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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."
The three most annoying features of YouTube won't display? Where do I sign?
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.
Where are the open codecs that everyone was begging for?
This could be good. If only you could use it in Firefox, maybe it's time to try out Chrome.
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 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.
I'm sure FF support is coming one way or the other.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Should be a good news I guess...
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.
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?
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)
Yes it does, but google serves up a special version that puts you into the youtube app anyway, it's easier to use anyway.
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.
...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.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
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
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?
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.
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echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
crashes chrome on linux HARD...
http://kered.org
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"?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
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:
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.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
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.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
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.
There are two ways FF could be supported: Google could add Theora, or they could free VP8 and switch to that.
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my God is currently using His noodly appendages to fire a meatball of death upon you for this blasphemy
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
probably not twice as much. maybe 1.5 times or so.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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?
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
That comparison is ancient. Theora has come a long way since then.
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.
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.
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.
You need to install libavcodec-extra-52. It's working for me now.
Oops, no it's not. Bugger. It slipped in a flash one to confuse me.
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
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?
Firefox has 25% of the browser market. That's not an edge case.
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...??
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
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.
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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.
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
Captions, ads, and annotations aren't yet supported
Sounds like paradise.
It is when supporting them requires 1.5x their current storage. In that case, those browsers are shit out of luck.
....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.
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.
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.