user. If VLC offered a plugin that was installed by the user, that'd be a comparable situation, but Firefox embedding VLC, actively and on their own, is not.

Also, did it never occur to you that Adobe might actually HAVE a license allowing them to implement H.264 video playback in Flash?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[nine-times]

Part of the problem is that h264 licensing fees are generally hidden. You don't pay for a license, your hardware/software vendor does. Apple and Microsoft and Google all buy the licenses for you and include them in their products. It's hard to convey the importance of the licenses for non-free codecs if they seem to be free.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[roger6106]

I don't think H.264 is patented in the UK. Why can't we have a version of Firefox that supports it?

This is what I have been wondering. Wouldn't it be possible to distribute an H.264 version in areas where it isn't patented?

Also, what do decisions such as these mean for software patents in the US?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[nine-times]

Huh. Why is it that VLC can get away with distributing an h264 decoder but Mozilla can't? Sorry for my ignorance here, but I never thought about it before. Is it because they're not operating in the US? Does it matter if they have mirrors located in the US? Can Mozilla exploit the same loopholes?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[RulerOf]

There's really no good way right now to force people to watch advertisements if the whole video is H.264

I'm wondering that myself. If you don't make the video player, or at the very least, know exactly how it's going to behave under all conditions, how do you force people to watch the ads?

One of my favorite parts about using Media Player Classic is jumping straight to "Title 1" on a DVD movie. The ads in them these days are extremely annoying.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[iampiti]

They can't just embed VLC. VLC doesn't play any royalties for H264, hence Firefox would be open to lots of legal nightmares

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[slim]

Indeed. And if a third party hosts and encodes your video (e.g. YouTube) that side of it's hidden too.

If you wanted to put H.264 video on your own site, you'd have to pay too.

http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html#licensing

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Youporn
Redtube
Youjizz

Competitors already know (but they dont display fuzzy cute kittens or other mundane topics)

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Bert64]

Or they could insert the ads into the video file itself on the fly..

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Randle_Revar]

Adobe pays for h.264, VLC does not.

Anyway, Mozilla, misguided as they may be in the matter of trademarks, are not so confused that they would use a non-Free codec even if they could afford to pay.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[mblase]

Some of us are deaf, and would much rather Youtube caption their videos. You don't HAVE to watch it. That's why it's called CLOSED CAPTIONING. Don't like it? TURN IT OFF.

Just because you're hard-of-hearing doesn't mean you have to shout all the time.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[tepples]

Boobies on YouTube. Unlikely to get flagged.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Apple and Microsoft and Google all buy the licenses for you"

Apple doesn't. Apple is one of the patent holders in the H.264 pool. As a result, they can instead cross-license with all the other pool members outside of the pool. This is why you don't see them listed as a licensee (google and msft are fully paid up).

In Google's case they are already so far beyond the annual organizational maximum that H.264 is fairly cheap for them, and they can't reduce their costs by using something else. But the costs are quite oppressive to start-ups and new players and makes great ammo against open source solutions.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[smidget2k4]

Sounds like they're missing out on an important market. I introduce:

YouPorn&Cats!

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[TheThiefMaster]

They should just use the underlying system's video system and be done with it.

On Windows, this would be DirectShow. You'd have access to all the codecs on the user's pc then, without the browser needing to pay any royalties at all.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Unequivocal]

I'd guess there are a couple of reasons:

1) Mozilla has real assets, so is more vulnerable to a lawsuit than little old VLC?
2) Mozilla may be taking a political stance they don't support patented tech?

From VLC's FAQ about this, they seem to indicate that using VLC for some purposes might violate the patent in question. So it's not like VLC has uncovered an OSS loophole - they are just to small to sue.

Some earlier posters suggested that b/c VLC's implemention of h264 was cleanroom, it wouldn't be subject to the original patent. This, I believe, confuses patent and copyright. Cleanroom engineering avoids copyright suits. A patent is about a *method* for solving a problem, not about any specific piece of code. So if VLC accomplishes h264 using methods covered by the patent, it doesn't matter if the code is totally new, it is still in violation of the patent. At least that's how I understand this mess.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[nine-times]

ome earlier posters suggested that b/c VLC's implemention of h264 was cleanroom, it wouldn't be subject to the original patent. This, I believe, confuses patent and copyright. Cleanroom engineering avoids copyright suits. A patent is about a *method* for solving a problem...

Right. AFAIK (admittedly IANAL) you have to pay patent licensing fees even if you come up with the same method independently. Otherwise, patent enforcement would require that you prove the offender wasn't simply ignorant of your work, and that would be very difficult to prove.

Theoretically, if they could develop a decoder which didn't use the patented methods, then no licensing fee would be necessary. Without knowing what the patents actually cover, I'm still going to guess that it would be very difficult or impossible to do that.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[BZ]

That's been seriously considered. The reason it's not being done (yet?) is described at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Account > Playback Setup > Annotations It doesn't matter if you set that preference, though. Annotations will be turned back on after a certain amount of time. You'll have to block all requests to *google.com/reviews/y/*

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[TrekkieGod]

Good to see Firefox not opting into a system that pushes us towards a non-free de-facto standard.

As others have said before, there's no reason why the codec should be part of the standard. It should be like the <img> tag. If you have the codec installed in your computer, use it. This allows the html standard to not be outdated when people come out with new codecs, free or not.

That said, if you want to complain about youtube's choice of a non-free codec, that's valid. Firefox shouldn't be actively not supporting things just because it's proprietary.

Anyway, Firefox 3.6 (which was released today) works fine with youtube html5. I just tried it out. So this entire discussion is moot anyway.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[jhfry]

Perhaps it is Google's vision to move people away from flash to H.264, then to something open and free. They have always seemed to move things in that direction over time.

HTML5 offers the flexibility, and AFAIK Theora is supported in the same browsers listed, so perhaps this is simply a step in that direction.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[adipocere]

I provide some video streaming to not-a-lot of users at my job. It's free. I just began looking around for new solutions, since we have been serving in just one format for a while. H.264 looks awfully attractive, and then BAM, I come across the licensing stuff and I am absolutely terrified.

I am loath to even suggest it as a solution, since it will require some serious lawyering and quite possibly some large payments to the MPEG LA group.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[MoxFulder]

Anyway, Firefox 3.6 (which was released today) works fine with youtube html5. I just tried it out. So this entire discussion is moot anyway.

Good to know! I don't see this anywhere in the FF 3.6 release notes.

I don't understand why it won't work with Firefox 3.5.7 though :-( I am running Ubuntu and have the free (if patent-infringing) x264 codec installed. I can play H.264 videos fine in Totem or Xine or VLC... why can't FF use this codec?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[OMGcAPSLOCK]

You've got it the wrong way round. Yes, some of us are deaf, but most of us aren't. So if you need it, turn it on, not vice verse. I'm left handed, so I have to move the mouse to the other side of the keyboard every time I use someone else's computer or a public terminal. Do I have a problem with this? No. It's hardly a huge inconvenience (much like enabling annotations on a per-video basis isn't either), and the people that DO "suffer" this inconvenience represent only ~10% of the population. The hard of hearing I'm confident make up an even smaller group. I'm all for making things accessible, but having things turned on by default just so that a tiny % of the population don't have to omg click a button is political correctness gone insane. Besides, I don't know why you're getting so hot and bothered. As was clearly said already, this is only a limitation of the current beta. These features will undoubtedly be back to annoy the majority of us and appease yourself by the time it's fit for a full release.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not mentioned because it *doesn't* support h264.
GP probably viewed ad-infested videos, which are played in flash even with the html5 mode enabled.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[0x000000]

Youtube already had their entire collection encoded in h.264 as that is what Flash supports, and what was required for Youtube support on the iPhone and other mobile devices. Now for Google to have to re-encode their entire YouTube collection into yet another format to support yet another codec is wrong.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[bill_mcgonigle]

.Some of us are deaf, and would much rather Youtube caption their videos. You don't HAVE to watch it. That's why it's called CLOSED CAPTIONING. Don't like it? TURN IT OFF.

YouTube has closed captioning? I thought all they had were stupid popup captions that are manually added by video uploaders. Google Voice has quite a bit more training to do before closet captioning is anything like automatic or pervasive on YouTube.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[nine-times]

Yeah, well...

Lots of people don't realize, but it's the same thing with MP3s. If you're distributing an MP3 encoder/decoder, you're supposed to pay a licensing fee for associated patents, even if there are no copyright issues. In addition, you're distributing MP3s, you're supposed to pay a fee for those as well.

Apparently part of the reason Apple decided to go with AAC instead of MP3 is that the licensing terms are better. They still have to pay a fee for the encoders and decoders, but they don't have to pay a fee for each AAC they sell.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Macrat]

RMS is that you?

Go take a bath

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[dangitman]

Good to see Firefox not opting into a system that pushes us towards a non-free de-facto standard.

