Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla's VP of Engineering On H.264
We recently discussed news that YouTube and Vimeo are each testing their own HTML5 video players using the H.264 format. Firefox does not support H.264, and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, has now made a post explaining why. Quoting: "For Mozilla, H.264 is not currently a suitable technology choice. In many countries, it is a patented technology, meaning that it is illegal to use without paying license fees to the MPEG-LA. Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded content. Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010. These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content." Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan has written a blog post on the same subject, following a talk he gave on Friday about the importance of open video on the web.
Didn't read the article then?
It's mostly just problem for Mozilla
Only if people insist on using it. I can't see that it would be in YouTube's interest to use H.264 exclusively.
But in any case, it sounds like a misnomer to call it "HTML5 Video", which sort of implies a standard. If the "standard" involves coughing up a whacking great licence fee to use it, lots of people just won't be interested, and H.264 will be consigned to the same back shelves as some of the ogg codecs.
Apple already has decoders that are properly licensed in QuickTime, so all they have to do is use those in Safari. A technology Firefox can use as well with plugins.
And yet even with a perfectly legitimate, reasonable, intelligent argument against H.264, tons of /. comments will go against FF's decision to promote an open, free (for everyone, not just the end users) and sane video standard over a proprietary one, ensuring that only people with lots of money can create browsers, run video sites, etc.
It's pretty damn simple, yet no one gets it. Just like seemingly everything else these days. Misguided loyalty to one thing because it's been promoted to the end users by those with lots of money as being "obviously" superior wins out over good things simply because people don't want to use common sense and for some reason trust people/companies with greedy motivations simply because of the idea of "they are famous and rich, they must know what's best for me".
Mozilla doesn't have to implement anything, just make the video plugin architecture extensible. Otherwise sites will just push other browsers which do implement H264, or will use plugins like Silverlight / Flash to render the content anyway in Firefox.
Remember that Opera proposed video element in the first place and they've chosen Theora from the start. They're not fond of patents, and may not want to choose H.264, especially if Mozilla doesn't.
Ugh, quicktime ... I'd even rather have flash.
Just throw a DirectShow interface at the video player and quit shipping codecs.
Let the user decide what codecs they want to install and allow the sites to choose what encoding mechanisms they wish to use.
Not everyone requires free software. Some are prepared to pay a reasonable price for a product they select.
Troll? Everything he commented on was covered in the linked article.
Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010. These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content."
So Google, Apple and all the rest who are implementing the video tag are just dumb? Someone enlighten me please.
lame :P
I have to admit though, H.264 kind of rocks in quality, but; we need open streams and open formats.
Rrrriiiiggghhtt ... QuickTime is worse than Flash. It takes more resources, crashes constantly, and is slow as hell. Yep. Sounds like reality to me.
I must be stupid.
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora are unencumbered and free. No "deals" need to be worked out.
Ogg/Vorbis/Theora has reasonable quality and compression.
It can be placed into a MKV container http://matroska.org/, also unencumbered and free.
Why would any end user select anything other than Theora/Vorbis codecs when given the choice? Google and Youtube have an opportunity to "don't be evil" and put an end to proprietary codecs being the default media format. It won't alter anything in the proprietary world, since they will always insist on DRM.
When was the last time you heard an end user happy about DRM? Well, when? NEVER.
Come on google, step up. Use Theora/Vorbis and MKV containers to significantly reduce the hold that proprietary formats have on your FLOSS OS using customers. Heck, if you do, I'll even stop using Scroogle .... maybe. Further, Apple and Microsoft can use the same codecs under the same terms that you or I can. For FREE. Talk about fair.
None of this would matter if the sites provided both formats. Chrome and Safari could have their H.264, everyone else could have the Theora version. Everyone wins.
Quicktime Alternative is a bit better and lets you save thhe files too.
Since the LGPLed FFmpeg library supports H.264 among other codecs, all they need to do is support it as a plugin. They can ship Firefox with a version compiled without "--enable-gpl" and without "--enable-nonfree".
All of the bitching about the patent/royalty situation ignores the following facts:
There are two alternatives here - Flash-based video and H.264. Don't kid yourself that Ogg is a third, because it's not going to happen. Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done. Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
So, given that H264 is a really bad idea license-wise, why did Handbrake completely switch over to it? The "xvid is hard" or "divx is old" doesn't seem to hold much water.
Very few companies could afford a license compatible with the LGPL ... hell, I'm pretty sure the MPEG-LA isn't even authorized to issue such a license, so you'd have to make private deals with everyone. Going to take 100's of millions of dollars easy, maybe more.
It really frustrates me that a technology created and owned by someone (MPEG) and otherwise unrelated to the software created and distributed by another (Firefox) is by proxy restricting success and future adoption.
It is so utterly archaic and unfair that this is allowed to continue; MPEG-LA have the industry by its consumers by their collective balls.
ilovegeorgebush
Just throw a DirectShow interface at the video player and quit shipping codecs.
How do you propose they do that on OS X or Linux?
The general idea is a good one, but FFmpeg is probably a more generaly useful approach.
Doesn't somebody own the rights to mp3, and technically, all users and content providers should pay royalties? Does that stop anyone from freely including decoders and distributing mp3 content? Here's hoping that H.264 goes that route, and unofficial, but well-recognized plugins for Firefox support emerge.
H.264 looks better that Ogg and makes smaller files. Nobody is going to say, oh I'd like my video to look worse and cost people more to download please! High quality video providers will use H.264 anyway for this reason. If Ogg was the standard everyone will end up installing H,264 anyway and the standard will be ignored. Everyone already has H.264 software. Nobody has Ogg software. I bet if you checked outside of this thread you'd find 0.1% of people have it an about 90% can alreay play H264 Thirdly ogg just sounds stupid. I wouldn't implement it for the name alone. I might as well write "NOW SUPPORTS FARTY FARTY PLOP PLOP" on the outside of the box. The name shouldn't matter. But it does. A lot!
There is a reason why this story wasn't posted in the "Mozilla's Rights Online" section of Slashdot.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Great point. H.264 is a lot like an IED.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yeah, "free software from Google" indeed - too bad us Joe Sixpacks can't distribute it, only companies with the proper patent license portfolio can. If this debate tells us (free software fans) something, it's that it's time to move to GPL 3 before things get way worse.
And to all you people who don't care about this and just want their videos to work:
This video^H^H^H^H^H opinion is no longer available in your country.
What he basically states is that "we are ideologically opposed to H264, therefore we won't support it".
Which is a devastating indictment of the entire Open Source community and something Microsoft should pick up in arguments with the EU about why Firefox should be prevented from taking a dominant position.
Now that's ridiculous. Unlike many other technology subject to patents, it's pretty clear that H.264 is useful, novel, and non-obvious. But allowing claims that cover not just the encoder and decoder, but the actual bitstreams they produce, is completely abusive of the patent system. A fancy new saw to cut complex curves in wood might be patentable, but allowing that patent to cover the product would be silly on the face of it. This is no different.
Except the fact that the article is asking for *more open* standards, , which completely invalidates the first sentence fo the last paragraph, if nothing else. Troll is a bit extream though...
HTML5 allows multiple video or audio codecs to be provided. Therefore, Youtube and Vimeo can provide both H.264 and Ogg Theora/Vorbis support. If their concern is bandwidth, then they can just provide a slightly lower quality Ogg version with the same bandwidth usage.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html#the-source-element
Starting perhaps a month ago, certain video players completely hang Safari on PPC machines. It's incredibly annoying, because often websites and even some advertising content feature embedded video which automatically plays (read: hangs) upon opening the page. This 'feature' has rendered many sites a crapshoot as to whether or not they'll bring a browsing session to a halt, and made some altogether unvisitable.
Forgive me for probably being completely retarded in the matter here, but can't applications like VLC and Handbrake decode H.264? How do they handle the these copyright things, and couldn't Mozilla do something similar with Firefox?
- Opera is a commercial product and they do a lot of business in embedded devices, mobile phones, wii and tv's and so on. They probably want to get a tech to play video for devices without new Flash versions (especially since it's 100% Adobe's responsibility to update Flash on those devices and Opera can't do much about it)
They do, but an open one. I'd say Opera has been even more vocal about their distaste for MPEG4's patents than Firefox has, likely because, being the little guy in most of the world, they're painfully aware as to how such mandatory licenses increase the barrier to entry and exclude anybody who's not already a large corporation from entering the market.
Since Firefox already has it's Gecko engine and wide range of plugins, why don't they make themself more reasons to forget about Flash and start using open standards?
Sure, as soon as MPEG-4 is an open standard and all patents covering it are released into the Public Domain.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Why troll? AC is correct. The article gives a nice answer to the OP. It's the OP that totally missed the point.
Don't people have to cough up a license fee to implement USB? PCI? AGP? Those are all standards.
People license stuff all the time, even standards. Mozilla needs to get over themselves and provide a way to play standard H.264 videos.
I'm assuming you are projecting the fact that most people are purely interested in open source.
You are wrong. Most people want things to just work. Firefox got where they are today because what they produced *worked*. The fact Firefox is open source, free source, or RMS Free as in Freedom(tm) is secondary.
The day Firefox stops *just working* is the day its lunch will be taken by competitors like Chrome, Opera or Safari. If IE9 plays H.264, Chrome plays H2.64, Opera plays H.264, and Safari plays H.264 but Firefox does not play H.264, guess which one doesn't "just work"?
By the way, has any of the Mozilla folk sat down at the table and talked with the folks that own whatever IP needs licensing? Have they, you know, said "dudes, we have 33% of the browser market and our business model isn't structured for this sort of thing". My hunch is they could probably get some kind of deal hammered out. The Mozilla foundation does have some political capital you know--this is a good use of it.
They also have at least a 1/3 of the desktop browser market. That gives them significant leverage in negotiating some kind of deal to license the codec in their browser.
Business is business, time for Mozilla to step up and act like one.
How to silently kill Firefox:
* Support Firefox trough funding (so that nobody can call you evil)
* Buy one of the most successful video sites.
* Implement a technology on this site that you know for sure Firefox can't use.
* Reduce competition on this site by using a video format not everyone can use on their site(increasing linking and video embedding to your own site)
* Support this video format on your own browser.
*Profit.
Why is this Mozilla's problem? You're putting video on the internet for a reason. You want to sell something or advertise something to sell. So why would you want to put it out in a compressed format that not everyone can see? Especially if you have to pay a royalty to do so.
In fact, why do you need patents on compression: without it, we'd have analogue or Laser Disk. DVD consortium would pay to get a compression ratio better than they get from analogue just so they can sell DVDs which are cheaper than laser disks. So the market doesn't need patents to monetise this: the demand of the industry itself would do the work.
Just like the Dirac code: it would cost the BBC more to license another codec than it would to write their own.
So they did.
Why's that modded troll? Quicktime has annoyed me enough to uninstall it. I still have flash installed.
Installing quicktime puts some stupid icon in the systray that annoys you every now and then. If you're not careful while installing quicktime, you might get itunes bundled along.
Adobe hasn't got around to making flash as annoying as quicktime yet (but they have made Acrobat Reader annoying thus I no longer have it installed).
Why can't Mozilla just implement a plugin framework, and leave it up to the user to decide whether he wants to install the h264 plugin, which may or may not be illegal in his area. Some Linux distros ship without MP3 support because it requires licensing, and it's usually just one command to enable MP3 support. It seems like the same thing should work with h264.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
sopssa is a well-known M$ asskisser, and he will be modded up by other M$ fans.
They modded AC troll.
h.264 is an open standard, the spec is available online, for free, right here: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.264-200305-S
Of course you need to pay to implement it, but lets not pretend it's a black box or 'closed' just because it isn't literally free to pass around like friendship bread.
