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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."
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.
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.
Mozilla cannot legally support H264 without releasing a closed-source version of Firefox.
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.
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.
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
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).
have you been defaced today?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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.