Yeah, because Flash is so Open and Free.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is listed as a licensee

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Google and Mozilla Foundation have agreed to a nda no compete clause which prevents Firefox from implementing this and other features, right?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Sir Homer]

That's not true. They just haven't gone after the rest of the Internet yet. H.264 is like a new GIF in the making (remember why PNG was created?). People don't realize how dangerous this can be, it's more then just a ethics thing.

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[nine-times]

What's not true?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[Anonymous Coward]

PornCats&You?

Re:Should be a selling feature...

[kobiashi maru]

someone should create a site that converts video into ascii pics so that lynx users can watch videos

What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Skatox]

I would like to see videos on a open format and with firefox

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[GundamFan]

I'm sure FF support is coming one way or the other.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[marcansoft]

I doubt YouTube is going to go ahead and reencode everything to Theora. Firefox needs to get its act together and at least take advantage of OS-supplied h.264 when it's available. Everyone likes to whine about patents for h.264, but there are free/oss decoders available and the best h.264 encoder is probably the open source x264. Considering that Theora isn't guaranteed not to contain patented technology anyway (it's just not known to), I'd say h.264 is a pretty good option with better support.

Consider that Vorbis never really broke into the mainstream, and it's actually superior to MP3. Theora doesn't really stand a chance as it is, and I have my doubts that it'll ever get to h.264's performance.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Yvan256]

Is anyone seriously thinking that Google will triple* its storage capacity just to have a Theora version for Firefox users and then waste twice* as much bandwidth for those same Firefox users?

* every time I hear about Theora people say it needs twice the bandwidth to achieve the same video quality as H.264

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[GreatBunzinni]

Why throw around bullshit claims based on nothing more than your vague and absurd assertion that "every time you hear..."? You can easily search for that info yourself, which would take less time than it took to post to slashdot. For example, you have this purely subjective analysis which was done by encoding Theora and h.264 files with equivalent size and then having a dude claim what image he preferred. Although he claimed that h.264 was better according to his own personal tastes, you can easily see for yourself that, when comparing Theora and h.264, you get pratically the same quality with the same file size. It's the same bandwidth, same size, practically (and in some cases) indistinguishable quality and although Theora's developers had to intentionally avoid more efficient algorithms due to patents.

So who exactly is spewing those bullshit, FUD claims of "Theora needs triple storage capacity and wastes twice as much bandwidth"?

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[kangsterizer]

1 - you say "triple" then you say its in fact only double
2 - you justify your source as "i heard so" which discard the source altogether

but wait theres more
"Another licensing issue that is often overlooked is the ambiguity of MPEG LA's future patent royalty collection plans. MPEG LA has established broadcast fees that licensees will be required to pay for distributing free (or ad-supported) streaming video content on the Internet. These fees will not be instated until the end of 2010, when the second H.264 licensing period goes into effect. The language used in the current license treats Internet streaming just like over-the-air television, implying that the licensees will have to pay broadcast fees per-region. That could prove to be extremely costly for Internet video providers who make their content available around the world." *

and:
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

what can yo usee on the above link? theora has same if not greater quality as youtube has with h264 and h263 (theora is much better than h263 low bandwidth, and similar to h264 in high bandwidth)

*http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-codec-debate.ars (look, real source link)

thanks for the FUD, tho.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Anonymous Coward]

They seem to disagree since Theora 1.1 is out: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[FlyingBishop]

Twice is an exaggeration. It's a significant change, but not twice.

And storage is cheap, so that's not really the issue here. You only need to back up the masters, so it's really only like 1.5 times the storage, assuming they do very basic backups of the videos on YouTube.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[cheesybagel]

Theora has better quality than H.263. Which is used as an option in Youtube.

No one is asking Yotuube to remove support for H.264. Just to add suport for Theora, even if it is at H.263 quality and bitrate levels.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[slim]

1 - you say "triple" then you say its in fact only double

He means, triple the storage, and double the bandwidth.

That is, they'd store both versions, one of size x, one of size 2x. x + 2x = 3x.

When a H.264 version is viewed, they'd transmit x bytes.
When a Theora version is viewed, they'd transmit 2x bytes.

This assumes the GP's assertion that for the same quality, Theora is twice as big. I can't speak to that.

I would say though; Google doesn't seem to consider storage to be expensive. At some point Google might decided that on the fly transcoding isn't expensive. It all depends on what technology is cheapest at the time.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Yvan256]

I didn't say that Theora needs triple storage capacity. I said that Google would need to triple their storage capacity, the first 100% being taken by H.264 files (obviously).

As for that page you linked to, look at the screenshots. There's nothing subjective about them, H.264 is the clear winner. If you can't see that then you need to calibrate your monitor. Same bandwidth = lower quality results using Theora.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a codec snob is trendy.

The reality of it is much less exciting.

Youtube already supports several versions of the files, they could probably drop the flash 7 compatibility in exchange for Theora. In terms of numbers of client Ogg/Theora for firefox is probably a better deal than flash 7. Adding one more to a half dozen isn't a tripling.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Yvan256]

If you have 1$ and triple it, you get 3$. If Google needs 100MB to store the H.264, then needs 200MB to store the Theora file, then they would need to triple their storage capacity. To stream the 200MB Theora file would then require twice as much bandwidth as the 100MB H.264 file. What's so hard to understand about that?

As for your xiph.org link (oh yeah, no bias there I'm sure), he says himself "In order to avoid any possible bias in the selection of H.264 encoders and encoding options, and to maximize the relevance for this particular issue, I've used YouTube itself as the H.264 encoder. This is less than ideal because YouTube does not accept lossless input, but it does accept arbitrarily high bitrate inputs."

YouTube is probably tuned for fast encodes, not good ones. I can probably get better results than YouTube with the default settings in Handbrake.

I do agree that the licensing terms of H.264 look like a complete mess. But on the Theora side you have Firefox and Opera. On the H.264 side you have Google and Apple, not to mention that practically everything has support for hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding these days (even digital photo frames).

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Yvan256]

Storage might be cheap for you and me, but if Google requires a few pebibytes of storage, "only 1.5 times the storage" is going to be too costly just for Firefox and Opera users.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[GreatBunzinni]

You got to be kidding. Well, there's a reason why you found it better to post as AC, isn't it? After all, if we play the clips available in that site side by side (which are equivalent in any way) then the only difference you may get will be nothing more than subjective opinions which, I believe, would be go up in smoke if a double blind test as conducted. In fact, if you play the 499kbit/sec comparison side by side you will find the image in the Theora/Vorbis clip to be less grainy and sharper than the h.264 counterpart.

The rest of your comments are just laughable. If we are comparing youtube videos to Theora then it is more than legitimate to compare Theora's codec with youtube's h.264 codec. And your absurd complain about animation clips being used in the comparisson, let's not even delve into the obvious details that it is far easier to legally get your hands on HD videos. The link you provided explicitly states that:

I utilized the Blender Foundation's Big Buck Bunny as my test case because of its clear licensing status, because it's a real world test case, and because I have it available in a lossless format. I am not aware of any reason why this particular clip would favor either Theora or H.264.

But then again, don't let that fool you. You know, the great thing about the scientific method is that the hypothesis is always testable by third parties. This is one of those cases. If you wish to try to attack the fact that Theora's encoded videos are at least no worse than h.264's then please be my guest and not only put up your own tests and, as the people from xiph.org did, release them in order to be peer reviewed.

But then again, there must be a reason why you opted to desperately throw FUD around behind your AC status instead of being able to point out any objective flaw, let alone present your own comparison. And that reason is perfectly understandable from all the comparisons: Theora does at least as good as h.264 and does it with the same bandwidth and same file size.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[nine-times]

I'd say h.264 is a pretty good option with better support.

And the main issue with the "better support" is hardware support. If you want to distribute HD video in a format with no hardware support on consumer chipsets, it's going to require a lot more general processing power. This means set-top boxes will need to be more powerful, as will portable players. Also, portable players will need much bigger batteries because all that processing power is going to eat your battery life.

That seems to be the big issue, that hardware vendors are already supporting h264 as their de facto standard. If you want Theora to be a viable alternative, then someone has to convince the hardware vendors to include support. Now you run into the chicken-and-the-egg problem of getting hardware vendors to support a format that no one uses, which they won't do unless people are already using it. Meanwhile you can't get people to use it because there's no hardware support.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Randle_Revar]

There are two ways FF could be supported: Google could add Theora, or they could free VP8 and switch to that.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Randle_Revar]

probably not twice as much. maybe 1.5 times or so.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Anonymous Coward]

You got to be kidding. Well, there's a reason why you found it better to post as AC, isn't it?

Ad hominem. Perfect start. I post AC because I don't have an account.

After all, if we play the clips available in that site side by side (which are equivalent in any way) then the only difference you may get will be nothing more than subjective opinions which, I believe, would be go up in smoke if a double blind test as conducted. In fact, if you play the 499kbit/sec comparison side by side you will find the image in the Theora/Vorbis clip to be less grainy and sharper than the h.264 counterpart.

If you view them side by side you'll see the blocky pattern in the Theora encoded clips and you'll see the image degrading into a blocky mess once there is a lot of motion, especially in the "Island" Trailer. I didn't specifically point it out as I figured it would be obvious to anyone watching the clips.