Regarding software patents, I've gathered some info already about H.264 and the standards problem:
It's a public wiki, help welcome.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
A fab costs a lot, if you can afford one you can afford a license.
And it's an invention: a real thing that has to get around those pesky real life things, unlike the maths that is a compression algorithm.
- Opera is a commercial product and they do a lot of business in embedded devices, mobile phones, wii and tv's and so on. They probably want to get a tech to play video for devices without new Flash versions (especially since it's 100% Adobe's responsibility to update Flash on those devices and Opera can't do much about it)
Distributing Flash is still 5 million dollars cheaper per year than to pay current licensing rates from MPEG-LA, so it's quite obvious why Opera is supporting Ogg Theora instead of h.264. One could argue that Flash with Ogg support would be a better solution for the Web than HTML5 with h.264.
Mozilla is going to implement gstreamer backend for html5 video element. See Bug 422540.
Also, Opera developers are going the same way. See this blog post.
Using gstreamer as a backend will eliminate ALL the problems with codecs. Forever. It will be able to play just the same as a usual desktop players, and that means, it will be able to play Ogg Theora, H.264, DivX, whatever you like - it's only a matter of plugins installed.
H.264 is as open as Microsoft Shared Source or OOXML. Forgive me, then, if I don't really consider it "open".
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Under Mozilla's approach, what happens when someone develops a new, free, codec that is better than Theora? If they aren't going to support using the codecs that are on the host system, just how do the early adopters start using the new codec?
Are we supposed to hold off on using the new codec until Mozilla determines it to be Firefox-worthy and builds it into the browser?
Mozilla doesn't have to implement anything, just make the video plugin architecture extensible.
They can't do that as they explain in the blog entry a) that most windows users don't have an H264 codec and b) It's pissing on their principles (my words, not theirs). And I see their point. The Mozilla people want to be able to browse the internet with a completely free stack. That is their point: a completely free stack.
What your suggestion is offering is a technical solution to the problem which unfortunately conflicts with their principle and thus they can't go down the road. I see Mozilla people's point and I agree with them. It's reasonable, logical and consistent. But I also understand there are a lot of people who read slashdot who just don't seem to understand what the point of freedom is.
So, I'm going to propose the following thought experiment for people who just don't get why it's important not to throw away your principles for a quick and easy solution that violates your principles. So suppose you're in the following scenario: you get to recieve a pile of money in exchange for a corporation to cut off your right leg (why? Who knows what their motivation is.)
What if it was only a few toes say of one of your siblings, or a living parent, or one of your children if you have any? Would you be willing to bargain away someone else's toes?
Now, some of you might be willing to bargain but rationalize to yourself "Hey, I didn't sell out cheap, I got $XYZ dollars for my right leg! Or. hey my brother didn't need his little toe to live, I'll cut him in for 30% of the money". I'm sorry to say that if you're someone who would do a thing like that, I don't understand you and I doubt that I ever will. From my perspective, you have no principles except possibly the pursuit of money which as a goal I just don't see much point. Pursuit of money as a goal is not a socially constructive purpose. If this is you then it's obvious why you don't grok Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. If you happen to be an American, you probably also don't grok the value of the Bill of Rights either right up until a cop splits your head open for resisting arrest while doing nothing. Then all of a sudden you might appreciate your freedoms with a little more enthusiasm.
As the blg points out that yes, H264 patents will run out on 2017, but that is not the end of patented video codecs, there will be an H265 that follows it and so on. If you value freedom then you can't piss away your freedom or others' freedom by compromising on freedom in the name of expediency.
It's mostly just problem for Mozilla
And every site that wants to host their own video content. H.264 also requires a license for hosting content. All those sites will probably stick to Flash if other browsers don't support Theora.
I really don't understand why Silicon Valley type geeks get so excited about the alleged advent of "free" and "standard" web technologies such as HTML5 and SVG. First, as this story illustrates, these are not "free". More importantly, these are not "standard". SVG for example has existed as a finalized, commitee underwritted standard for more than eleven years now, yet not a single browser supports more than a subset of it, and each a different subset. Even if it had been supported by IE from the beginning (Adobe doesn't even bother to support their plug-in btw), web developpers would have faced the pain of making their app working across browser, which is bad enough currently with the JS situtation.
Instead of having these commitee designed pseudo "standard" existing in abstract document and leaving it up to multiple browser and platforms to implement their own interpretation of it, I much prefer the model in which a few vendors develop mature plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight that are guaranteeded to work the same whatever they're plugged into. Yes these are "proprietary" but so are your OS and drivers if you run Windows or MacOSX, so is the design of your CPU and GPU, etc.
Better having working platforms which empower a multitude of developpers to get working stuff out to the public than abstract, broken chimeras that burden developers with absurd compatibility and licensing issues.
Ponder over the original story and the paradox that the FOSSest browser out there might be actually better off loading a proprietary Flash or SL plug in than implement a "Free" HTML5 "standard"
Just use the platform's native video architecture. Then instead of some poorly optimized software-only codec (on most platforms; it would of course be optimized for Windows), the video would actually look good and perform well.
I don't know what to do about Linux. But I'm not sure why the prevailing attitude is that Mozilla should be completely self contained and try to do everything themselves. Some other project besides Mozilla should be worrying about h.264 for Linux.
Considering all that is happened, i was trying to figure out how to get an IPTV box for free internet television out for the last 4 years, but i kept running into this same discussion. I guess the situation has finally come to a head.
It's mostly just problem for Mozilla Only if people insist on using it. I can't see that it would be in YouTube's interest to use H.264 exclusively.
YouTube already encodes everything in H.264 for embedding in Flash and for portable devices like the iPhone which consume the video directly since it does not support Flash. Why should everyone be forced to download or include in their portable device an Theora plug-in just to support yet another format when H264 is already available on all commercial desktop and mobile platforms?
But in any case, it sounds like a misnomer to call it "HTML5 Video", which sort of implies a standard. If the "standard" involves coughing up a whacking great licence fee to use it, lots of people just won't be interested, and H.264 will be consigned to the same back shelves as some of the ogg codecs.
Perhaps you should buy an old fashioned dictionary to look up the word "standard". I'm all for open standards but not when they are obscure or inferior to the industry standards and those standards are available for anyone to implement for a small fee.
I hate to break it to you but almost everyone is already using H.264 to distribute video whether it be directly or embedded within a flash video file. It has wide industry support in both software and hardware (HD Video cameras). To use Theora, you would have to re-encode all of your video in order to use it.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Actually it's a software patent problem that excludes small commercial vendors and open source vendors of any size. The HTML5 video spec does not define a standard codec, so using the operating system's back end is a reasonable choice for mozilla. The problem is that mozilla can not have native support for h.264 in any reasonable way that would let its users, or firefox variants for that case (like iceweasel/icecat, swiftweasel, etc), redistribute a modified version of their browser.
This whole problem could be avoided if Google decided to push for VP8 on youtube and license it in a way it could be used in open source software without patent restrictions.
Of course, the whole problem could be avoided altogether if software patents weren't allowed in the first place. This is a fine example of legal Bullshit getting in the way of technology.
... pay to create and distribute video content or having to upload it on the few big sites that have enough money to pay the royalties to MPEG-LA.
We might decide to use h.264 anyway because it's technically better but what I expect is that customers and content creators should be happier to see a totally free codec succeed over one that will cost them money.
Youtube, Vimeo & Co are trying to use h.264 to become the new majors. I understand why those companies don't want a free codec to succeed: that would lead to more competition and less ways to profit from their position. I'm afraid that in this case their best interests are our worst interests.
Think if it happened to images. You could only legally upload graphics to Flickr, Facebook and a few dozens of other big sites with the money to pay royalties. All vacation pictures and UI buttons would have to go there. Figuring out what the web would look like is left as an exercise to the reader.
Because their opposition to h.264 is ideological, not technical, so a technical solution is not enough for them.
They are definitely muddying the waters by coming up with weak technical excuses for not doing it too, though. Those excuses are mostly easily refuted, and just makes the whole thing even more confusing. They should be more honest about it.
Any chance 3rd party developers can make a h.264 enabling extension for Firefox? I'd pay a few dollars for that.
Here's a relevant quote from Geore Bernard Shaw. Quote:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
So you're asking the Free Software People to give up their principles in favor of expediency and thus promote no progress. I think not. I prefer to live in a world of Freedom than one ruled by expediency. Expediency might win a battle but in the end principles win the war. Considering the progress of GPL software for the past 26 years I would say they are doing a damn fine job of promoting positive progress. Better for the reasonable man to use free and open standards codecs than the Free Software People piss away their principles.
It is open. Just because theres licensing costs it doesn't mean the underlying technology isn't open. Free != Open, even if open usually goes along with free. But it's not necessary.
Webkit is GPL and BSD, you can't distribute a paid patented implementation of a codec with it.
Safari can support it as a "module", but Webkit can't. It's the same reason why Mono doesn't distribute the MS codecs, even though they cost 0.
Being GPL or BSD implies that you can redistribute it, but you can't do that to the H264 codec, so it would conflict.
Dilbert RSS feed
This is a fine example of legal Bullshit getting in the way of technology.
In a way, but not completely. You can blame software patents about it, but the fact is that if those weren't available, MPEG-LA would just use a different method to generate revenue back on their technology. Now they could open up their technology, because they can still ask for licensing costs because they hold the patent. If they couldn't, they wouldn't have opened it up and would use some other way.
That is a fine example of how capitalism works and why changing one thing doesn't always work out as you would expect.
and H.264 will be consigned to the same back shelves as some of the ogg codecs.
H.264 is the de-facto standard for online video now. Just about every device has decoding for it in hardware these days, phones, PMPs, TVs et al. Being supported by large companies and market leaders means it's here for a very long time.
OGG has never been popular and is now getting dropped from various projects due to lack of use. It's a near dead format, despite it's benefits over MP3, it simply never achieve support in almost all devices, or obtain any interest by consumer device manufacturers.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's also plain old maths. And, as such, is not patentable. So it's ALREADY a borked patent.
And you STILL have to rely on A.N.Other to provide your video. You now have to say "supported on Browser X,Y,Z... on OS A,B,C.." instead of "supported under HTML 5".
Which do you think is going to cause least customer confusion?
And if your customer is confused, will they buy or leave?
They can't do that as they explain in the blog entry a) that most windows users don't have an H264 codec and b) It's pissing on their principles (my words, not theirs)
The first is a silly argument: Is it somehow better to play on NO computers, than to play on only SOME?
The real reason is the second, that they are ideologically opposed to it. And that stance is only going to hurt them, and they should just get over it. It is not a fight they can possibly win.
Only if people insist on using it. I can't see that it would be in YouTube's interest to use H.264 exclusively.
The YouTube guys have said that they don't want to spend the hard drive space to hold three different formats on disk (and considering 20 hours of video of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, I can't blame them), and that the bandwidth requirements for the same level of quality are significantly higher for Theora than for H.264. So basically, YouTube uses H.264 because it's cheaper than any alternative, presumably even after factoring in licensing costs (which I think are capped at like a few million dollars for each licensee, and thus are probably noise to YouTube).
They are. H.264 is not open enough to be shipped with a FLOSS product that is playing strictly by the rules. The question is why Apple and Microsoft are not supporting open standards, because Theora support is in Chrome and pre-release versions of Opera.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Installing quicktime puts some stupid icon in the systray that annoys you every now and then. If you're not careful while installing quicktime, you might get itunes bundled along.
It seems that you are on a Windows system; you need to install QT Lite.
You know that Theora is a work-in-progress, right? That right there says GO AWAY
The Theora bitstream format is frozen since the beta. All the work in progress is directed at 1. performance of the decoder, and 2. quality of the encoder while producing bitstreams that still play correctly on all conforming decoders.
