Vimeo Also Introduces HTML5 Video Player

bonch writes "Following in YouTube's footsteps, Vimeo has now introduced its own beta HTML5 video player, and like YouTube, it uses H.264 and requires Safari, Chrome, or ChromeFrame. The new player doesn't suffer the rebuffering problems of the Flash version when clicking around in the video's timeline, and it also loads faster. HTML5 could finally be gaining some real momentum."

Comments

Excellent.

[Khyber]

Now if only FireFox will get support.

Re:Excellent.

[Winckle]

This is a big thing for me. I don't give a damn about their ideology or their patent concerns, if youtube choose h264 then h264 has won this mini format war, and firefox better swallow their pride and licence it.

If they don't, i'll end up on chrome for windows, and I already use Safari on mac because their mac UI team are atrocious.

Re:Excellent.

[Korin43]

Honestly, as much as I'd like to stop using Flash immediately, I'd rather have Mozilla try to stick this out. Somewhere around a third of all people on the internet use Firefox (and I assume a higher number of Youtube users). If Mozilla can push Google to support Theora it will be worth the wait.

Re:Excellent.

[smash]

Everybody transcoding their videos = not going to happen.

If firefox do not support H.264, they're going to become irrelevant as far as video goes.

Re:Excellent.

[smash]

Google has no incentive to go theora either, as it means transcoding all their stuff - and they clearly already have a h.264 license anyway.

The authoring tools for .ogg are not there either.

So really, open source people can whine all they want, it will make no difference - Firefox can buy a license, or they can become irrelevant. Or maybe start their own video hosting to compete, but my bet is that will be more expensive than a h.264 license.

Or hell, they can just use whatever codecs are available on the host platform.... and get back to what they should be worried about - writing a web browser, rather than getting involved in a codec war they have no chance winning

Re:Excellent.

[javilon]

This will of course benefit ChromeOS and will force Microsoft into implementing html5 and H264 negating its strategy of killing adobe and becoming king of the online video.

But there is a bad smell about this. Google could achieve this as well by adding Theora to the supported codecs. Google is putting Firefox in a position where it is either encumbered with patents therefore losing the status of "pure" open source project, or looking bad in the feature front. I don't like this.

Re:Excellent.

[bill_mcgonigle]

and firefox better swallow their pride and licence it.

Why should they license it when an embeddable player is available on every OS with noticeable marketshare?

They just need to enable the HTML5 video tag to use that. Oddly enough I couldn't find this bug at BMO with a quick search.

Re:Excellent.

[smash]

Or firefox could have.... a plugin architecture for whatever codec the user likes, preventing us from being stuck with some shitty 2010 codec technology 5 years from now.

Re:Excellent.

[Dr. Spork]

Also, Ogg Theora is just less good than h264 on several levels. For one thing, there are hardware decoders for h264, but more importantly for me, h264 just indisputably looks better. Seriously, in this grudge match of Firefox v. Google (and now others), Firefox is on the losing side. I hope the developers realize this soon. Maybe Google is not intervening because they're happy to let people say "fuck it, I guess I'll try it with Chrome" - as I'm about to.

Re:Excellent.

[master5o1]

How does using HTML5 + H.264 negate their attempt to draw people away from Flash for video? It just doesn't aide their Silverlight efforts.

Re:Excellent.

[CowboyBob500]

And a majority of that third live outside the jurisdiction of the US patent system so the license issue becomes moot. Personally I'd rather the rest of the world stick 2 fingers up at the US system and continue to use browsers that support H.264 and don't pay any patent licenses to anyone.

For example, why not make a US and non-US version of Firefox with the non-US version having H.264 support. US people will still manage to get the working version and Firefox will still have the required support.

Re:Excellent.

[Goaway]

Mostly it seems Mozilla just do not want to support anything but Theora, and they're making up weak excuses for why they shouldn't use platform libraries to play video.

I sure hope they grow out of it soon.

Re:Adobe...

[MrNaz]

Don't. IE will not support HTML5 for many years, if history is anything to go by, making Flash at least a fallback requirement for any remotely popular video site for the forseable future.

Here that wooshing sound, Firefox?

[Endymion]

That's the sound of you getting passed by.

I'm a total GNU fanboy most days, and generally agree with the moral move they are trying to make with OOG formats, but in this case it is a losing strategy. H264 video has gotten a momentum that is hard to break, similar to how MP3 got a momentum in the past. It has nothing to do with technical features, morals, licensing, or other commonly-argued things. Instead, it's about a critical-mass of popularity. H264 video the new pop thing, even in cases where people don't even know terms like "H264".

By not finding a way to make video work properly, Firefox is saying they want to be left behind. No, I highly doubt people like google or others will re-encode video into Theora. They will make the business decision that not only is it a lot of work, it's not necessary as firefox is supported with Flash.

If the Firefox people want to make a good moral stand with this issue, they should pull something similar to the crypto situation and make an "international" version. That version could serve as an embarrassment to the restrictive patent system, and a useful political talking point. At a minimum, though, they should simply remove all codec processing form the project, leaving that particular can of worms to an external project (gstreamer? embed mplayer/vlc/other? some new project created specifically for this purpose?).

I love firefox. I really do. So please don't choose to be non-player in the video arena!

Re:Here that wooshing sound, Firefox?

[Endymion]

that WOULD be an improvement over what they are doing now, which is to simply not play anything!

The proper response, though, is not to put up some sort of error message, but to use an external solution such as mplayer, ffplay, vlc, gstreamer, or whatever, and make it "someone else's problem".

Chrome up and coming is an even bigger issue because of this. If it works well with youtube, and firefox doesn't, then firefox will lose dramatic market share to Chrome.

Re:Here that wooshing sound, Firefox?

[Rocketship Underpant]

I agree 100%. Mathematical algorithm patents are not recognized in most countries outside the US, so make an international Firefox version that only visitors who claim to be outside the US can download.

Re:Adobe...

[Toonol]

And you can't write videogames in HTML5. Flash will be around for a while.

The real problem with Flash, stupid menu widgets, irritating ads, and non-html website frontpages, won't disappear until sites can recreate equally annoying equivalents via some other method.

Re:Adobe...

[.tekrox]

Javascript.

Don't whine that it's slow - Chrome, Opera, Safari and Recently firefox now have very fast javascript engines.
Don't whine its not powerful enough - ActionScript (Flash Scripting) is Javascript. And Flash isn't very quick at interpreting it either...

Re:Google already transcodes...

[smash]

It would be "1 more" transcode that makes no business sense.

Look, ditching h.264 is simply not going to happen. there are way too many hardware devices out there that do h.264 and no ogg. All I'm hearing is bitching from the firefox camp about how they're not going to support it for reason X rather than looking for a solution to the problem.

Simply not supporting h.264 is an option, sure. I just don't think its going to end well for firefox.

AS to host code not being exposed to the web... run it with least privilege in a sandbox. My bet is that any copy of theora embedded into the browser is exactly the same reference code as used else where in any case (and if its, not, then its not as well tested...), so that point is pretty moot.

The 2 are linked

[DrYak]

Because HTML5 + VIDEO tag draws people away *from Flash* and *into an open standard* that can be found everywhere.
What Microsoft would have liked would be, drawing people away from Flash and *into one of their own proprietary* technology, marketed as much better.

The core strategy of Microsoft is not just killing random IT companies for the fun of it (although it's not always obvious), but killing other companies in order to get bigger themselves in the process.

Silverlight is their optimal solution to lock more customer in Microsoft solutions.
HTML5 is their nightmare.