The rest of your comments are just laughable. If we are comparing youtube videos to Theora then it is more than legitimate to compare Theora's codec with youtube's h.264 codec. And your absurd complain about animation clips being used in the comparisson, let's not even delve into the obvious details that it is far easier to legally get your hands on HD videos. The link you provided explicitly states that:

I utilized the Blender Foundation's Big Buck Bunny as my test case because of its clear licensing status, because it's a real world test case, and because I have it available in a lossless format. I am not aware of any reason why this particular clip would favor either Theora or H.264.

While this topic isn't about Youtube you stated in your post that Theora and H.264 provide the same quality. You weren't talking about specific implementations. You didn't mention Youtube and the comparison you linked didn't use youtube for H.264 encoding either. The link I provided doesn't state that at all, it is just a comparison of a film trailer and a shuttle launch done by a slashdot member. Furthermore I didn't say that animated content would favor anyone. I said that animation is easy to compress and therefore makes differences harder to spot. Still they come out quite big SSIM. Hint for the graph, the column saying "x264 baseline" could be used by Youtube without without making use of any features they don't use already.

Video encoding is my hobby. I have tested Theora myself when 1.1 came out and they've had some nice improvements, but nothing that brings them anywhere near a good H.264 encoder like x264, especially not at the low bitrates we are talking about. I don't see a reason why I should put up another comparison when there are plenty available. Even one by the Xiph people themselves shows x264 as an H.264 encoder provides a solid lead over Theora, even with defaults. The defaults used to be very fast settings and were changed some time after this comparison IIRC.

A bit off topic:
Posting AC doesn't automatically make me wrong. Not posting my own comparison doesn't automatically make me wrong either.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[hullabalucination]

Everyone likes to whine about patents for h.264, but there are free/oss decoders available and the best h.264 encoder is probably the open source x264.

Apparently, even though x264 is GPL'd, it violates MPEG-LA's patents in jurisdictions that recognize software patents:

http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/05/videolan_x264_e.php

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[FrostedWheat]

That comparison is ancient. Theora has come a long way since then.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[hullabalucination]

A quote from the Xiph paper referenced:

That's a valid question. The original reason we made this graph was to offer a rebuttal to a quite sloppy paper that both incorrectly claimed x264 exceeded Theora PSNR by nearly 20dB (!) on this specific clip, as well as incorrectly implied that PSNR comparisons conclusively indicate relative codec superiority. This paper was beginning to see wide distribution as yet another piece of 'evidence' that Theora has no hope of competing and was not worth considering for use. Although we've contacted the author, he's not yet shown any inclination to correct the errors.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[marcansoft]

I know that. Which is why we need to fight software patents, to end all this nonsense.

If you're running Linux, chances are you're running software that violates hundreds of software patents. I'm not referring to some FUD claim by $company, this is just common sense. There are zillins of ridiculous software patents out there and pretty much all software infringes on a bunch of them.

Open source h.264 is just going to increase that patent violation tally by a few, and Theora itself very likely violates other patents out there. We're screwed either way, software patents just need to die.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Anonymous Coward]

holy shit have you even seen that guys examples, theora is way worse even at the low resolution he's encoding some of the video at. It is a very noticeable difference as the resolution goes higher.

theora has about half of the acuity of h264 for the same bit rate. re-look at the small detail and look for square macroblock artifacts in the sample images

they are not even -close- to the same.
-captain

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and in their test they showed that x264 exceeded Theora by more than 3dB, even with fast settings. Keep in mind that a difference of 4 dB would mean that you need about twice the bitrate for the same quality which is probably doable by using slower x264 settings.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[hullabalucination]

Keep in mind that a difference of 4 dB would mean that you need about twice the bitrate for the same quality.

Pretty strong evidence here that this assertion is incorrect in real-world tests:

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[tkinnun0]

That may be, but how much is there still to go and how long is it going to take to catch-up to where h264 is today?

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you please at least look at the videos in my first post (as of this moment -1,Troll). The test in your link isn't against x264 as the one I linked. It's against the youtube encoder which, as I posted previously, is really low quality for an H.264 encoder. My link to that one animation comparison showed that different implementations of the standard and different encoder settings can result in vastly different results and youtube is one of the worst.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[FlyingBishop]

Firefox has 25% of the browser market. That's not an edge case.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[FrostedWheat]

Unfortunately it won't. There are fundamental limits in the Theora spec that means it can never quite equal H.264 without breaking compatibility with current decoders. Also H.264 encoders have improved since that comparison too, but the gap was definitely closed in the push to Theora 1.1.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[hullabalucination]

Can't, sorry:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/ Line Number 77, Column 184:

It appears you're using Microsoft's flavor of Javascript, which has notorious issues with my brower/platform of choice (Firefox/Linux).

There might be an apt analogy here to the situation between x264 and h264, but I'm too tired right now to explore the idea further.

By the way, I'm a professional videographer/photographer/editor/graphic designer. I personally have made use of x264 (in VLC), but I would be extremely hesitant to use it on a professional project, where I was prominent as the author, due to it's extremely shaky legal foundation in the US. I'm not a lawyer, but I have three decades of experience plowing through IP/copyright law (with the help of lawyers) as practiced in the US. Frankly speaking, I feel that the x264 implementation doesn't have a legal leg to stand on in the US and the EU, and if you'll do some basic research you'll find that there are many IP lawyers on both continents who concur with my view. You're exposing yourself to huge risks by using the x264 libraries, and distributing the works thereof...at least where I live.

The recent FAT32 fiasco where Microsoft lowered the boom on TomTom is a direct compare. TomTom assumed they were in the clear since an open source reverse-engineer (dosftools) had been in use for quite a while by many vendors, until Microsoft's legal team educated them otherwise.

http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/2006-August/002052.html

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's interesting, because the link works fine on my brower/platform of choice (Opera/Linux).
There isn't an apt analogy because x264 is simply an implementation of the H.264 standard and it is compliant.

There are plenty of commercial projects that use x264, even in the US, for example Facebook and Avail Media, but your appeal to authority is duly noted.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[dave420]

It is when supporting them requires 1.5x their current storage. In that case, those browsers are shit out of luck.

Re:What about firefox (ogg video)?

[penguin359]

Actually, much of the use of Vorbis is hidden in videos. I have a number of hi-def videos that, while use H.264 or similar MPEG 4 codecs, also use Vorbis for the audio track and a Matroska container. It's easier to find this than OGG Vorbis music files, from my experience.

What a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a shame that I won't be shown wonderful ads in the bottom of the video or be able to view fantastic poorly worded Post-It notes plastered throughout the frames. They should reconsider doing this until these issues fundamental to my enjoyment are resolved.

Re:What a shame

[Bluebottel]

Notations can be turned off, theres a button in the player itself. The ads are still annoying and im not aware of any way to get rid of them.

Well, that kind of sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the open codecs that everyone was begging for?

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[gad_zuki!]

Like Theora? The problem with that codec is that its based on pretty old technology. Google probably isnt interested in paying a bandwidth premium. It looks like this move is Google telling the rest of the industry to standardize on H.264 via licensing deals.

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[diegocg]

H.264 is the codec used in youtube when you play videos with the flash player. This HTML5 video viewer just reuses theses videos, only the html client code changes. Using other codec means reencoding all their videos in a different video format, which must not be easy. Specially when the alternatives are worse (theora) or not ready (dirac).

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

they suck ass so they weren't used.

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Have any proof Theora uses more bandwith? Old doesn't mean bad, HTML is old, so is TCP/IP and UNIX

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[Malc]

Re-encoding assumes they have the original source material. If they don't, they'd have to transcode, which is even worse.

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of pictures, videos (with the current Theora 1.1) and metrics comparison linked in some of the Troll moderated posts to this story that show just that. For the same quality Theora needs way more bitrate to compete with a good H.264 encoder.

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.osnews.com/story/19019/Theora-vs.-h.264 has a nice subjective review of Theora vs H.264.

I love your examples too. The first one opens a new connection for every individual piece of content on the screen, researchers and military alike are attempting to replace the second all over the world for better speed and security, and the last ... Ok I give you that. UNIX is the one case where old doesn't mean bad, however good luck installing a UNIX machine in a company not currently employing big bellied bearded guys.

Re:Well, that kind of sucks

[hkmwbz]

From 2007? How about something a bit more recent?

Hmm

[Uranium-238]

This could be good. If only you could use it in Firefox, maybe it's time to try out Chrome.

Re:Hmm

[Qwerpafw]

You can't use it in firefox because mozilla refuses to support H.264

Wake up, nobody uses ogg theora. Sorry guys, patent/royalty-free is great, but in this case it's just not happening.

H.264 is hardware accelerated on just about every mobile device. Ogg Theora won't even play on them.

Re:Hmm

[0100010001010011]

This could be good. If only you could use it on Porn. Damn it, RedTube and YouPorn need to get with the times.