It's modded troll because it's from someone who can't tell the difference between a media API and a media player. The ClickToFlash plugin for Safari will let you use QuickTime for YouTube and it uses about 10-20% of the CPU that Flash uses, while presenting a UI that is more consistent with the rest of the system and the same features (although better buffering). Anyone who'd rather use Flash is an idiot or a troll.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, I won't pardon you for being retarded. It's even mentioned in the links, not to mention several times here on the thread.
Distributing the output of a patented algorithm IS being threatened with a license fee. Their claim is like the output of a program (to the screen) is copyrightable/protected (one click shopping, for example. Or Look n feel).
The decompression without license doesn't make sense because it's using the patented algorithm just as much. And they've only stated this is fee-free until this year.
And you will STILL have the problem of "I've put a video on line, but many customers cannot see it". Instead of being unable because the browser cannot do it, it's unable to be seen because the computer OS cannot do it.
You missed a lot of the point there. Part of the point is that once Mozilla coughs up that 5 MILLION bucks, the browser is in the clear, but now people wanting to actually produce something in H.264 format, they have to cough up again and if (god forbid) they actually want to 'bvroadcast' that video, they get to cough up some more.
The argument is that it's better to support something that regular people can afford and don't need a law degree to understand the licensing terms for.
Not only does Microsoft license H.264 in Windows 7, but any application written for Windows 7 can play back H.264 content.
Step #1 : Buy youtube.
.... (Shakes Fist)
Step #2 : Switch the video format on youtube to H.264, a proprietary format that free browsers can't afford the licenses it needs to distribute a reader for it.
Step #3 : Push H.264 part of the open standard HTML 5, even though it's not open at all, thus further shoving free browsers downward the spiral.
Step #4 : Win the browser War, pwn the internet, make profit with ur browser built in search engine.
..... F***ers,
We were paying attention....
But I can play flash from within FF.
And if flash is H.264, then I can play H.264 from within FF.
But this is impossible.
Therefore you are lying.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
and contrary to the concepts of a free market
we should actively rip off h.264, not because we want to use the codec for free, but simply to undermine the status quo that some people, for whatever reason, respect this bullshit called software patents
those who created the codec need to depend upon ancillary streams of revenue, such as hardware prodcuts that depend upon the software ideas. meanwhile, patenting a simple arrangement of bits is contrary to the free exchange of ideas
you should only be able to patent physical objects
everything else is abstract representation: this should never be protected. do we respect the idea that the church of scientology has a copyright on its sacred texts? of course this is bullshit, just as much as it is bullshit that the RIAA attempts to control the flow of bits, or that the chinese autocracy attempts to control the flow of information: the entirety of the phylosophical concept of putting roadblocks on the flow of ideas is a form weakness, failure. it leads to a less rich society
ip law must be actively fought
luckily, this is all too easy, because the internet is the disruptive techology that destroys ip law, whether some people like it or not
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What we need is clean fork of Firefox which would have some kind of h264 support. It should follow otherwise upstream as closely as possible and be 100% compatible with extensions and themes. Of course MozCos trademarks should be avoided. So, a catchy domain, few devs and some marketing, and MozCos stubbornness wouldn't matter anymore. I'd guess even Google could help to sponsor this kind of project, as it's in their interest to get the format war over.
Only "everyone" who is already distributing video on the web, that is to say, a small minority of web sites. Nd even then, not all flash video is H.264 a huge chunk (if not most) is Sorenson Spark as it is has been supported longer in Flash. People who do not yet stream videos are more likely to be affected by what MPEG LA decides to do about distributors. Support in HD video cameras is irrelevant, unless you plan to post full resolution, un-edited videos from them.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I don't want to sound like a repeating record but the Dirac codec produced by BBC R&D is royalty free and extremely good.
I am sure if you look you will find more but start with these links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)
http://diracvideo.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dirac/files/
and if you can watch the promo too.
http://dirac.kw.bbc.co.uk/download/video/maybefinal/
why are we still debating this?
Rooster - A friend. "Anyone's friend in particular or just generally well disposed to people?"
MPEG-LA didn't "open" anything, they are a post-factum licensing agency, the actual standard was created by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Your definition of opening up their technology excludes small competitors and open source altogether though. And they are a large part of the competition out there today. Even inside a patent regime like the one in the US, there are ways to license your technology such that it does not exclude competition, while at the same time making a handsome profit. Software patents are squarely the one to blame and RAND licenses in particular. Such licensing schemes often lead to oligopolies, which are quite ant-capitalistic.
But in any case, it sounds like a misnomer to call it "HTML5 Video", which sort of implies a standard.
As far as I understand, the HTML5 standard does not specify ANY standards. They tried, but there were people with vested interests on the committee, and it proved impossible to come to an agreement.
So, HTML5 says you can use any codecs and any container format within a <VIDEO> tag. It's up to the developer to know what browsers support.
Sucky, but there it is.
YouTube et al to switch to Ogg instead.
Is it appropiate to put the video decode code in the browser in the first place? Media player's use the codecs that are installed on the OS. Presumably if they went this route they get the hardware acceleration that's built into the video card
standard? Can somebody explain how the hell that could happen? What does H.264 have to do with HTML5, exactly?
What's the state of Dirac and Snow codecs. They're never brought up in these discussions.
It's not like the MPEG-LA has the only working implementation in the world. If you don't want their product then use one of the lgpl versions and dont pay them. Stop fussing over nothing.
Don't forget flash supports h.264 in addition to On2's VP#.
This is precisely on-topic. No, I guess not. Why? Because you're in the 80 - 90%. Fucking Douche-Bag!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Right, because that makes a ton of sense. My mobile phone can play H.264... whats your excuse?
You're aware that there is a Patent on the "Method", not on the specific software implementation right? Right?
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Why can't Mozilla just implement a plugin framework, and leave it up to the user to decide whether he wants to install the h264 plugin, which may or may not be illegal in his area.
WTF do you think we have now?
We already have Flash, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, RealPlayer, Silverlight..... how many more video plugins do you want?
Though, it's moot now, but we would have been far better served if HTML5 also dictated a codec.
If the license fee for h.264 has already been paid by the video card company for on-card decoding, could Firefox offload the decoding, forgoing the need for a redundant license?
If Mozilla were bundling H.264 support right now, it would be closed source (so forget about seeing it in Ubuntu by default) and it would cost them $5,000,000 this year. Next year, the fee will be even higher. So, Mozilla would have to allot 6% of their revenue (revenue, not profit) to supporting this one proprietary video codec.
H.264 is only supported by Chrome and Safari (less than 10% of those online). Let's keep it that way and keep the barrier for entrance into the browser market from reaching insane proportions. Otherwise we'll be left with fewer choices in the browser wars since lots of people can't pay $0.20 per unit for a product they give away for free. Mozilla and Opera certainly can't. But for Google and Aple, supporting H.264 in their browsers is free since they already hit the $5,000,000 cap this year (Google due to all the encoding and streaming of it, Apple due to licensing it for iPods/iTunes).
So, it's EASY for Apple and Google to support it since it's free and they already ship closed source products (Safari is closed source even though the underling webkit is open, Chrome is closed source even though the underlying Chromium bits are open). Mozilla would have to pay a ton of cash (and increasing) and add closed source bits to Firefox.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Yes, consistency is better then (from the users point of view) random breakage. If you are dealing with a large number of technically unsophisticated users then having youtube work on one computer and not another without being able to transparently fix it (as opposed to "Click here to install Flash") is worse then it consistently not working with and explanation.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Firefox users will just get routed to the old flash interface on YouTube. YouTube isn't gonna transcode the whole damn library into some silly format when they can just treat Firefox like a legacy browser and feed it H.264 wrapped up in a .flv. If anything, they wouldn't bother with the whole Video tag at all when Flash worked fine before.
Nothing you said contradicts a single word of what I said. In fact, you just made my point.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
And someone will have to pay for it since shipping H.264 support costs $0.20 per unit. Either that or you have to avoid all countries that support software patents. That means you may to host downloads yourself, too, since all the big players in open source project hosting (SourceForge, Google Code, Ohloh, etc) are US entities.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
And what exact advantage does it offer over Ogg? It has the exact same chicken and egg issues (namely that TONS of stuff supports H.264 and *almost nothing* supports Ogg or Dirac.
It's the exact same argument, but with a different codec.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
You're a fool and a slave. Why don't you just get on about sucking the cocks of your corporate overlords while they pound you in your ass. You're so stupid, you don't even realize you are not "Free". It has nothing to do with "Free" as in price. Everything to do with "Free" as in Freedom. You don't even own your phone or the data on it you douche-bag. Your masters do. But, you won't believe it, because you are too goddamn stupid. All you know is it tastes sweet, looks shiny, and smells like flowers. If they coat their cock in sugar, scent it with jasmine, and polish it with chrome, you will drink their spooge like a good little slave. Jack-Ass!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Wow, that's a great idea. Maybe they could even get some other large company to write a plugin for H.264 for them! And get it installed on 97% of computers worldwide! Maybe they could call it "Flash"... </sarcasm>
No, it's technical, and this is what I think is going on here. It is economically technical, and I would bet/guess that higher level Moz folks are thinking about this right now. The planet is soon to be encumbered with some draconian restrictions on bits and bytes if you don't come up with the scratch that some folks demand for some of those bits and bytes. As soon as ACTA is made law all over, this "just download the naughty bits" that go to make your fav browser/OS/player "just work" for your listening and viewing pleasure will be tracked and people will start getting notices that this might result in getting their connection turned off, or worse, if they are distributing or facilitating the "naughty bits", perhaps charged with "enabling" or some other lawspeak.
Sure, there will still be ways to "get the codecs" and install them, just the real world cost of doing so inside nations that have more effective policing will go up. Right now, not much enforcement, after ACTA, this will change rather severely. When you have all these major economies switching from durable goods for creating wealth to "IP" licensing, the moneysuits who 100% control your "elected representatives" will determine what gets ignored or not, what gets enforced or not. They will want their money, or no vid soup for you, unless you want to go from being a "casual criminal", as it is now with not much enforcement, with not much worries for most people, like "ya, sure, just go to the unrestricted repositories and download.." wink wink nudge nudge, to "man, this sucks, a fifty grand fine! I ain't touching that stuff. I'll have to use the officially approved browser/OS/Player" level, which is (a big part of) what ACTA is all about.
This is coming soon to a computer reality near you. It's going to be a game changer. It's designed to be a game changer, they wouldn't be dorking around with it if it wasn't, and because they are, they will start enforcing their fees and restrictions a LOT more than what we have grown accustomed to.
Ya, some will say they can stay pure and just use "hooks" for this or that in the software to allow these naughty bits to work..those moneysuits see billions that they ain't got and billions that they do want, the politicians see their cut coming, and this duality will soon be dictating to the cops and prosecutors, and they won't give a rat's ass about minor software technical things like that, they will look at the end result "whole" and go "you are guilty, pay up or else".
This going to be for both content, and also how you get to experience this content.
You don't have to. Just use Flash -- Adobe has already paid the H.264 bucks for you. (You *do* know that Flash supports H.264 directly, right?)
Firefox users will just get routed to the old flash interface on YouTube.
Then what is the issue, you think ?
Yes. And?
If only there was a company who had licensed H264 and distributed a plug in for free that worked with all major browsers - their business model would be to make money from the authoring tools.
In fact, since this is going to be used for video, wouldn't it be even better if that plugin supported a Javascript like language, perhaps compiled to byte code and JITted to native code to get decent performance. Perhaps a custom graphics library that allowed people to make players with custom controls show a list of related clips once the video ended.
Then open source browsers could use the plugin to show H264 videos.
