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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.
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.
roc has explained why using DirectShow in Mozilla's Gecko won't happen in the foreseeable future.
Mozlla's concerns don't seem related at all to the implementation of the video. Rather, they're concerned about the licensing issues related to their usage of it. According to the article (and the summary, at that), the only reason H264 is even legally embeddable in current software is due to a free-to-viewer clause, and even that may permanently expire in 2010.
Currently, most of the web (Flash excluded) is free to generate. I can make an HTML document, or a tool to generate HTML documents, and render those HTML documents without paying or owing anybody anything. To legally generate H264 files, you must pay for a license. To build software that generates H264 files, the software company must pay for a license. And (possibly) after 2010, a viewer or viewer software may have to pay for a license to watch the content. These are some pretty huge issues to overcome.
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.
You are kind of comparing wrong things here. Both MKV and Ogg are merely containers (and H.264 can be placed inside MKV container too, and is usually done so).
Also, Theora and H.264 aren't technically equivalent. Theora is kinda there, but it misses many features, is more heavy on hardware and requires a larger bitrate to get the same results. It also completely misses support for B-frames, variable frame rates, interlacing, and larger than 8-bits bit-depths. It also loses out because the creators have chosen to maintain backwards compatibility in cost of being technically superior.
Another thing that manages to create more support for H.264 is that blu-ray, PS3, DVB (digital television in europe, including cable) and several other services and devices already support it.
All of your arguments are irrelevant if the licensing issue can't be solved. Firefox can only use codecs that are not covered by restrictive licensing, no matter how good it looks. (And I agree with you, H.264 does looks good) Their choice is basically:
Theora is the best of these options. It doesn't matter how good H.264 looks, it's simply impossible for Mozilla to use it without dealing with the licensing issue.
Don't people have to cough up a license fee to implement USB? PCI? AGP?
For USB the only fees are for using official logos to show a product passed certification testing. For PCI you pay 3K/year for a membership to get a PCI ID assigned, but there is no licensing fee I am aware of. I don't know about AGP.
Little problem: Even if Mozilla caves in and pays the license fee, that does not cover anyone else distributing Firefox. Canonical would also have to pay the $5 million for Ubuntu's browser. Firefox would effectively no longer be open source as it would be illegal to compile it (with H.264 support) and distribute the resulting binary.
There must be SOMEONE out there with a great experimental video codec that just needs some love.
There are already a lot of video codecs out there, because there's a lot of ways to implement it. They all try to balance numerous factors within performance and quality. It's not easy. There's no one "holy grail" that produces perfect pictures while using a smaller number of resources than all of the others.
Also...
The editors of HTML5 are Ian Hickson (Google, Inc.) and David Hyatt (Apple, Inc.) Apple uses h264 in almost everything, so they would probably like to see it as the standard.
Actually, the patents can't cover the bitstreams. Case law such as In re Warmerdam indicates that nonfunctional descriptive material (such as a picture or a song) isn't a process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, so it doesn't meet the requirements of 35 USC 101.
However, the patents can potentially cover (modulo any prior art issues) the process of transmitting the bitstreams. It may sound like some really thin slices of salami to you, but that's how the law works.
By the way, your example about the "fancy new saw" and the resulting cut wood is wrong. As long as the cut wood resulting from using the fancy new saw has a specific, substantial, and credible use (for example, it's not merely ornamental, although there's something called a design patent that covers ornamental designs), it is patent eligible under 35 USC 101, because it's an article of manufacture.
> H.264 is a free and open standard, just not in the US.
Or France or Germany, last I checked (as in, there are H.264 patents that have been granted by those countries; these are not _software_ patents but patents on the design of the codec). I haven't looked into detail for other countries, but I think you're making some unjustified assumptions here (like "h.264 patents are software patents").
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.
The GPL and patents intentionally mix like oil and water. Directly from paragraph 7 of the GPLv2: "For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program." You can get around this by covenant not to sue *cough*Novell*cough*, but that's abusing a loophole really.
That works out great in certain circumstances, for example I can't patent something, add that to a GPL project and control distribution by selling patent licenses. But neither can Mozilla, they can't license it from MPEG LA just for themselves, the GPL basically requires them to license it for everyone. That is why you can download the Chromium source, but you will not get a patent license from that either. Only binary builds of Chrome gets the patent license, since a right to sublicense would destroy MPEG LA's revenue model.
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