Re:Hmm

[BhaKi]

Firefox supports the video tag. The h.264 support can be added by installing mplayer browser plugin or xine browser plugin.

Re:Hmm

[armanox]

Define mobile device. I've never had an issue with OGG on my laptops (going back to the Pentium II era). My phone and PDA do not support either format.

Re:Hmm

[daveb1]

Good. However, if you just so happen to be on windows(im not), how would that work ? (vlc?.....)....

Re:Hmm

[Qwerpafw]

ogg is not hardware accelerated on your laptop, and if you're still using a PDA then you're a couple generations back anyways.

All modern smartphones (anything that runs android, pre, iPhone, even most of RIM's stuff) play H.264 and have hardware acceleration for it, many "dumbphones" even play H.264.

Netbooks all have H.264 hardware acceleration...

sorry that your decade old 3Com Palm Pilot doesn't play HD video, don't blame google for that one.

Re:Hmm

[Mornedhel]

Even with h264 support (through gecko-mediaplayer), Youtube tells me "Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available.".

Re:Hmm

[nine-times]

Most video chipsets these days are including hardware support for H264 decoding. This includes the chipsets in devices like mobile phones, MP3 (portable media) players, and set-top boxes.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't use it in firefox because mozilla refuses to support H.264

You can't use it in firefox because nobody is allowed to support H.264 without first getting permission. Permission to use H.264 is only available through licensing.

Think about what a massive fuckup that was. Until now, the web was something that anybody could implement freely.

Re:Hmm

[LordVader717]

No one huh?

Re:Hmm

[Rockoon]

Works fine in the Opera 10.5 pre-release, the latest Safari, and of course the latest Chrome by definition.

Mozilla is in the same boat as Internet Explorer and I for one predict that FireFox development is going to get slower and slower and slower.. still not sure that they will do a full rewrite like last time.. thats still up in the air.

Re:Hmm

[Ksevio]

Really? I got a message saying my browser couldn't display any of the video types in the new Opera

Re:Hmm

[GreatBunzinni]

Old technology? Since when is technology's age any relevant to it's value? Electricity was discovered centuries ago and we still rely on it up to this day. Do you believe that just because it's old technology it should be simply be abandoned without any relevant and rational reason to justify it?

And for your information, Theora is on par with other formats such as h.264 in all relevant categories such as file size, bandwidth and encoding quality. So, that's also not it.

Regarding that "hardware accelerated" bit, do you know what it takes for a codec do be "hardware accelerated"? It only takes the will of the manufacturer to offer hardware support for a specific format. The h.264 codec isn't magical nor is the Theora codec cursed. In fact there are Theora hardware decoders in the market already.

So please refrain from spewing ignorance and/or FUD. Theora may eventually stumble on relevant shortcomings but hard

Re:Hmm

[Rockoon]

You are right, and wrong, I think.

Some videos seem to play while others report that there isnt a supported video format available.

Maybe Opera is only supporting Theora at this time?

Re:Hmm

[armanox]

I don't think that my Latitude C400 supports H264 with hardware acceleration.

Re:Hmm

[armanox]

Correction - it does not support it.

Re:Hmm

[Clarious]

Trying out with chromium (binary package) at the moment, does not work, neither do firefox 3.5. :(

"Your browser does not currently recognize any of the video formats available.
Click here to visit our frequently asked questions about HTML5 video."

Re:Hmm

[BZ]

Last I checked, Opera only supports Theora, yes.

Re:Hmm

[Clarious]

Ok, so it is due to distro package maintainer, they disabled to avoid legal problem with h264

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux uses GStreamer that gives it H.264, windows does not have that. Opera are pushing for Theroa rather than H.264, or more likely closely seeing what Mozilla do. If they adopt H264, then Opera will have to aswell. Until then, and HTML5 Video support on Youtube is only for minority browsers like Chrome and Safari.

Re:Hmm

[omnichad]

Well...they had no problem making the embed or object tags work. Why would this be different? They can use Quicktime or Windows Media Player or whatever media plugin depending on your platform.

Re:Hmm

[Randle_Revar]

As long as h.246 is non-Free, it is irrelevant.

Re:Hmm

[Randle_Revar]

>Theora is on par with other formats such as h.264 in all relevant categories such as file size, bandwidth and encoding quality

Much as I support Theora (i.e. totally), that is not even close to true. It is maybe comparable to MPEG-4 ASP (divx, xvid).

Re:Hmm

[The Mgt]

I've got chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree installed which includes h264 on Ubuntu Karmic. Still doesn't work.

Re:Hmm

[bigtomrodney]

Same problem here. And to think I installed chromium just for this!

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as (h.246|mp3|m4p|Windows|iPhone|PSD) is non-Free, it is irrelevant.

haha, right........

Re:Hmm

[_merlin]

As long as Theora isn't implemented in video chipsets, it is irrelevant. I think more people care about decent performance than RMS-approved GNU/Freedom (Free as in beards).

Re:Hmm

[geoff2]

" In fact there are Theora hardware decoders in the market already [xiph.org]."

That link you provided doesn't show that. It says there are players out there which support Theora; however, "there is a hardware decoder implementation being developed." That means there isn't currently a hardware decoder.

Meanwhile, there are numerous h.264 decoders available in hardware from multiple vendors. See Macej Stachowiak from Apple's post here, and search "h.264 asic" on your favorite search engine for more.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that, Theora is an inferior codec... people don't seem to realize that.

Theora: inferior quality, unsupported outside of FOSS community, but free
H264: superior quality, wide band of hardware/platfor support, license laden

Hummm... tough call. Maybe some of you should shave off your beards.

It's about time.

[schmidt349]

Flash has always been a Band-Aid on a gangrenous ulcer. If you aren't [un-]lucky enough to be running Windows it sucks up gobs of CPU time to decode even the teensiest thumbnail of video, which is incredibly annoying when you visit websites that are plastered in Flash ads. HTML5 has its problems, but it's worlds better than what always seemed to me like the Next Coming of Java.

Re:It's about time.

[hitmark]

there is a reason why i use firefox with noscript extension installed for my browsing.

Re:It's about time.

[bradbury]

Agreed. I've got NoScript running in most of my Firefox sessions so don't run into Flash problems that often (as Javascript is often used to start Flash) but in working a little with chrome and the FlashBlock extension that seems to be an even better approach.

Now the question will be whether there will be a way to disable the nasty HTML5 video options when advertisers start to abuse those as well. Video should always be "at the user's discretion", precisely because there are probably hundreds of millions of PC's scattered around the world which simply don't have the hardware to be able to show video without it "killing the system" (even running a Pentium IV, I have problems with video on any VT / hardware combination that didn't happen to get the Xorg -> Kernel DRI interface (and that is only one of my VTs)).

Re:It's about time.

[silent_artichoke]

The suspense is killing me... I hope you didn't include the reason in a Flash video.

Re:It's about time.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I think a NoVideo would be easy to implement since elements can be manipulated by Javascript.

Re:It's about time.

[Anonymous Coward]

While Flash is a resource hog, I tried the HTML5 video and it uses even more cpu on my poor Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. Perhaps it is just Safari being crap, considering it can't even play animated GIFs without grinding to a halt.

Re:It's about time.

[Randle_Revar]

you don't need flashblock, noscript blocks flash just fine. Just tell it to block flash and to apply restrictions to trusted sites as well.

Re:It's about time.

[Tamran]

Flash has always been a Band-Aid on a gangrenous ulcer. If you aren't [un-]lucky enough to be running Windows it sucks up gobs of CPU time to decode even the teensiest thumbnail of video, which is incredibly annoying when you visit websites that are plastered in Flash ads. HTML5 has its problems, but it's worlds better than what always seemed to me like the Next Coming of Java.

I've got it set up and most videos are HTML5, but some still want to play in flash, not sure why. It seems to work OK for beta. Going full screen on KDE (and back) seems to work just fine, however it doesn't seem to lower the cpu load on the videos (tried with and without HTML5).

I agree it's about time indeed ...

I'm excited to see where this goes.

Tamran

Re:It's about time.

[bradbury]

But why should I have to execute an insecure program in an insecure lanaguage (go on -- Justify to me why Javascript is reallly secure -- esp. when I consider it unlikely that you have read the source code for each of the various implementations in each of the various browsers on your machine). When you have read the code, and you are willing to assert that it is secure (under the threat of liabilty of lawsuits that you claimed something which was fiction) -- then I will begin to take you seriously.

Until then, executing remotely written Javacript on my own computer, i.e. you are letting people program your computer, is for me a largely forbidden act. Because in short there are are a large number of individuals who are either stupid or untrustable. And I do not want either of those groups to be executing code on my machine.

Re:It's about time.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

That argument seem specious to me. You let other people program your computer all the time by running it. Modern browsers are one of the most heavily used applications in existence. Presumably if anything has been tested thoroughly its a browser. Still, I can understand the mentality. How do you get by when so many sites require tremendous amounts of javascript to not offer a degraded experience though.

Re:It's about time.