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;
"I've go mine, get yours" is your only talking point.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
The most important thing is to persuade the Pirate Bay to support Theora but not H264.
It sure is nice that you have no real problems, so you have the time to get this worked up about such trifling matters.
Said explanation being "We made this not work for you even though we could because we wanted to be fair to everyone"?
The real reason is the second, that they are ideologically opposed to it. And that stance is only going to hurt them, and they should just get over it. It is not a fight they can possibly win.
Deja vu. That's what people used to say about Linux and Open Source. They still appear to be around. Anyway, define 'win'.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Yeah, and instead of installing annoying Adobe Acrobat reader I can install some other PDF reader (and I do).
;) ).
But that's not really the point since when I said Quicktime I meant Apple's version of it. And I assume the OP meant that too. Similarly I believe "flash" meant Adobe's stuff.
FWIW, I have tried Quicktime Alternative - and it was flaky too (crashes, hangs, doesn't fail gracefully, etc) - given that other codecs and video playing stuff I've installed don't give as much trouble I think quicktime is the problem[1]. So I uninstalled that too. I'm not going to bother trying QT Lite because frankly I don't feel like wasting more time on "quicktime".
I don't care if in theory the technology is great, because in practice it isn't. For example when there video downloads with multiple format choices I have not noticed "MOV" videos being significantly smaller in typical cases. In fact they often seem to be bigger. Just google for mov wmv download trailer and look for examples with the same video at same res (e.g. 720p ) available.
Why should I install some flaky software when the downloads aren't significantly smaller in practice?
Maybe one day it will be less crap.
[1] I don't blame the crashes on Media Player Classic (included with quicktime alternative) since in my experience it's less crash prone than VLC (which is subpar - I noticed when playing short videos VLC often doesn't render some frames at the end, VLC has lots of other annoyances too, but I'm digressing enough
Said explanation will probably not be necessary on big sites that would be out of their mind to drop flash support. However trying and failing to load an appropriate system codec might lead to breakage and reflect badly on Firefox even if it wasn't their bug.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
- Microsoft can probably work out a pretty good deal with MPEG-LA, and licensing technology is no problem for MS.
Microsoft is an MPEG-LA member. They'd probably pay little or nothing. And whatever it costs, they're already paying the maximum, because they're distributing H.264 in Windows 7.
- Google aswell and they have to support it on YouTube anyway.
Yeah, they're also surely already at the maximum premiums, so it probably costs them nothing extra to ship it in Chrome. (Which they already do.)
- Opera is a commercial product and they do a lot of business in embedded devices, mobile phones, wii and tv's and so on. They probably want to get a tech to play video for devices without new Flash versions (especially since it's 100% Adobe's responsibility to update Flash on those devices and Opera can't do much about it)
Here you're wrong. Opera is aggressively pro-standards, sometimes even more so than Mozilla. They likely won't support H.264 out of the box anytime soon. I believe current alphas support it only on Linux, where they use system GStreamer and so will use system codecs. On other platforms they bundle GStreamer with a fixed list of codecs.
- Apple definitely needs to support it in MAC OSX and maybe iPhone too, so WebKit and Safari will most likely support it.
They already do support it.
The real question is not whether all browsers will support H.264, it's whether they'll all support Theora. If MS supports Theora, everyone will hate Safari for being the only one not to support it, so Apple will likely support it too, and it will be the only format that works on all browsers. But if MS comes out with <video> support for H.264 only, which seems likely, then Mozilla will have to seriously consider compromising, because it will have real trouble winning as a lone standout.
Until then, Mozilla's refusal to compromise is buying Theora a lot of attention, and might help make it a better competitor to H.264. If they compromise now, Theora loses, but if they hold out, they can always compromise later if necessary at no great loss to web standards. Everyone will have to fall back to Flash for several years anyway, so the format war isn't making <video> that much less attractive; one extra browser will have to fall back to Flash, at worst.
If H.264 does win: oh well. We tried. GIF didn't kill the open web, and nor will H.264. What we have to be really vigilant about is not letting another proprietary format get a foothold in the future. Then we'll be in the clear by 2017, if not earlier.
There is no such thing as a patent on an algorithm. It is a patent on a method. You and I may know better, but that has nothing to do with the law. You make the mistake of trying to logical rather than legal. Everyone makes this mistake all along. They actually believe in the law because they think it matches up with what is logical. It does not! Most laws exist to give some individuals or exclusive groups power over you and everyone else. Why won't you just swallow it like all the other lemmings? Oh, my bad, you are an intelligent thinking individual who can tell the difference between what should be fair and logical and what is legal. Now, if only most people could understand this we'd be somewhere. But, instead, we have butt-wads like "coryking" and their, "My smart-phone does h.264, what's your problem?"
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Congratulations, you're /. user #1001 to suggest this. Read why Gecko won't use DirectShow in the foreseeable future.
How do you know what problems I have or don't have? How do you know I get worked up about this because I actually give a shit about other people's right to communicate? You assume much and offer little. You like to dismiss people who "get worked up" because you never bother to "get worked up" for anything you don't think immediately affects you. So, I'm going to invoke Godwin: First, they came for the right to produce video communication, and I said nothing; Then, they came for the right to consume video communication, and I said nothing; Then, they came for the right to produce written communications, and I said nothing; Then, they came for the right to read written communications and I said nothing; Then, they came for the right to speak communication, and I said nothing (because they had cut out my tongue).
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Maybe I'm lucky but I don't notice flash playback using very much CPU. Just tried it on youtube, full screen. 5% cpu usage. 10-20% of %5 is 0.5 to 1% CPU usage.
I guess 5% to 1% is great for you, but to me such gains aren't worth putting up with quicktime. Especially since Apple keeps trying to sneak in itunes along with it. Anyone remember itunes causing BSODs? http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=543
I don't recall Adobe ever bugging me and suggesting I get "Flash Player Pro" when I try to play flash movies.
Adobe is bad, but Apple has a worse track record.
I sure hope someone comes up with a decent alternative when flash player gets as crap as adobe acrobat reader, but quicktime isn't a decent alternative to me.
I don't think I'm trolling, so I guess you can call me an idiot, which is fine with me as long as I don't have to use quicktime.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540 you might have to copy and paste the URL as mozilla doesn't like being linked from slashdot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I can actually hear the 'woosh' sounds from here, as your point flies over the head of a million /. readers.
It is a question of resources. doing a lot of work for a solution that helps small amount of people on a single platform isn't that interesting to them. This will probably change when most Windows installs have these codecs (but this will take several years, if history is any indication).
This sounds eerily familiar... I remember how Mozilla developers and users were laughed at just a few years ago: many viewed the battle lost and saw IE-emulation and an activeX-implementation the only solutions that could make free software relevant in the browser space again.
You know, "RMS Free" is a lot clearer than "Free", "Libre", blah blah. You say "RMS Free", and we all know what that means, and those that don't know won't falsely assume they know.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It is slow, it does crash alot, and it does take a lot of resources. It crashes more often than flash, in my experience, but flash is the bigger resource hog (both in cpu and memory). It's very unstable as a browser plugin and when using Firefox I avoid anything that might try to use quicktime as a browser plugin. It's pretty awful.
If it weren't for my iPhone, I'd just uninstall quicktime. Unfortunately, Apple married the iPhone to iTunes and iTunes to quicktime -- so there's simply no way to avoid it. By the way, iTunes is also terrible. It might well be the worst software experience known to me. I cannot express enough how much I hate iTunes. It's the anti-iphone: slow as shit, super confusing to use, highly unstable, and weak on features. I could write you a 12 page essay on iTunes and why I hate it, and still probably have forgotten several points a long the way. It's TERRIBLE.
Sorry, I just can't miss any opportunity to rant about iTunes.
Did you even read what I said? What the fuck do you think you are educating me on? I just said it doesn't matter what it is in reality, but, what it is legally. The law doesn't give two shits about what logical people like you and I think about it. We can trumpet from the highest towers, "It's a software patent", and they will say, "Shut the fuck up!"
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
DailyMotion uses Theora. Wikipedia uses Theora.
Flash based Video *is* H.264 these days, you're comparing unlike things. Flash can be used as an alternative for the tag. Codecs are an independent issue.
The "hardware accelerated" point is mostly spurious. No one bothered adding special hardware for older codecs than H.264 because older codecs didn't have the utterly insane cpu requirements. The Theora decoder is several times faster than H.264 decoders. Yes, Theora doesn't get the same quality per bitrate that H.264 gets but thats not due to any flaws in Theora: Theora is optimized for lower cpu usage instead. There is no free lunch: Every codec must balance bitrate, quality, cpu usage, licensing/patents, and other factors. Theora strikes a very different balance than H.264. You might try to argue that CPUs are fast enough that H.264's addition usage is irrelevant, but you (and everyone elses) cries for hardware acceleration put the lie to that claim.
Moreover, if you're defining "hardware accelerated" broadly enough that you can say "nearly every platform, desktop and mobile" or even just "most desktops" then you must only be talking about hardware colorspace conversion, which works equally well for Theora. On many platforms, "hardware acceleration" means little more than using the specialized media instructions most of which apply equally to Theora and H.264. On some smartphone platforms (like palm-pre, android devices, nokia table) it means using a dedicated DSP, and there is already a port there. My stupid little jailbroken Iphone decodes full screen theora at about 100fps using the arm optimized port.
If the MPEG-LA looked at history, they would know that pretty much every format universal on the Internet today, got that way because the player/viewer was offered free of charge. The MPEG-LA is basically shooting them selves in the foot by requiring a royalty to decode.
Sounds like you're using Windows. Try using Flash on any other platform. On my 1.5GHz G4 Mac, Flash uses 100% of the CPU playing YouTube content. QuickTime uses 30-40% (VLC uses around 20%, but doesn't look quite as nice).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Win" would mean Theora becoming the standard for video on the web. And no, that is not happening, no matter how much you idolize Linux.
It is a question of resources. doing a lot of work for a solution that helps small amount of people on a single platform isn't that interesting to them.
It is neither a small amount of people, nor a single platform.
This sounds eerily familiar...
Yet it isn't.
follow a broken, outdated, immoral law, and you will do worse off than those who disobey the broken scheme called ip law, yes, that is exactly true
ip law punishes those who abide by so-called (easily circumvented) restrictions
it rewards all of us, including creators, who ignore ip law
ip law is simply unenforceable in the age of the internet, so stop trying to follow it anyways. you only get punished when you obey ip law
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"we should actively rip off h.264, not because we want to use the codec for free, but simply to undermine the status quo that some people, for whatever reason, respect this bullshit called software patents"
Let me guess, you're a ffmpeg developer, no? Well you sure sound like them: "Look at me! I'm sticking it to THE MAN by using his LICENSED FORMATS! TAKE THAT!"
Listen up, idiot. The reason people use formats is for compatibility. Every other factor is secondary. Even if you're not a judgement-proof teen in the Ukraine you're going to be forced by market pressure to use the same formats he uses, because no one wants to be incompatible.
THE MAN doesn't have to collect cash from each person in order to make a boatload of money, he'll happily go after the most likely to pay: MPEG LA has collected over $66 per every man, woman, and child on earth in codec licensing so far. They won't go after you, they go after your technology suppliers and the cost gets passed along. If thats ever not enough they'll simply have your government tax it out of you like the music industry has done with blank media in many places.
You think you're screwing the man? You're a fucking idiot. By writing and using these excellent open source tools for encumbered formats you're assuring the man's success. Why do you think that MPEG LA does not enforce against flagrant violators like ffmpeg, VLC, etc? They are required to use the same terms for everyone, but they risk a hard smackdown by the FTC for antitrust abuse specifically because allowing those tools to go unmolested is good for business.
The only way to screw the man here is to not adopt his formats. End of story.