[bradbury]

Fortunately, many of the sites I frequent, such as /. or many bugzilla based systems, or even the NIH NCBI databases (up until recently) did not require JS to function reasonably well. I would assert that any site that requires JS to present itself has not thought things through very well. HTML is a passive presentation language, it simply presents information on ones machine as distributed by the provider. That works very well -- be it from /. to bug databases to Wikipedia to Google. One only has to inject JS if one wants to enhance that. E.g. Menus or pseudo-new-windows, or doing some arithmetic in the browser. Those are "+" features -- they are not required to present information. Now one can argue all day about whether the internet is about presenting information or selling you something (its the same debate with advertisements on TV -- which have expanded from 1m every 15 minutes to ~2m every 10 minutes). I choose freedom, the only things which I should have to read/watch are those which I select and demand. Anything inflicted upon me is IMO evil and I would do well to remove it from my life by whatever means.

This is fantastic news

[Qwerpafw]

I've been using ClickToFlash with safari for a long time now, which suppresses the flash in youtube videos and plays them in H.264 (when possible) directly. This is a tremendous CPU boon on a netbook - I can't play flash, HD or otherwise, fullscreen, but quicktime plays H.264 just fine. Flash is a horrible monster, and with all the vulnerabilities and instability that it brings along with it, the faster youtube moves away from it, the better.

Re:This is fantastic news

[Anonymous Coward]

get yourself a real browser you sad little fag. don't shift your own technical inadequacies onto others.

Native Safari playback on iPhone/iTouch?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, does this mean we'd be able to ditch Apple's (cached) YouTube app & surf/watch YouTube directly in Safari on the iPhone/iTouch?
Does Safari for iPhoneOS 3.0 support HTML5?

Re:Native Safari playback on iPhone/iTouch?

[beelsebob]

Yes it does, but google serves up a special version that puts you into the youtube app anyway, it's easier to use anyway.

Re:Native Safari playback on iPhone/iTouch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it does, but google serves up a special version that puts you into the youtube app anyway, it's easier to use anyway.

Easier to use, maybe... but it serves content cached on Apple's servers, which seem to frequently time out or have other load issues.

What do they call PDAs nowadays?

[tepples]

if you're still using a PDA then you're a couple generations back anyways.

Not everyone needs a cellular radio and a 2-year contract. What is the latest popular term for a smartphone that can make calls only over Wi-Fi? A "smartpod touch"?

Netbooks all have H.264 hardware acceleration

I'd like to know where you got this information.

Re:What do they call PDAs nowadays?

[Anonymous Coward]

|What is the latest popular term for a smartphone that can make calls only over Wi-Fi? A "smartpod touch"?

An anachronism? :-)

Re:What do they call PDAs nowadays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not everyone needs a cellular radio and a 2-year contract.

True, true, but the GP specifically bemoaned BOTH "my phone and PDA", so he/she DOES have a cellular radio (not sure about the contract), making at least one of the devices superfluous in today's world, so the point still stands.

Re:What do they call PDAs nowadays?

[tepples]

True, true, but the GP specifically bemoaned BOTH "my phone and PDA", so he/she DOES have a cellular radio (not sure about the contract)

I make so few calls that my Virgin Mobile USA bill runs me $5.35 a month. I don't think any smartphone's plan comes anywhere close to that price, and I don't need to be online away from places where I can already get Wi-Fi. So a smartphone isn't for me.

Re:What do they call PDAs nowadays?

[FlyingBishop]

you must be mistaken. Apple does not deal in anachronisms.

Re:What do they call PDAs nowadays?

[hclewk]

Not to mention that if you are going to shell out for the hardware anyway (i.e. buy a PDA), you could just buy the smartphone outright and not get a 2 year contract...

Chromium on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get this to work in Chromium for Linux.

Re:Chromium on Linux

[The Mgt]

You need to install libavcodec-extra-52. It's working for me now.

Re:Chromium on Linux

[The Mgt]

Oops, no it's not. Bugger. It slipped in a flash one to confuse me.

I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Ilgaz]

Flash is already on my Symbian phone and various other platforms. Will HTML5 advocates spare time to non cool (!) platforms to code a codec/driver along with testing thousands of different setups to show their Theora video which is clearly missing 2-3 generations in video codec development compared to H264?

Google, a multi billion giant can roll out a good "quicktime interface" for youtube, can even add extra features to it but it doesn't really mean HTML5 with codecs which nobody can agree will crush Flash.

BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows. I have seen it using almost nothing while playing 1080P video over youtube.

I keep testing Theora and sorry to say, I don't think it will take off unless Google does some amazing thing and make the VP7+ codecs open, free as in freedom. Now that would really change entire media universe. Hopefully they purchased that codec company for that reason.

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[mamer-retrogamer]

BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows.

Great, so if I want decent performance out of one of the most popular internet video services, I am tied to Windows. Yuck.

I think even Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall for Flash. However, if you no longer need Flash to view videos on the web that's just one more reason why you don't need Windows. Luckily for us, Microsoft wants all of us to replace the horrible Flash with the new and improved Microsoft Silverlight. :p

Thanks, but no thanks. I'm one of the ones hoping for HTML5 video to take off.

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5 != Theora. HTML5 is simply (will not that simple!) the mechanism or conduit if you like to the codec. That's why lots of the discussion above is about lack of Firefox support as there is no out of the box support for H.264 in Firefox. I take your point but you have defeated it yourself by comparing theora to H.264.

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Mr. DOS]

BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows.

Yeah I tried that. I had to move back down to 10.0 because while the performance was better, videos looked like crap because hey, guess what, 10.1 doesn't have nice-looking video scaling! I'm sorry, but I'd rather have Flash eat my CPU alive than feel like gouging my eyes out due to uneven pixelation.

      --- Mr. DOS

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows. I have seen it using almost nothing while playing 1080P video over youtube.

That doesn't help me on my home OS X machine or my Linux workstation at work.

Also, will Flash exploits also be GPU accelerated?

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't help me on my home OS X machine or my Linux workstation at work.

People use Linux at work??

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[YouDoNotWantToKnow]

Your Symbian phone has been around for 5+ years. Android and iPhone have been out for almost 2 and Flash still does not work there. This, aside from the obvious software freedom versus proprietary lock-in should be the main reason for switching. I want to play video on my G1 and it is Adobe's fault I can't.

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[nine-times]

to show their Theora video which is clearly missing 2-3 generations in video codec development compared to H264?...Google, a multi billion giant can roll out a good "quicktime interface" for youtube...but it doesn't really mean HTML5 with codecs which nobody can agree will crush Flash... keep testing Theora and sorry to say...

Sorry for the whacky quoting, but I'm just trying to highlight that a few parts of your post seem to imply that Google should be weary about pushing strange formats, but that's not really what's going on anyway. Youtube basically uses h264 encoding for their video right now, and then it plays those videos using Flash as its video player. What the move to HTML does is that is gives you the same h264 encoding, but leaves it up to your browser how to play it. If your browser has a decoder built into it, it can decode the video itself. The browser can also pass the video through to your operating system's default decoder.

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Hal_Porter]

BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows. I have seen it using almost nothing while playing 1080P video over youtube.

Oh wow. I've got an Asus 1005HA netbook. I.e. an Intel 945 graphics chip which I'm pretty sure doesn't have much in the way of video acceleration for H264 - I think it supports iDCTs in hardware but it's not on the list of supported chipsets for hardware acceleration for flash 10.1. Now it uses ~90% CPU but plays smoothly. If you right click on the video there's an Video Info window and you can see it drops a few frames. Still 720p video actually works pretty well - before it was choppy as heck and/or would lose audio synchronisation and now it's actually quite usable.

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[defaria]

I would use Flash 10.1 if they had a 64 bit version that worked worth a damn!

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Anonymous Coward]

This is fixed in 10.2

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[HigH5]

BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows. I have seen it using almost nothing while playing 1080P video over youtube.

Wow, that's really sensible, throwing hardware solutions against software that acts like cancer in the web ecosystem since its inception.

Re:I wouldn't want a HTML5 only Web now

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone else puts their sig in the sig field, not sure why you put your sig in the body? Fix that.

Still no good

[FunkyELF]

When I go on digg.com/videos and see a Top 10 XYZ videos of 2009, there will still be 10 embedded flash players on that page and will bring my system to its knees. This is only good for viewing youtube.com and not for people who embed stuff.

Re:Still no good

[samkass]

On the Mac/Safari I use ClickToFlash, which turns off auto-run on all Flash content and lets you click specific flash panels if you want to run them. (It also adds a menu selection to let you turn on all Flash for a given page or override the settings for a given site.) Further, it can recognize YouTube URLs and redirect you from the Flash to the h.264 if available. That single feature is worth more than any speed increase in any other browser... hopefully it spreads.

I disapprove of ad-blocking software since I believe there's an implied contract between web page consumers and the funding models of the providers, but I don't have a problem with blocking particular proprietary content delivery mechanisms.

Re:Still no good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well aren't you detective obvious.