It was greed and corruption that brought about this situation and it is greed and corruption that will fix it. In particular:
Google wants Microsoft's desktop monopoly to break, and at the same time they compete directly with Apple's iTunes. As a consequence their only realistic shot at this is to help Linux flourish.
Microsoft sees Google as a threat to their monopoly and hence they can't let Google kill Firefox as Firefox users would likely prefer chrome to IE, thereby strengthening google further.
RIAA, MPAA etc... don't want google to grow to strong since they don't want google dictating terms to them, something they could do if they become the de-facto only site to serve video.
MPEG-LA will try to squeeze every penny from the patent licenses while the party lasts, something google and vimeo very much dislikes.
Essentially the usual short-sighted greed over quarterly profits amongst companies will cause them to push the situation until it breaks. It may take a few years but eventually the very greed that made a patent encumbered format the de-facto standard is the same greed that will kill it.
mozilla doesn't like being linked from slashdot.
thats quite interesting. why not?
... Installing quicktime puts some stupid icon in the systray that annoys you every now and then. ...
Found your problem there. You're obviously using windows.
- tristan
The original point was that Mozilla can't just go ahead and use h.264 because of Patents. Call them software patents, call them patents on algorithms, call them patents on methods. It doesn't matter. As long as it isn't a "Patent on a Specific Implementation" then Mozilla can't use it without infringing it. You can't publish video using it (after December 2010) without infringing it. You can't consume/view said video without infringing it. You will need to license to produce and consume. This CANNOT work for Mozilla and open web standards, It is a DEAD END!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Richard Stallman, must maligned by the "I just want my bread and circuses" crowd, is still one of the few who will say this consistently. Either you have free software or you are owned by the companies, and there is no half way.
In 2010, the free license for h264 runs out, and then what? Must everyone suddenly pay for every use of the codec? It is all to easy to sacrifice freedom for a little bit of convenience, but every time you do it, you must spend far more if you ever want to get it back.
Look at the origins of Firefox. We surrendered our freedom to IE, and it took a LOT of hard work to get it back. Now we want to do the same again? And for what? Replace Flash with another 3rd party program that is under the control of a company only seeking to maximize its profit?
It will be interesting to see what is going to happen, I think it will be yet another setback, forever increasing the gap between open and closed software. Just as browsers are becoming more standardized so that everyone can use the web with whatever software they wish, another closed source element sneaks its way back in. Google might have reasons to do this, but it might well end up biting them in the ass. All MS has to do is create their own youtube, that supports HTML5, with only THEIR codec pre-installed on the OS. Google and Apple would have NO grounds to complain, since they did the same.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
and all i'm saying is use whatever the hell format you like: the creator can benefit in ancillary ways
i could care less about "the man"
i care about a set of laws that in the internet age has no more integrity or enforceability
you'r hyperventilating and getting caught up in derivative conflicts
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
VFR is purely a container issue, not a codec issue.
Ogg also supports VFR, with fairly modest overhead. It just does it somewhat differently than some other formats, more like how windows media does it: Rather than explicitly switching frame rates, you use a high stated frame rate (like 1000 fps) then skip the frames you don't need.
Some of the 'features' Theora skips are responsible for Theora's much more reasonable CPU usage. Other ones (like interlaced coding) are locked up behind a wall of patents (but fortunately no one should give a shit about interlace support anymore). Part of the problem with comparing to H.264 is that its not just one format, there are a dozen different profiles and most devices (especially hardware decoders) can't play many of them, even most software players won't play deep video or 4:2:2/4:4:4. There is just one Theora, and it even has 4:2:2 and 4:4:4.
QuickTime no longer enables the system tray icon by default and has not for a long time. I also don't see how you can get confused and end up with iTunes installed. The QuickTime installer only contains QuickTime, the iTunes installer contains both iTunes and QuickTime. I guess see how you can get confused on a second look, one is named QuickTimeInstaller.exe and the other is named iTunesInstaller.ex;, they both have "installer" in their name. How confusing, be careful out there!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Beta versions of opera use gstreamer for video, so if you install H.264 gstreamer plugin (and such exists) then you will have opera playing H.264 streams.
Nothing stopping them installing one...
Except price.
Also, most video cards these days support h.264 in hardware
True, some mobile and set-top-box video cards implement the entire MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 stack on an ASIC. But Firefox is targeted at desktop and laptop PCs, and as I understand it, PC video cards support signal transforms that are useful for video decoding in general, such as cosine transform (IDCT), deblocking filter, and motion reconstruction. A Theora decoder written partly in OpenCL or CUDA would run on a video card just as well as an H.264 decoder written partly in OpenCL or CUDA.
The thing is, both iTunes and Quicktime are stable and usable on Macs (no surprises there). Most Apple fanboys won't have experienced it on Windows.
They'd doubtless assume the problems are somehow Windows' fault...
The reality is that I think both are based on Mac-targeted source code, and work via a compatibility layer written by Apple. This adds some inefficiencies to what the code has to do. It also means they have Mac UI traits, that Windows users don't know what to do with.
> Sounds like you're using Windows. Try using Flash on any other platform.
No thanks. At home I use Windows, FreeBSD and Linux. I do the "desktop stuff" (videos, games etc) on Windows.
So flash is crap on the Mac, and quicktime is crap on Windows. Not surprised actually.
FWIW, Quicktime using 30%-40% CPU to play Youtube videos doesn't sound that great, but maybe that's due to the 1.5GHz G4.
I thought the powerpc G4 had fancy instructions? Does quicktime use them to speed stuff up?
How much CPU does quicktime on the newer Intel Macs use to playback youtube videos?
Windows works a lot better without Apple applications on it.
Deliberate sabotage? Or just incompetence?
On my Core 2 Duo Mac, QuickTime uses around 5-10% of my CPU, flash uses 40-50%. It's less important on that machine, but on the older machine QuickTime can play 720p quite happily, while Flash can only handle normal quality YouTube stuff without dropping frames if nothing else is using the CPU. On my 1.2GHz Celeron laptop, Flash can't handle YouTube videos without dropping frames, but VLC can play them back using under 50% of my CPU.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, QT is far more unpleasant than Flash. Maybe it works acceptably when it's ran natively on a mac; but on other OS's, I'd lump QT in with Real Video. Immediate scrub off my machine if it shows up.
So it's like a major web browser creator versus major web video providers. I think the porn industry will say the final word again.
Especially refusal to live in reality.
As I previously said:
Firefox does not need to do anything!
Just bind to ffmpeg/ffdshow/CoreVideo. They all support H.264, and your responsibility is zero.
You can still fall back to Theora, even if nobody will actually ever use it in the real world.
There is no either/or here. There is not even a compromise. You can have all your wishes and dreamy ideals, and we can have H.264.
The whole problem is made-up. And only kept alive trough continued denial and ignorance of what I just said.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's rather defeatist. It could happen. It would need to happen in stages. Each stage is a win in itself.
1. It becomes common practice for sites to host both H.264 and Theora. (HTML5 lets you specify multiple video URLS. The browser will pick the one it prefers. You can do fallback-to-Flash in Javascript)
2. Some sites start using Theora only. Either for ideological reasons, or because it's simply all they can afford. Their fallback is a message saying "sorry, please use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc."
3. People start complaining to their vendors about this content they can't view -- "how come Firefox can do this and my browser can't?". Under commercial pressure, these vendors start to support Theora.
If Firefox folds on this issue, then even step 1 won't happen. God bless 'em for having principles.
Why do you exclude flash? The sdk is free and the player is free. Adobe makes some IDEs that are for sale but they are not required.
You can buy a licence from MPEGLA for a using an opensource implementation of H264 such as ffmpeg or x264, entreprises do that already.
The patents are public so there's no need to hide source code of implementations.
Linux media players already have support for h.264.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Nobody forced anyone to adopt Microsoft Windows; it just happens that it did get adopted because it actually is a good operating system. There are alternatives of varying quality and success, and even if there weren't, nothing is stopping someone from designing one and marketing it.
While not completely analogous, Microsoft isn't forcing anyone at gunpoint to buy or sell Windows. They're just using their market position to compel people to do so ("an offer you can't refuse").
A lot of people have voluntarily chosen to get locked in, and have in this way granted a lot of power to an organization that might not have their interest as its top priority.
MPEG-LA didn't take power, people just (stupidly?) gave them power. That doesn't change the fact that it now has a lot of power. And it wields it counter to our interests.
I think that's what your parent was getting at.
A browser that supports a completely free stack has no need for plugins. Or add-ons that handle content that the browser doesn't. So let Mozilla put their principals where their mouth is and start by banning those things.
What your suggestion is offering is a technical solution to the problem which unfortunately conflicts with their principle and thus they can't go down the road. I see Mozilla people's point and I agree with them. It's reasonable, logical and consistent. But I also understand there are a lot of people who read slashdot who just don't seem to understand what the point of freedom is.
Their principle is already conflicted by things their browser supports. Many sites contain an embedded swf and Mozilla dutifully instantiates a proprietary component to play it. Hell, their browser will even HELP the user get Adobe Flash Player if it encounters sites that contain SWFs. It's hard to imagine how their principles could be compromised any more if they're taking some kind of stance on this particular point.
Of course I realise why their principles take a backseat here. IMO it's simply pragmatic to support the proprietary stuff while pushing HTML standards which do away with them. But a video tag that only supports ogg really isn't much use at all. Sites aren't going to code against that tag when it doesn't support the INDUSTRY STANDARD codec. Some sites might use it but the majority will carry on using proprietary plugins by Adobe and Microsoft to play their content or advise users to use Google who do supply a browser which plays videos. Either way open standards and Mozilla lose.
It simply makes no sense for Mozilla to take this stance. By all means ship with the ogg player. After all, the power of the default can be never be underestimated. But not allowing other codecs is flat out stupid and ultimately self defeating. Most modern operating systems either contain an h264 player, or can obtain them. In many parts of the world, it's even free and legal to use h264. Denying a popular industry standard video format and denying providing an API so that others can support it is cutting off the nose to spite the face.
So does this settle it for firefox on windows 7?
signature is pants
This is how it should be, at least for an OS that uses gstreamer.
signature is pants
It looks as though they're finally accepting this. Is that true?
Yay for technical merit beating political bullshit, then! Next up: DirectShow on Windows and QuickTime on OS X? Please?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I would have modded you funny, but I already posted abobe :|
signature is pants
*above.
signature is pants
Support in HD video cameras is irrelevant, unless you plan to post full resolution, un-edited videos from them.
Name some mainstream consumer video editing packages that support Theora encoding. A large proportion of video content on the web is produced on the mac and Apple is one of the major supporters of the H.264 standard.
Most people don't even know what software is out there that allows you to play back Theora let alone encode in that format.
I think the open source community is wasting its time with this battle when they could be concentrating on developing their server service standards like Open Directory to compete with Active directory and develop a robust replacement for Exchange server. I'm all for open source "server" services and open standards for networks but I'm not a fanatic about open source being used everywhere and for everything.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
no one is under the illusion that ogg is a suitable replacement for h.264 in all cases. The hope is that a better codec than either will appear with more suitable licensing terms
And the second thing you mention is not equally delusional as the first why exactly?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Lost in all this noise here is the reality that while Mozilla would have to pay on the order of $5million/year, they already make tens of millions per year being paid to have Google as the default search engine.
So why not take some of that large amount of profit and roll it back into the browser being distributed? I'm sure they do already in terms of development R&D. The stance against h.264 is somewhat admirable from the standpoint of idealism, but not very practical for someone wanting to distribute a modern browser. If you never compromise you'll always end up stuck.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're saying abnoxious advertising is a web usability problem?
Yes, actually. Though that's by no means all of it. I mostly use Flashblock because nothing says "screw you" like a background window suddenly using 100% of my CPU.
sites that use Flash for UI almost never provide a no-flash backup.
That's why Flashblock shines. Instead of having 20 little applets busywaiting in the background, I get 20 little (>) icons that I can selectively enable, and leave the 3d flash navigation menu that's tracking my mouse pointer with a clippy-quality avatar blocked until such time as I need it.
And, yes, even with the extra clicks, this gives me a far better user experience than without it.
Problem #1: I don't know about everyone else, but I am in favor of Mozilla promoting an open, free, and sane video standard. I just wish they would do that while also giving their users choice by supporting proprietary codecs through mechanisms which have been set up specifically for this purpose.
That is: I have no problem with Mozilla supporting Theora. I have no problem with them promoting it, or even providing a little notice on pages that use other codecs. I have a very big problem with them refusing to support anything else, even through plugins.
Fortunately, that particular bit of insanity seems to have passed -- it looks as though Firefox will support GStreamer on Linux, so we'll get h.264 support if we want.
Problem #2: I might Mozilla doing this if Theora was a stupidly-obvious choice. An example of a stupidly-obvious choice is PNG -- there is no rational reason to choose GIF instead of PNG for any still image. Another example is FLAC -- if you've got the space, and you're looking for a lossless format, FLAC is the obvious choice, and it's not going to be terribly painful for anyone to convert from, say, Apple Lossless to FLAC.
But it's not. Theora is catching up, but is still measurably and visibly behind h.264 in every comparison I've seen, including comparisons done by Theora proponents and Theora developers. So far, it appears it would cost Google more than 5 million in extra storage space and bandwidth to store Theora files instead of h.264 files -- and that's ignoring the additional cost of transcoding all these videos again, adding a generational loss to the ones people managed to upload in a format YouTube didn't feel the need to transcode at all.
And the only thing standing in the way of h.264 being an open standard is legal issues. That means this is all going to be moot in, what, 10 years? 15 at the most. Technologically, we understand it, we have many free software implementations of it, and it's already an open standard anywhere software patents aren't enforced.
These problems aren't addressed by your simple explanation -- perhaps I should call it a simplistic explanation. If you can make Theora (or Dirac) better than h.264 in every way, then I will support it, I'll participate in letter-writing campaigns to YouTube, and so on. But as it stands, you're letting the lawyers force you into adopting worse technology, and you're taking one of the icons of user freedom, Firefox, and severely limiting users' freedom in that way. That's where we have a problem.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's mostly just problem for Mozilla
And every site that wants to host their own video content. H.264 also requires a license for hosting content. All those sites will probably stick to Flash if other browsers don't support Theora.
Do you work for a living or do you just live of student grants? In the real world, things cost money and companies need to find a way to recoup their investment in developing things in H264. Not every company can live off donations and selling t-shirts or donations from other companies which are "for profit".
If if was not for there being some of those "evil" closed source companies, most open source projects would have never seen the light of day because they would not have had enough resources. Servers and bandwidth are not free.
Open source software should not be "free" to download for people who have not contributed considerable code to the project. I think there should be the option to pay for a license to use the binary, the option to contribute sweat equity to the project in exchange for a binary download and just give the non-paying public a link to the source and let them build the binary themselves.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Not only that Apple has the fucking gall to want you to buy their product if you want to get fullscreen. Not to mention it likes to take over ALL video. I finally gave up after years of installing and uninstalling it and now i just do without quicklime. Its jsut not worth it to see a trailer or something. I hate fucking quicktime and their bullshit decisions instead of just being a decent media player.
Good-bye
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
Good-bye
Why can't Mozilla just implement a plugin framework, and leave it up to the user to decide whether he wants to install the h264 plugin
No, no, you don't get it: that would be smart, and convenient, and uhh...
Oh wait. Well, I recall a link to a blog post by some firefox dude a few days ago (sorry I'm being so specific ^_^) who said that this has been suggested, and that it would be problematic: if there's a security issue (or some other issue) in the third party code, then firefox can't fix it.
It doesn't make any sense to me: sooner or later, firefox is going to make a system call. If the Windows API is broken, will firefox (the mozilla foundation) fix Windows? Will they fix libgtk? Or the OS X TCP/IP stack? Why is the video codec different? And by not shipping a video codec, they force us to use flash on (e.g.) youtube. Where are all the Mozilla foundation fixes to flash?
But there's the argument: The Mozilla foundation can't fix third party code, so it (selectively) won't rely on it.
Freeing slaves punished those who followed the law: the law that allowed you to keep slaves.
Do you really think google will just ignore it when youtube's webhits nosedive by 36% and their advertising partners leave en masse?
If 36% of all internet users and especially the pros can't see your html 5 videos, then html 5 is done for.
just wait for html 5's demise and ogg/theora in html 6...
Mozilla is to powerful in the browsermarket for any website to not support them!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
You mean like flash lets people use any installed codec? Oh wait. No flash forces you to use its internal H.264, H.263, or VP6. Or like IE lets you use any system codec? Oh wait, no it doesn't. You must mean like silverlight? No, even silverlight forces to use the built in codecs. Of course there is Chrome... BUT EVEN CHROME ONLY USES ITS OWN INTERNAL CODECS. Safari on mac actually does use system codecs, though apple severely constrains the functionality (for example, MOV with embedded hyperlinks don't play).
Ever think there might be a reason for this? System codecs are notoriously insecure. This is acceptable when they aren't going to be exposed to a highly hostile environment, but being embedded in a widely used browser or plugin is a very hostile environment, so no one does it. Except for apple, and thats mostly because they can get away with being security stupid because no one bothers attacking their platform.
Moreover, it's been possible to embed videos using the object tag since the mid 90s on any system dumb enough to expose the system codecs, and yet no one does video this way: The reason is because you can't expect it to work. You can't trust that the user will have any particular codec, or even one codec out of a small finite set (e.g. Theora or H.264). Virtually all video hosting sites create a couple renditions for different player CPU levels, screen sizes, and bandwidths so supporting two formats is bad but not a killer, but having to support two dozen formats just to get something to play is a total non-starter.
TLDR: System codecs = insecure; unpredictable; inconsistently available; shifts the openness problem onto someone else They are a problem, not a solution.
mozilla doesn't like being linked from slashdot.
thats quite interesting. why not?
Slashdot effect.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Mozilla is going to implement gstreamer backend for html5 video element.
That's only for Fennec; roc is dead set against enabling GStreamer for desktop Firefox.
Someone should make a greasemonkey script that replaces the H.blah thing with mpeg or flv - whichever Firefox supports. The tricky thing would be to fake browser title (Safari or Chrome) only on youtube sites - since Youtube doesn't really give you the video tag on other things as far as I can see. Faking is possible to change in about:, so maybe someone already wrote an extension to do that on the fly (would need to be modified to do it automatically on *youtube.com* sites), so some sort of mix should be made - I don't really know the limitations of either - perhaps you can do it both in just greasemonkey.
Alternatively (and until then), you can use this script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771 (it's free software)
Do you even realize how steep the licensing fees are for MPEG?
Chris Blizzard was on record a while ago saying that if Mozilla wanted to ship mp3 support in FF, the licensing fees would be somewhere over $500,000 *a day*. h.264 is considerably more expensive. Millions a day. Mozilla would be broke in under a week.
The MPEG-LA had a little slideshow not long ago talking about how successful it's been. One of the slides said proudly, I kid you not, that in 2008, MPEG-LA took in $66.46 of royalty fees for every man, woman and child ON THE PLANET for MPEG-2 ALONE.
Oh yeah huurr hurr its all about greasy hippies and freedom. No, its about COLD HARD CASH.
Quicktime and Acrobat are the evil twins of PC software, developed from the outdated perspective that software licensors have a more valid claim on your hardware than you do. My OS no longer ignores desktop input while completing unrequested mandates from Apple or Adobe. Search 'remove acrobat plugins' for an indicator of the general feel out there. Like you I dropped them both.
Holy shit dude that was fucking hilarious.
Opera has been releasing 10.50 "pre-alpha" versions for the last few weeks, with one major feature being <video>. It supports Theora, but not H.264. Actually, it uses GStreamer, so third-party H.264 support is quite feasible on platforms where the latter is first-class (Linux, BSDs etc) - it will just support anything your distro offers.
On Windows they use their own minimal port of GStreamer which only supports Theora for video; that said, GStreamer is still open source, and so is this thing, so it can be theoretically hacked to add H.264 as well. Nonetheless, this isn't exactly "out of the box".
As it stands, only Safari and Chrome stand by H.264.
They don't even need to implement a plugin framework. They just need to use the one that OS provides already - DirectShow on Windows, GStreamer on Linux, QuickTime (the framework, not the codec) on OS X, and so on.
The challenge is to build a better codec fast. A better codec that is covered under the GNU GPL would stop H.264 in its tracks. Until then, we have H.264. I know Apple has turned into the new Microsoft, so they want to push lock in and proprietary formats and the HTML5 tag doesn't specify a codec, so Ogg Theorea or H.264 could both be used, but Apple whined they like H.264 (they created it). It screws everyone else though, and makes Firefox users disgruntled. I think its time to kill proprietary video and audio codecs on the internet. If you want to poison your own users, then fine. The internet is a public forum. Proprietary has no place here.
I think many slashdotters have a knee jerk reaction to those promoting freedom due to RMS being a little extreme.
I just want to get something to work hassle free. To me supporting H.264 is about using $$$$ tools like adobe flash to create sites and use internet applications. Html is supposed to be as open as you can get. I do not care if people are greedy and yes supporting this will be the death of firefox and ultimately the internet. Lawyers from other companies will then demand payments for things like displaying the letter A with a font and using a network, and a whole bunch of endless redicious fees.
Then firefox will receede and IE will take over and html 5 development will mean expensive proprietary tools that only work on windows, etc.
Yes I willl use proprietary products if it gets the job done. However the internet is the only free thing left and I do not want a return to AOL, MSN, in the1990's where creativity was discouraged and $$$ ruled the day on who gets to develop software.
With html5 and free software codecs we can use our own tools and encourage innovation.
The net is free now but that is endangered. The lack of IPv4 addresses by domain squatters, h.264, and flash are creating problems.
http://saveie6.com/
What about DIRAC????
You are changing the subject (cameras vs editors). But anyway.
Most people don't know about any of it for H.264 either, or for JPEGs or PNGs for that matter. They just go to a site with Firefox or Chrome and Theora video "just works". As far as encoding is concerned, anyone who knows enough to write HTML5 should be able to google for it. It's not obscure enough that there is no info out there, just that many people haven't heard about it.
In short, the tools will come, and rather quickly if anyone wants them, the groundwork has been laid, the user friendly front ends are not that big of a deal.
I think that, unless you expect Firefox developrs to just randomly drop developing a browser and start on random server side projects, you are off topic there.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I don't know - I suspect that the firefox team wants to support all platforms equally which would be a problem.
They dropped the pay-for-fullscreen thing a few years back.
Yo man, don't shoot the messenger here. I am just reminding about this new ACTA. I am not disputing the present or the past, they are what they are, just talking about the near future. They are going to be serious about it once that passes. that's the whole idea, and they got the juice to do it. You may not recognize it as a big deal yet, shoot, hardly anyone does, but it is there and eventually will be put into force. DeCss and so on, is exactly what I have been saying, they *haven't* been serious about enforcement, nor much for downloading copyrighted content. It's been joke level enforcement so far. This previous **AA "enforcement", for example, is just them getting warmed up and developing their tech to pull this off better. They will keep changing it around until they get something that works on a mass scale. so far, when they have started sending out the threatening letters for getting people to be bounced from the net connection, that has been working better than threats of cash lawsuits. After that will come blacklists, and no more net connections for people anyplace. All of this is set to change fast once they have even more legal precedent that will be in the form of this international treaty/agreement. A lot of these repositories and so on with "infringing" warez to make your box functional with various media will find it hard to find anyplace that will host them outside of the control of the RBN. The wild wild west days of the net are rapidly closing, the suits are going to want their money and way more control of the net, or else.