Re:Still no good

[Anonymous Coward]

In the firefox world, we've got Flashblock -- same thing, and I wouldn't run without it. It doesn't have the youtube redirection thing, though -- that requires a separate add-on, which I don't have installed on most machines since I scarcely ever watch youtube.

Chrome and Safari?

[NotPeteMcCabe]

This has to be the first truly-large-scale website that came out with a new feature for Chrome and Safari first. I guess the new "Apple vs. Google for control of the world" thing hasn't kicked in yet.

Re:Chrome and Safari?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever think it has to do with the underlying technologies (Webkit) powering the browser?

Re:Chrome and Safari?

[pclminion]

You're surprised that a Google-owned megasite adds support for a Google-made browser off the starting line? What else surprises you?

Hmm..

[user53]

Should be a good news I guess...

Mod parent troll

[FlyingBishop]

Mozilla cannot legally support H264 without releasing a closed-source version of Firefox.

Re:Mod parent troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, they can include closed source components without compromising their browser's source code. How do you think the NVIDIA driver under Linux works?

Re:Mod parent troll

[Yvan256]

Mozilla can't embed VLC?

Re:Mod parent troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla cannot legally support H264 (in the us) without releasing a closed-source version of Firefox. Maybe it's time for a EuroFox "fork"

Re:Mod parent troll

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Yes they can! All the have to do is wrap the platform native playback capabilities (or one of them on Linux). Every major platform has a media framework that can be made to support h.264.

Re:Mod parent troll

[cheesybagel]

Great. Another buggy plugin with crash bugs that do not get fixed. Just like Flash.

Re:Mod parent troll

[tepples]

Every major platform has a media framework that can be made to support h.264.

Wii doesn't, with its 0.73 GHz CPU and its slow software release process.

Re:Mod parent troll

[Ash-Fox]

Mozilla can't embed VLC?

VLC is not legal in the USA. Software patents and all that.

Plugin/Add-on?

[JSBiff]

So, why not a closed-source plugin? Why would they need to close the entire browser source code just to support a video codec which should be able to be punted into a loadable library?

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[Ken_g6]

Adobe already released a closed-source plugin to play H.264. It's called Flash Player.

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[Anonymous Coward]

A plugin wouldn't even have to be closed source as long as they can find someone to shell out the licensing fees.

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[nine-times]

Because the problem isn't the openness of the code, it's the licensing fees required for creating an h264 decoder. There are already an open source h264 decoder that you can download, but legally someone is supposed to be paying a licensing fee.

So the problem is this: Should Firefox include something in their browser that will require them to pay a licensing fee for each copy they distribute? Will that then mean that Linux distributions will drop Firefox as the default browser anyway?

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[JSBiff]

Personally, I'd be willing to drop something reasonable, like, say, $1.99 one-time to buy a license to use an H.264 codec (as long as it was of sufficient quality and did things like taking advantage of available hardware acceleration features of my CPU and GPU). I prefer open source, but I also accept that a lot of R&D, and Engineering went into creating H.264, and I don't mind paying a *reasonable* fee for something like that. I'm sure RMS would disagree, but I've always disagreed with RMS, and as long as the browser itself can stay open source, I'm ok with a proprietary plugin.

(Although, not Flash, specifically - I'd really like to get away from the Flash model (where everyone is locked to a single vendor/implementation, and towards the <video> tag model, where there can be competing implementations, but that's more of a free market/open standards ideology than a Free Software dogma).

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[nine-times]

Well essentially you probably did pay some kind of a licensing fee, but it's just hidden. Everyone who has bought Windows 7 or OSX has paid the fee in a fairly direct manner: you pay Apple or Microsoft, and they pay the fee. It's a little trickier with Google, but essentially you've paid via ad-views.

But that's not the problem, really. It's not exactly that you, as a user, pay for a licensing fee once and then you're covered for any h264 decoder you want to use. I believe the licensing fee is directed at software developers and they have to pay for each copy of the decoder that they distribute. Therefore, whenever someone downloads Firefox, Mozilla would have to pay some fee. Linux distributions, assuming they included a decoder, would also have to pay a fee. Now theoretically they could also work out some kind of an alternative licensing deal, but still, they would have to be the ones to paying patent licensing fees. Since they don't make money for each copy they distribute, this would present a problem for cash-strapped open source projects.

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[JSBiff]

I think you're missing my point. I'm not asking Mozilla to make free distribution of H.264 and to pay the licensing agent on my behalf for what I get for free. I'm saying, why not distribute the browser and the plugin seperately. So, first I download and install Firefox. Then, I go to YouTube, or some other site with video, and I get directed to a page where I can buy and download the plugin for h.264.

What's the problem with that?

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[Bert64]

Better would be for Firefox to utilise a native video decoding library provided by the underlying OS...

Windows has Directshow...
OSX has Quicktime...
Linux could use Gstreamer, mplayer, ffmpeg or several others...

Then the browser wouldn't technically be supporting any codec, and could use whatever codecs the underlying OS had support for.

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[nine-times]

No problem with that. You should already be able to do that with a 3rd party plugin.

Sorry, I was thinking in terms of the whole thread, starting with, "You can't use it in firefox because mozilla refuses to support H.264". Mozilla isn't going to bundle h264 support in the browser, but it's not an open-source/closed-source problem and it has nothing to do with your willingness to pay. It has to do with their unwillingness to pay a licensing fee per download.

Mozilla could rely on 3rd party plug-ins, or they could do what Apple does in Safari and basically pass decoding duties back to the OS, thereby avoiding responsibility for deciding which codecs to support. Either of those seem reasonable to me.

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's doing quite well actually.

While the various parties concerned disagree over html5, meaning that as a viable solution for video it is years off, like it or not flash goes from strength to strength , just today check out...

http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/?2010-01-20/Fox-Switches-from-Move-to-Flash-ABC-Plans-Transition-Too/&id=2404

Re:Plugin/Add-on?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Windows has Directshow...
OSX has Quicktime...
Linux could use Gstreamer, mplayer, ffmpeg or several others...

Aren't these already supported by Firefox/plug-ins?

Maybe just the HTML5 video tag needs to get wired up? (or does that work already?)

No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Firefox video tag is free formats only. Tools like mplayer are a cesspool of security holes— they aren't designed to be exposed to hostile content. The video tag requires pretty deep browser integration, ... only apple supports using the native infrastructure and even they disable 99% of their features for security reasons (e.g. try a mov with hyperlinks in it).

Mozilla is committed to an open web, and you can't get their with a wink and a nod and asking users to install codec software which is illegal everywhere in the developed world. (Including europe. I'm so tired of seeing people characterized codec licensing as a US thing— there are more European patents on codecs than US patents)

Re:No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only

[Spad]

Technically, the European parents aren't legally enforceable as there is currently no provision for patenting software (even though the EPO accepts applications for and issues such patents) within the EU.

Re:No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only

[omnichad]

If the OS includes the codec it doesn't matter. They handled the embed and object tags just fine. Uses Windows Media Player on Windows, and Quicktime Player on the Mac.

Re:No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only

[funkatron]

Mozilla will be made to support actual video content. Just give me time to learn the extensions API.

Also, stop acting like anyone actully cares about the legal status of codecs. If anyone did then ffmpeg, vlc, etc would not exist. The only important issue here is if the video works when I go to youtube.

Re:No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only

[Randle_Revar]

Epiphany, at least, uses GStreamer.

Re:No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only

[eihab]

Also, stop acting like anyone actully cares about the legal status of codecs. If anyone did then ffmpeg, vlc, etc would not exist.

I thought VLC, ffmepg and others are going to be in trouble if the EU legalized software patents. That leads me to believe that they (VLC, ffmpeg, et al) are based in Europe or somehow are able to use the lack of software patents there to their advantage.

Brief quote from VLC's press release:

The end draws near...

VideoLAN is seriously threatened by software patents due to the numerous patented techniques it implements and uses. Also threatened are the many libraries and projects which VLC is built upon, like FFmpeg, and the other fellow Free And Open Source software multimedia players, which include MPlayer, xine, Freevo, MythTV, gstreamer.

Re:No. Firefox is Ogg/Theora + Vorbis only

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect.

Codec patents are not "software patents", even though theycan read on a computer running particular software. A "Software patent" is a very specific thing, the fine distinctions of which are mostly interesting to patent attorneys, and mostly not understood by Slashdot users. The best lay description of a software patent that I can come up with is an patent on an abstract idea with no mechanical element at all. Most codec patents, instead, specify particular transformations on data by machines. The patents are granted and enforceable in Europe, and have been widely and aggressively enforced. A random example.

A typical codec patent is hyper specific-- specify exact bit orderings and exact operations on the bits. Patenting the more abstract behaviours in a codecs would require software patents, which lack the universality (and ease of getting granted) of the more mundane normal patents. This usually makes it trivial to work around most codec patents-- So long as you don't care about bit-stream compatibility. This, in part, explains the near complete lack of litigation of codec developers against each other.

Works great in my side by side comparison

[jschen]

Using Safari/OSX (latest version of each) on a first generation Core2 Duo laptop (2.33 GHz), I tried watching the same video (containing no ads, annotations, etc) at the same size using both the default Flash option and the beta HTML5 option. CPU use was a steady 33-34% during playback in Flash. A steady 12-13% in HTML5. Seems like a winner to me.

Re:Works great in my side by side comparison

[gazbo]

I've tried in in Chrome/WinXP, and the HTML5 version is absolute crap. No significant difference in CPU usage (but as both never get above about 5% it's hard to tell), but the HTML5 version looks awful. The video is completely blocky - small blocks, mind, but so sharply defined that it looks like the video has been painted on canvas.

I suspect the actual amount of detail in the pictures is the same, but the way it's smoothed in the Flash version looks a hell of a lot better than how Chrome handles it. It's even worse in motion, because the size and type of artifact changes depending on whether areas are moving, unlike the Flash version which is consistent.

Presumably it's just different options being passed to the 264 codec, but without any obvious way for me to change them it's verging on painful to watch.

Re:Works great in my side by side comparison

[jones_supa]

I've tried in in Chrome/WinXP, and the HTML5 version is absolute crap. No significant difference in CPU usage (but as both never get above about 5% it's hard to tell), but the HTML5 version looks awful. The video is completely blocky - small blocks, mind, but so sharply defined that it looks like the video has been painted on canvas.

I get the darn blocks in the Linux version of Chrome too. There's maybe a slight improvement in CPU usage but it's still too high for a good video player. It should be quite on par with something like mplayer.

A proper video overlay should also be used to avoid colorspace conversion in software, which creates this major slowdown when using Flash. Maybe even follow vsync to avoid tearing.

Well, this is all beta stuff anyway. The new player's UI is quite snappy.

Re:Works great in my side by side comparison

[jschen]

Presumably it's just different options being passed to the 264 codec, but without any obvious way for me to change them it's verging on painful to watch.

Are there actually different options to pass on? Seems to me that it's probably just different quality implementations of the codec. In my case, the results looked the same. As they should, since it's the same video being sent, in the same format. Just to a different player. If both players work correctly, the results should be indistinguishable.

Re:Works great in my side by side comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's due to http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26536

Re:Works great in my side by side comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be a Chrome or Windows problem. The html5 and flash videos look just about the same using Safari on my Mac.

Re:Works great in my side by side comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you try playing those full screen? I couldn't figure out how to do that. They're all letterboxed**2 and not full-screen.

Re:Works great in my side by side comparison

[jschen]

Full screen isn't supported yet. I definitely will try it once it's supported.

Now all we need...

[Hurricane78]

...is the Firefox team to get over themselves, and integrate ffmpeg, for instant support of every format out there!

But I bet they will bitch and scream again, mentioning some “non-freeness” of H.264, despite nobody having cared about GIF support or anything, and ffmpeg being free and with H.264 support.

I hope Google tells them: Either you support it, or the money deal ends right now.

Re:Now all we need...

[BZ]

> and ffmpeg being free and with H.264 support

Free in what sense? You can use their code in your code. Your code would then not be able to be distributed to users unless you pay the relevant patent licensing fees. The Mozilla Corporation could do that, but then any other Firefox distributors (e.g. Linux distributions) would not be able to distribute Firefox without either removing this functionality or paying the relevant patent licensing fees. Anyone doing a custom build of Firefox and distributing it could be sued by MPEG-LA to recover the money due them.

Effectively, Firefox stops being "free" for practical intents and purposes. It's still "open source", but the only thing you can really do is contribute patches back to the main repository, unless you pay up the patent fees.

That's not exactly a desirable situation. We might end up there, but as a first cut trying to avoid it is a good thing.

Re:Now all we need...

[bill_mcgonigle]

But I bet they will bitch and scream again, mentioning some "non-freeness" of H.264, despite nobody having cared about GIF support or anything, and ffmpeg being free and with H.264 support.

In many jurisdictions, ffmpeg is only Free as in Beer, not Free as in Speech. Firefox doesn't want to give up broad international distribution or its corporate status.

Re:Now all we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope Google tells them: Either you support it, or the money deal ends right now.

Google can't and won't do that. They can't because they have a contract with Mozilla to pay the money in return for being the default search engine in Firefox, however they might be able to force it when the contract comes up for renewal. They won't because they have their own browser to push this with, and their motto is "don't be evil", forcing Mozilla to do what they say could be perceived as being evil.

Fud fud fud fud

[Anonymous Coward]

Theorarm decodes Theora full screen video at about 110 FPS on my jailbroken iphone. The hardware support thing for h264 is mostly an issue because of h264's utterly obscene cpu consumption, Theora is much more thrifty. The "doesn't work" thing is entirely manufactured by the device makers (e.g. Apple) having a direct monetary interest on a format that they get royalties for being adopted.

Mozilla doesn't just refuse. Legal licensing of the codec would be 10% of their annual budget. Do you really want 10% of Mozilla's budget to just be flushed on a single media codec? (and then more needed for AAC.). For that kind of money Mozilla could employ an entire codec development team.

WHy?

[Tibia1]

I don't know anything about html5 and whether it will be good or not, but why is it that all the videos I watch in "high quality" still look like shit. Is there an option I forgot to check?

Re:WHy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'touch yourself at night' option should be UNCHECKED, but you have to perform a task to get the box out of the locked state so you can uncheck it.

Stop touching yourself at night, then try again.

Sure makes downloading easy...

[joetomato]

I know there are programs / firefox extensions to download + convert videos off youtube, but this just makes it too damn easy. Especially since you're already using Chrome - right click on the video, choose Inspect Element. It opens the page source, and finds the URL of the video for you. Copy to clipboard, paste to address bar, and it downloads a suprisingly high quality .mp4 - no conversion or crappy flash video players neccesary. Keep up the good work YouTube.

Re:Sure makes downloading easy...

[tlhIngan]

I know there are programs / firefox extensions to download + convert videos off youtube, but this just makes it too damn easy. Especially since you're already using Chrome - right click on the video, choose Inspect Element. It opens the page source, and finds the URL of the video for you. Copy to clipboard, paste to address bar, and it downloads a suprisingly high quality .mp4 - no conversion or crappy flash video players neccesary. Keep up the good work YouTube.

All the much better I say. Especially since the h.264 videos off Youtube are the high-quality high-def ones.

Not that downloading videos was especially hard - using Live HTTP Headers you can easily see the URLs of the videos. Interesting thing is that the FLV low quality versions are trivially downloaded (just wget the flv URL - the one with video/x-flv as MIME type), but the high-quality (video/mp4) ones require a referer header.

Re:Exterminate all Mudslums

[Hal_Porter]

My religion isn't nuts. For a limited time only I'm offering the introductory course for a mere $99.

crashes chrome on linux HARD...

[deander2]

crashes chrome on linux HARD...

Re:crashes chrome on linux HARD...

[m0i]

crashes chrome on linux HARD...

Which is it? chrome only (so it is not HARD) or the whole system (meaning it could well be X/the display driver that bring the system down).

Re:crashes chrome on linux HARD...

[VMaN]

Neither for me, works flawlessly.

Not a bandwidth issue

[Anonymous Coward]

http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html

Youtube's H264 is far from what a good H264 encoder can do, and youtube already offers at least one alternative which is clearly inferior to Theora.

It's not like anyone is demanding that google ditch h264. They already offer 8 or 9 copies of every video, people are just asking them to support one or two more.

h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[RulerOf]

A couple questions... h264 offers fantastic quality at 1080p in a size that fits on a DVD9, but it also offers quality superior to previous generation codecs for 480i/p video in a size that fits a 1 hour show onto a single CD. What is the current generation FOSS alternative that does the same?

Second, if h264 needs to be licensed at such exorbitant prices, how do x264, VLC, and MPC-HC do it?

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[slimjim8094]

By not licensing it?

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[spyrochaete]

Is there really any demand to burn Youtube videos to DVDs in 1080p? Sounds to me like Google picked an inappropriate codec for their medium. Perhaps they chose it simply to drive a wedge between their Chrome browser which supports this codec, and IE and Firefox which do not.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[slim]

From the VLC FAQ:

Is VLC legal in all countries?
Probably not. Specially DeCSS module might violate DMCA (and similar laws) and some codecs would require licenses for personal/commercial use. There haven't been any court cases related to VLC but specially companies should make sure they pay license fees to license holders if they use VLC commercially and use patented formats or codecs.

Essentially the licence is not for implementing the codec, but for using it. If you use VLC to encode video, then broadcast that video (including on the Web), then at least in some countries, you have to pay the patent holders.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[hullabalucination]

Second, if h264 needs to be licensed at such exorbitant prices, how do x264, VLC, and MPC-HC do it?

I don't know about MPC-HC, but x264 (which is the h264-compatible codec used in VLC) is a cleanroom reverse-engineering job. So, it's technically not h264. Just very compatible. And it's GPL'd. However, we now have the question of why the Mozilla folks aren't supporting a GPL'd codec. I'm guessing because there are possible legal patent-related issues surrounding a reverse-engineered codec like x264.