So US law is very slanted against patent pools, they are viewed as anti-trust law violations by default and can pretty much only exist with the permission of the FTC. MPEG-LA has come under fire several times regarding anti-trust law.
Part of the criteria required for a patent pool to be lawful is that it must be offered under RAND terms-- the licenses must be available to absolutely everyone at exactly the same price. No special deals, no incentive freebies, etc. Break that and the principles of mpeg-la are looking at time in federal prisons, the law here is pretty serious.
They are currently playing somewhat fast and loose with the intention of the law, if not the expressed language of it: They are wilfully blind to most beneficial infringement, x264 is breaking the law like WOAH, but since they make the best encoder by far MPEG-LA looks the other way. It's not at all clear that the failure to enforce in these cases is at all lawful in the context of anti-trust law, so no one is going to formalize that kind of deal, and Mozilla can't afford to depend on the hope that MPEG-LA won't enforce like VLC, ffmpeg, and x264 can. They also violate the intent of the law in that the patent holders themselves cross-license with each other without paying into the pool, and the annual rate cap is highly discriminatory-- though discriminates via proxy rather than by name.
Government regulators respond slowly, but I expect there will be some amazing fireworks once the FTC does wake up.
Its not ideology at all in my opinion. Mozilla lawyers simply stated, do not include H.264 because its legally owned by someone else.
I do not like this situation either and think its ridiculous. The mozilla foundation has a legal responsibility to protect its assets against frivolous lawsuits.
http://saveie6.com/
Speaking as someone that has lived all over the world and done extensive amounts of work in the US in Software.
First off. Every Country/Region needs to understand that if they make the conditions unfavorable for mid-long term business operations for software development the software shop will move. ( The whole concept of outsourcing ).
For quite a long time now we have seen the migration of LARGE data centers to cost effective, dependable locations. Data centers have different criteria than a software shop but they show us an interesting parallel to software development. Chicago used to be one of the data centers capitals of the world. It's not exactly known for that now. Why? Unfriendly local taxation, cost of power, reliability of power, migrating network backbones away from region. What I'm saying is data centers moved away from Chicago because the conditions became unfavorable.
Software development is even more vulnerable. In the last 24 months I have had contract development done in Vietnam, Brazil, Sri Lanka, India, France and NONE in the United states. All because of factors like. Cost, Time to Market availability of resource etc.
Other factors do have impact. In the example above kernels. The issue here is the concentration of specialized developer staff. Is a major factor. For several years San Fran was the "only" place to set up a software shop of any kind. Not so any more. Why? Partly the specialized skill spread out.
Several of the driving factors for migration away from the US are. Cost of staff, Cost of facilities, Cost of power, legal over head, governmental regulatory encumbrance. ( Basically all of them are money )
Do not for one second believe that what you see on the ground now for jobs and company shops in the US will remain so in 2-5-10 years time. Taxation in the United states will most likely climb. Taxes go up expensive jobs will flee. I have seen dramatic shifts in the IT world over the decades, boom bust, migration and dispersal. A lot of local changes had to do with government and taxation.
A common joke around my office circle is. "How do you make a project over run and never deliver? Get an IBM project manager from the States on the job." It may or may not be true. But it does reflect the sentiment that is out there. Basically the rest of the world does not look to the United States first for development.
So you the future leaders of the US software industry. You need to really pull your finger out of that dark hole it's in and start doing something to improve the reputation, the viability, the cost of software development in the United States. Cause if you don't wave good buy to another white collar high paying industry. As someone else said. The US made this mess and now the US needs to dig them selves out of it. This statement is also true for other locations on the planet as well. India for example is facing a very nasty fall in the software industry if conditions don't improve for companies.
They'd have to go back and reencode the entire YouTube library if they wanted to offer it in Theora.
We're speaking about Google.
MOTHER. FUCKING. GOOGLE.
If anyone on the web has the processing power and storage space to reencode the whole Youtube library on a whim, it's them.
And if they are really that short on storage space, they could kick out some of the older format stored in the library.
Each video isn't just stored as H-264, but as a whole set of different formats - for backward compatibility (I seem to have read somewhere that there are even Flash 7 compatible encodes).
Google could drop one of the older format (say, Sorenson, for example) and use the freed space and processing power to do Ogg/Theora encodes instead.
As Theora is less complex, it wouldn't probably require as much processing resources as H.264 anyway. (In fact it's somewhat the same generation of technologies as the Sorenson codec, for example).
As Youtube and the like mostly contain crappy quality clips taken with camera-phone, the fact that Theora is less complex won't impact that much the quality (well at the beginning Youtube used much poorer quality codecs and still did well - the move to h.264 is an overkill quality-wise).
(The h.264 vs Theora quality will only start to matter for websites streaming HD TV and HD commercial movies)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So in other words, it can be done, but Mozilla refuses to do so. Given how big of a deal HTML5 is getting to be, I wouldn't be surprised if someone forks Firefox over this.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
how do free installs somehow compel other people to buy?
free installs compel more free installs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But does the default install of Ubuntu have any "don't install this software if you're not sure it's legal to do so" software?
Ian Hickson, as it happens, is violently against anything even slightly non-standard, and you can bet he would love to see H.264 die.
H.264 is a standard published by an international standards body (ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding). Theora is not.
Why does everyone seem to forget about Dirac?
The article states that Theora outperforms Dirac "at typical Web bit rates" such as 500 kbps.
The main point as i understand, is that MPEG-LA can start after 2010 to force users to pay for the content they view. Until now, the viewer are free of payments, but this can change. At least on US territories and any territory where software patents apply (i can think JP/US/Some countries @Europe). I don't think is a thing of "we buy the software" anymore, but the thing can become a "Pay per View", so you want to see some video encoded with H.264, then you (as user) pay MPEG-LA or their licensors let's say, US 0.99 per video... It will be be not the end of youtube or similars, but the end of free videos using H.264. Of course there's a chance that MPEG-LA just say the viewer are excempt of payment, but... why allow this??
That's why an open standard should be supported... is not that it will replacing a commercial standard anyway... If you want to support a commercial standard, then pay for it.. a plugin??... well why not... if the os has included facilities, then you pay for this when you buy the OS (windows/osx). If you use linux, then you are out of luck or be illegal and live with it... (not much of a difference with a informatic pirate anyway, but laws changes from country to country anyway).
Here's a quote about it from Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22787/Mozilla_Explains_Why_it_Doesn_t_License_h264
The licensing fees for H.264 are well-known and widely published. The current cap is $5,000,000 per year (which Mozilla easily hits considering their userbase). The cap is going up again next year. Previous raises were an additional $750,000 per year, but you never know what it's going to be. There's no contractual limit on how much they raise the cap, only a promise of how much they raise the per-unit fees which doesn't affect Mozilla (they have so many units, they'll always hit the cap).
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Considering the progress of GPL software for the past 26 years I would say they are doing a damn fine job of promoting positive progress.
Do you think the Googlers didn't expect this response from the Mozilla foundation? If Mozilla stick to their guns, Chrome will swallow Firefox whole... end of story.
They are. H.264 is not open enough to be shipped with a FLOSS product that is playing strictly by the rules. The question is why Apple and Microsoft are not supporting open standards, because Theora support is in Chrome and pre-release versions of Opera.
Because better the devil you know. They know there's not going to be any more people asking for extra fees for H.264 - Theora simply isn't deep enough in the water for the subs to prepare their torpedos.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fact is, if the web site has the ability to choose the CODEC, then they should have a means of providing the CODEC. An architecture via DOM, EcmaScript, WebGL and an audio object should have been designed so that CODECs could be distributed to the web browser as byte code that can be compiled optimized for the platform.
Sure, initially it would be slow, but now that pretty much all EcmaScript implementations compile to native, it would make sense to push the limits and force the ability to produce vectorized code as well. There's simply no reason that EcmaScript couldn't be used for implementing CODECs. WebGL provides video textures which can be used for pushing the media to. Additionally, GLSL might be able to be used for GPU accelerated Video CODECs.
As far as I can see, the only thing missing is a method of outputting audio data from EcmaScript as a stream.
a) that most windows users don't have an H264 codec
Great, because some people do not have the codec I will have to continue to use flash on Youtube. Maybe I could download some plugin that allowed me to watch h264 videos because I have the codec. Maybe I should tell everybody how easy it is to download HD TV shows using torrents. Then more people will have the codec.
b) It's pissing on their principles (my words, not theirs)
Too bad.
But I also understand there are a lot of people who read slashdot who just don't seem to understand what the point of freedom is.
Well, I admit I don't. I always though that freedom meant that I could do whatever I wanted (within reason of course). That should include being able to watch h264 videos on Firefox.
So suppose you're in the following scenario: you get to recieve a pile of money in exchange for a corporation to cut off your right leg
Depends n the amount of money. If the amount of money is enough to build a fully functional artificial leg and then there would still be enough for me to never have to work again I'd probably do it.
What if it was only a few toes say of one of your siblings, or a living parent, or one of your children if you have any?
I'd ask the person h(im|er)self.
From my perspective, you have no principles except possibly the pursuit of money which as a goal I just don't see much point
So, you would refuse to sell your leg for any amount of money. You continue to live and work as usual and can be proud and tell everybody "Well, you see, I was offered $XYZ, but I refused, I still have my leg and can continue to enjoy living in fear of losing my job", well, until you get in an accident in which you lose that leg anyway (or maybe you don't).
From where I see it, this decision by Mozilla actually is infringing on my freedom. I want to be able to watch videos in sites that use h.264 codec. Almost everything else uses that codec (anime, HD TV shows, youtube) and a lot of devices support it (PCs, bluray players, my cell phone). So why use the codec that is only supported on PCs and is inferior in quality? OK, you like the codec because of legal reasons, I understand that Mozilla cannot distribute h.264 codec for free etc. OK. So make it possible to write a plugin with that codec.
Or even better, use the codecs that are in the PC already. Ir that particular user does not have h264 codec, the site can guide him to download it or if he can't it certainly won't be worse than it is now, where I can't play the videos even if my PC has the codec.
Going back to your analogy about cutting off a leg. If you respect freedom, than you have to respect my choice to sell my leg (or my kidney, or some of my blood), otherwise your idea of freedom becomes something like "Do whatever you want as long as I approve it". And this is why I can't understand the laws that prohibit the sale of non vital organs. If I can't sell it, you aren't getting it for free either.
It is not firefox's job to decide what video content i can and cannot watch. If the site serves the video and i have installed (legally, illegally or outside of juristiction) the required codec to render it then the video should play. 'nuff said.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
> QuickTime no longer enables the system tray icon by default and has not for a long time.
Good to see some progress. But they're not going to get in my good books so easily. After all:
> The QuickTime installer only contains QuickTime, the iTunes installer contains both iTunes and QuickTime.
Sure maybe TODAY it does. But every now and then Apple "thinks different" see:
1) http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/92938/want-quicktime-apple-forces-you-to-install-itunes-to-get-it.html
2) http://digg.com/software/Download_Quicktime_7_Without_Being_Forced_to_Install_iTunes
3) http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005533.html
So, no thanks.
Maybe I'll switch if Adobe started forcing people to install Acrobat Reader even though they only want Flash Player...
RefControl: Default:Block HTTP referer. ;)
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
You are changing the subject (cameras vs editors). But anyway.
Easy? So I take it that you have never written any software I take it? I've been working as a software developer for over a decade. It all appears deceptively easy to the uninitiated.
A lot of people use tools like Quicktime, iLife or Movie Maker to quickly edit and upload their videos to places like Youtube. Where are people expected to get encoding software? Will it work seamlessly? Will they even care enough to choose Theora when the default might be H264? Where will these videos be hosted? How easy will it be to upload the videos?
Most people don't know about any of it for H.264 either, or for JPEGs or PNGs for that matter. They just go to a site with Firefox or Chrome and Theora video "just works". As far as encoding is concerned, anyone who knows enough to write HTML5 should be able to google for it.
Thank you for proving my point. People expect their software to "just work". Without content in Theora format, they will have nothing to watch. As for creating and publishing in H264 format, there is Quicktime and iMovie which now support uploading in H264 to Youtube from within the application.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
H.264 had already won. It wins because it does the job the best. Yeah, it's a commercial thing, and that IS bad for the web in ways that's not really much of a big deal for other things. Similarly, delivering the best compression per bit is critical for video delivery over most other media, but particularly ... well, the places it's already used. Every major still or video camera maker uses H.264. Every Blu-Ray member, satellite companies like Echostar and DirecTV. Every major PMP maker.
The simple fact is that H.264 is to the early 21rst century was MPEG-2 was to the 1990s... THE video standard format.
The correct way to manage this the way the video players (DVD, Blu-Ray) have done, but that still sucks a little if you're Mozilla. Basically, every video format has both mandatory and optional formats it must decode. This makes this a bit harder on the player producers, but much easier on the content delivery folks.... the only have to chose one of the above. So if I make a Blu-Ray (I do, this isn't just hypothetical), I have the choice of H.264/AVC, VC-1 (WMV9), or MPEG-2 as the video format, and half a dozen audio formats, including a few flavors of AC-3 and plain old uncompressed.
So the right consumer solution here would have been to demand that support H.264 and Ogg Theora as mandatory formats. Toss in a few optional formats if you like... they might not be popular, but you never know (MPEG Layer 2 audio was an optional format for Region 1 DVD, yet nearly every players supports it).
To support open source, make the H.264 piece into a closed source, pay-for plug-in. This is how a number of companies (Nero, Archos, etc) have dealt with the extra cost of supporting AVC, at least at some time in the past. It might have a bad taste without those Fundamentalists among us who want to refuse even the possibility of closed source or proprietary formats getting into their faces, but for those who just want a practical engineering solution, this works. None of the Theora backers were EVER going to get the H.264 proponents to back down and embrace Theora as the only HTML5 video format. Look at the list... they're all the guys with the money, and most of them have vast investments already in H.264 content. Taking them on the way this was done, it was a guaranteed fail.
But of course, this is the computer industry, where everyone has to fight over their one preferred solution, rather than take the "what's best for the most people" approach, which is really what the CE type solution comes down to. And of course, the CE industry NEVER has such format wars [ducking....]
-Dave Haynie
We are talking about yet another encoder module, not an architecture overhaul. You have been a software developer, would you use modules for import/export functionality if you were developing an application that needs to deal with multiple file format? I'm not a professional developers, but I'm not completely clueless to the process either.
If they don't care, they will not encode H.264 with just the right settings for youtube to pass it through without trans-coding. So the answer is, it doesn't matter if their high-bitrate H.264 export gets trans-coded to a lower bitrate H.264 or Theora video.
Except that that wasn't the point you were making (I cannot vouch for what you attempted to make). You said that people wouldn't know how to playback Theora and encode it, basically they wouldn't know what to make of these odd .ogg files. I don't see a way of reading "Most people don't even know what software is out there that allows you to play back Theora [..]" as "Firefox might play back Theora transparently, but since no one publishes Theora videos it doesn't actually 'just work' even if in reality it does as seen by the few people who actually do publish Theora vidoes". I might also add that the latter doesn't make much sense, so I might be completely misreading and would prefer clarification if I am.
There is also Windows Movie Maker for XP, digital cameras that can capture videos in MJPEG and all sorts of other sources outside of the (still relatively small) Mac ecosystem. Youtube still accepts and trans-codes videos from these people, if they switched to Theora today the effect would be minimal.
In case Quicktime and iMovie has a special mode that allows the video to avoid trans-coding there might be a slight quality loss as they would be trans-coded due to the format change. At least until someone gets around to implement it (or they'd insist in continuing to push a format they have for which they have patent in the pool and point fingers at Google).
In the end however, web video is bigger then youtube and what I personally care about is the ability to put my videos on my site without paying a format tax in one way or another. If I have to point to a third party with a flash player for fall back for browsers other then Firefox, Chrome and Opera, then that's still better then having to rely on a third party exclusively. For Firefox to try to support me, more then they try to support Apples video editors is no surprise given their history.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Suspect or hope, they can't know this. And Google is a pretty big target and was On2 back in the day (VP3 has been around). If someone in the business had wanted to flex their patents, why wouldn't they have gone after a big codec developer?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I prefer to live in a world of Freedom than one ruled by expediency.
The freedom for there not to be choice and competition in VIDEO tag codecs?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ugh, quicktime ... I'd even rather have flash.
You'd rather have the MPEG-4 file format than the Quicktime file format?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Well, sometimes there are folks who stick to religious convictions, regardless of the impact. Some religions reject the use of modern medicine, others, apparently, reject the use of some specific operating system interfaces (video), but curiously, not others (images, files, etc).
And then there's occasionally someone who just wants to get the frickin' job done, and perhaps in a way that people will use it. Which is why everyone says "Linux" today, not "GNUix" or whatever..... Linus just got it done. I'm sure he's got plenty of principles, but they didn't get in the way of building something people would actually use.
Mozilla looks like they are trying very hard to make themselves a moot point. I rather expect they'll just keep playing videos via a Flash plug-in, years after HTML5 takes off, with increasingly fewer users. Or we'll be getting the popular version of Firefox from somewhere else, the one that adds the external video CODEC option to Mozilla's base.
They seem to be missing the point entirely here... popularizing Theora would lead to people using it. Force-feeding will not. And until Theora doesn't suck, and does get general support in video applications that are actually creating video (eg, via those same OS-level video CODECs that Mozilla abhors) it's not going to get much use. And I say this as a guy who does both engineering and video.
-Dave Haynie
Open source software should not be "free" to download for people who have not contributed considerable code to the project.
Ah, somebody fixated on creating artificial scarcity and who can't cope with the idea of non-rivalrous goods.
The world is a richer place when things can be freely copied billions of times.
Artificial scarcity, copyright and patents, are a primitive hack to encourage creation that possibly was going to happen anyway, nothing more, and often cost society much more than they give.
It's quality and bandwidth that makes Ogg Theora a problem right now. You need more bits for the same quality from an original source, plain and simple
But once again : Do we *really* need that quality for crappy clips taken with sub-quality camera ?
Yes, a 512kbit/s Theora will be more blurry as a 512kbit/s h.264. It would probably need a 768kbit/s to achieve the same visual quality as 512kbit/s h.264
BUT what I'm arguing is that these extra 128kbit will only be spent trying to be more faithful to the artifact of the original video.
I understand the debate "to achieve the same quality, Theora needs more bits". What I want people to take notice is, as long we're speaking about video-clip-upload websites (as opposed to website stream commercial HD shows & movies), these extra bits are useless : the difference in quality doesn't matter.
That difference is only about which CODEC will be better at conveying the noise of the original clip MJPEG at 60%-quality.
Google doesn't need to give the additional bits to Theora. Let it run at the same bandwidth as h264 - thus it won't cost Google any extra. The quality would be lower but : Nobody is really going to pay attention that much AND by doing so, they are enabling a patent un-encumbered format.
Theora-users would be only losing some quality but still be part of the game.
Whereas in the current situation, users of browsers who can't afford paying the h264 patents are left completely out.
Google may well be going in yet-another-direction. They did just buy On2 {...} The On2 people claim VP8 is 40% more efficient (eg, bits at the same perceived quality) than H.264 for low bitrate video. {...} Even more interesting would be if Google open sourced VP8, assuming it's clear of any MPEG-LA or Microsoft or other video compression patents.
That would REALLY be interesting. I was kind of expecting something on the long term, although I was more expecting it to come from the Dirac/Schroedinger projects. Which would probably one day too perform much better as h264 (given that it's a newer generation of technology) but are currently still very young and immature and still require lots of development.
But I'm afraid that actually a Google Free/Libre VP8 would actually lead to even more fragmentation :
- Google would be interested because of the bandwidth saving and the free/libre.
BUT
- Apple would still cling to h264, simply because it's hardware accelerated already in current chips on their iPhones. And probably because VP8 is more complex than h264 and more resource-hungry (thus CPU software decoding is a less desirable option).
I think this whole debate will only close when embed hardware's GPU are advanced enough to OpenCL-based power-efficient implementation of codecs.
What is a big deal is Mozilla saying, no, we're not going to support H.264, but we're also not going to support any of your system CODECs already.
Well the whole idea behind "VIDEO" tag was to get rid of 3rd party plugins.
If you insist on using 3rd party codecs you're back into the situation you were trying to run away from.
Only worse, because you're not using plugin designed from the ground up for a browser, but instead feeding data directly from the virus-laden web straight into a video codec which might never been meant for anything else than a simple offline player.
I you only solve the problem for platform having system codecs. You don't solve it for platform lacking support for h264 (like Windows XP among others). You don't solve the problem for all the interesting new and creative way to use the web (the mythical internet-enabled fridge :-P ).
As pointed out by others : If you had to pay several million in patent fee to the CERN each time you implemented HTML or CSS, do you think that all the crazy disruptive development of the web would have happened since Tim Berners-Lee proposed it in 1980 ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The fact is that they have options that do not require them to include h.264 code themselves. They are rejecting those outright too.
It is ideological, and they would be the first to tell you so.
Open source software should not be "free" to download for people who have not contributed considerable code to the project.
Ah, somebody fixated on creating artificial scarcity and who can't cope with the idea of non-rivalrous goods.
The world is a richer place when things can be freely copied billions of times.
Artificial scarcity, copyright and patents, are a primitive hack to encourage creation that possibly was going to happen anyway, nothing more, and often cost society much more than they give.
This has nothing to do with artificial scarcity. It has to do with people valuing the work of others. When you pay for something, you are much more likely to value it but if it is free, it becomes something that has no value to you and is easily disposable.
You seem to think that you are entitled to the work of others. Just because something is free, it does not mean that is does not have value. Unfortunately, many people like you do not see value in things that are free so it become necessary for you to work or pay for it in order to appreciate what something is worth. The problem is with your mindset.
Open source software is written by people and it takes considerable effort. It's just so sad that most people are not capable of appreciating the value of a gift given by someone to the community at large. It should inspire you to contribute donations or learn how to program and contribute something yourself instead of being selfish and sponging off the good nature of others.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Its worse. You would have to wait until 2028 for the US MPEG-LA H.264 patents to expire.
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-July/020737.html
In the US the last MPEG-LA patents listed for H.264 expire in 2028, not 2017.
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-July/020737.html
Depends on whether they want a showdown with maybe Mozilla and definitely the Free Software community. Right now Google can probably claim that it is beta that they are only supporting H.264. However, if they persist in only supporting H.264 for youtube, they are basically saying that they do not want open source programs to be able to view youtube anywhere that H.264 is patented (which is more than just the US). Using a rate of $0.66/GB per year (Amazon S3 rate) the $5 million dollar MPEG-LA fee would buy about 7.2 petabytes of online storage ( 5e6/(0.055*12)/1024/1024 ) . So they can probably transcode and make it available online for something on the same order magnitude as the cost of the MPEG-LA licensing fee. I think it is fairly likely that Google will start supporting Ogg Theora/Vorbis as well.
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-videos-on-youtube/