Doing a bit more searching, we find this:

http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/05/videolan_x264_e.php

x264 is a free library for encoding H.264/AVC video streams. x246 has features such as CABAC and DirectShow encoding. It is released under the terms of the GPL, but this license is incompatible with the MPEG-LA patent licenses in jurisdictions that recognize software patents.

* * * * *

Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect. —Stephen Wright

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[RulerOf]

Essentially the licence is not for implementing the codec, but for using it.

So, technically speaking, VLC users that install/use the h264 decoder of libvacodec owe licensing fees?

That's... kinda funny.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[kcitren]

The issue isn't a specific implementation [which the cleanroom engineering would get around], its about the standard.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[KnownIssues]

What is the current generation FOSS alternative that does the same?

That would be Ogg Theora. Read this Wikipedia article on "Use of Ogg Formats in HTML5" on why it didn't remain a recommnedation in the HTML5 spec. Read this article on Theora on the debate over whether Theora has the same quality as H.264.

You can form your own theory on why a patent-free open-source product that exists hasn't gained prominence over propriety formats, but here's one AppleInsider writer's opinion.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[hullabalucination]

I disagree. Discussions about a "standard" are moot if legal, non-encumbered implementations are unavailable for a considerable subset of users. Which seems to be the Mozilla team's stance.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[nxtw]

x264 (which is the h264-compatible codec used in VLC)

x264 is only an encoder for the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. It does not handle decoding.

is a cleanroom reverse-engineering job. So, it's technically not h264. Just very compatible

Citation definitely needed. The project calls itself a H.264/AVC encoder.

I'm guessing because there are possible legal patent-related issues surrounding a reverse-engineered codec like x264.

Being implemented through reverse-engineering doesn't matter. Anyway, it seems the specification is freely downloadable.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[hullabalucination]

x264 is only an encoder for the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. It does not handle decoding.

Doesn't make an iota of difference what decodes your video, if you're not legally allowed to encode it in your jurisdiction using a patent-encumbered codec in the first place.

Citation definitely needed. The project calls itself a H.264/AVC encoder [videolan.org].

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1500342/h264-decoder-source-code

Being implemented through reverse-engineering doesn't matter. Anyway, it seems the specification is freely downloadable [itu.int].

The specs for FAT32 are available, too. Didn't seem to do TomTom much good, did it?

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/firmware/fatgen.mspx

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[nxtw]

Doesn't make an iota of difference what decodes your video, if you're not legally allowed to encode it in your jurisdiction using a patent-encumbered codec in the first place.

You called x264 a codec. It is not a codec; it is an encoder.
Furthermore, it is completely legal to encode video with a patent-encumbered encoder if you have a license to do so.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1500342/h264-decoder-source-code [stackoverflow.com]

It says "clean room implementation from the specs". This is not the same as "reverse engineering" as you claimed twice. Furthermore, stackoverflow is hardly a reliable source for this kind of thing.

The specs for FAT32 are available, too. Didn't seem to do TomTom much good, did it?

I didn't make any claim about the specs being freely available meaning anything with regards to patent licensing.
Since I was questioning your erroneous claim of x264 being "reverse engineered", I provided the link to the freely downloadable H.264 specification to demonstrate that reverse engineering would be unnecessary.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[hullabalucination]

OK, you make good points. Although I'm not sure that the x264 library qualifies as a complete "encoder" (stream output functions?) but it's close enough.

Furthermore, it is completely legal to encode video with a patent-encumbered encoder if you have a license to do so.

But this gets back to the whole point of the thread. In fact, the x264 team does not have a license (from MPEG-LA) to the h264 IP according to all accounts that I can find. They released under their own, separate (GPL) license. And, according to posts on the x264 developer's list, a practical, real-world usage in patent-honoring jurisdictions would require adherence to both licenses, according to Alex Izvorski:

However (and this is an extremely important and possibly confusing point) the patent license for H264 is *completely separate* from the copyright license for x264. You need both; you need to comply with the terms of both; if one says you can do something and the other says you can't, then you can't.

Re:h264 being "not open" confuses me...

[dave420]

Theora's PSNR is not as good as H.264s, so no, they're not comparable. The FFMpeg tests that showed it was better were flawed due to a bug in FFmpeg. People don't want to make do with second best just because it's free. They want the best even if it has patent issues. The product hasn't gained popular, widespread support because it's not as good as the other kids on the block. It's getting better, but people aren't going to start supporting a codec that will, some time in the future, be as good as other codecs are today.

Bad example

[WiiVault]

Just wanted to chime in. The site you showed pretty much proved his point. There is no competition if that is actually where they are both at Theora looks drastically worse.

Crap

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

I just opted in with IE and on my P4-M 2.6 GHz XP laptop HTML5 on a non-HD, non-HQ video was significantly worse than in FF with flash. The playback was 'stuttery' and the sound was not in sync.

Re:Exterminate all Mudslums

[thomasdz]

All religions are nuts.

my God is currently using His noodly appendages to fire a meatball of death upon you for this blasphemy

So, how is this better than Flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading the request was for "Support HTML5 open web video with open formats" not just "Support HTML5"

So now we have HTML5 with a closed video format which Firefox and other free browsers are never likely to support.

We've already seen comments on how Adobe is beginning to use the GPU for video decoding. So, remind me, how this is any better than the existing situation with Flash?

Missing fullscreen

[AlpineR]

Fullscreen is not supported.

I've yet to encounter a caption, ad, or annotation that I'd miss. But a lack of fullscreen is a big loss.

Re:Exterminate all Mudslums

[Anonymous Coward]

their profit

ooohhh kay! not surprised that idiots don't know how to spell.

What ads...?

[cayenne8]

"I find adverts the most annoying "feature", and it's not just because they are adverts.

If you're watching a video in full screen mode in Youtube, the advert flashes up. Move your mouse to kill the ad and the video stalls, but the audio carries on playing. "

What are these ads you and others keep mentioning. I've never seen and ad on YouTube...??

This isn't HTML5

[Baloo Uriza]

If it was HTML5, it would be supporting Ogg Theora, not the crap Apple's offering.

Re:This isn't HTML5

[nemesisrocks]

I think you misunderstand. The HTML5 standard does not specify a codec to be used in the <video> tag; just like the standards don't specify what image formats are to be used in the <img> tag.

Arguing that "it's not HTML5" because your browser (presumably, firefox) doesn't support h.264 would be no different to an Internet Explorer user saying "it's not HTML4.1" when a website uses PNG images.

Crappy webcams ? Do they need H264 ?!?

[DrYak]

Well technically yes. Theora produce slightly more blurry frames for an equivalent bitrate.

Now the big question: do we *really* need the added quality of H.264 ?
For fuck's sake, it's Youtube we're speaking about.
The website filled with small home-made video done using crappy webcams. Or feature botched TV-grabs. Where the people who upload video don't actually really have a clue about codecs and thus their creations have been through several conversions, each time with the corresponding drop of quality.

Arguing whether H264 or OGG/Theora is better for streaming HTML5 videos means arguing which codec will be the best to faithfully convey all the artefacts contained in video produced by clueless users. Given the average, both formats are already*good enough*. In fact the older MPEG-4/DivX/Xvid would probably be already good enough.

We're not talking about the best way to bring 1080p commercial movies to Youtube, we're talking about videos of dancing kittens filmed with a smart-phone's embed cam.

What was that last part?

[Dr. Hellno]

Captions, ads, and annotations aren't yet supported

Sounds like paradise.

There's a huge elephant in the room....

[OMGcAPSLOCK]

....and that is that HTML5 video has apparently done nothing to address the CPU usage issues I was having with flash video. On OS X 10.5.8 HTML5 video playback on Youtube is *at least* as much of a resource hog as Flash. I was seeing my quad core system routinely hitting 100%+ CPU usage during playback of videos, where I'd usually expect around 85-90% with Flash. I was really holding out for this being the answer to my perpetual Youtube headaches. Good job I didn't hold my breath.

browser and multimedia are very different animals

[Ilgaz]

I really wonder if browser vendors can really code multimedia cores especially targeted for real life situations, advertising to begin with... Also one way or another, DRM will be required by some content providers, does W3C has a plan for implementing a multi platform DRM?

What about GPU decoding? All GPUs post directx 9 later has H264/MP4 SP and even VC1 decoding on chip. It is _not_ a hack, it is unused, idling part of GPU because of stupid childish fights between GPU vendors and OS developers. Adobe has stated Linux and OS X doesn't have stable API but Windows has. I don't really want to believe them on that case but if it is true, I can't picture browser vendors doing a totally unrelated coding. Video isn't really trivial 320x240 plain mpeg 1 files anymore, users expect flawless 1080p (yes, p!) and overall low CPU usage.

BTW; I am not saying Adobe is the best ever mmedia developer ever, in fact, they really suck and they are stupid/cheap not to license actual working decoders from folks like 3ivx, core codec.