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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.
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.
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.
I don't think anyone's ignoring those facts. In particular, 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; in the meantime a premature standardization on h.264 would hurt the chances of that codec being adopted when it appears, no?
On the other hand, you seem to be ignoring the fact that Wikipedia, say, has no plans to put its video in H.264 (so Safari, say, can't very well view it).
> Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done.
As a side note, Apple and Google did not have to pay for a license separately here. They already had the licenses.
> Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox
If that were to start happening (and it's nowhere close yet), the calculation might have to change, of course.
You're missing one important point: Google already has all these videos in H.264, so serving them up is relatively painless. They'd have to go back and reencode the entire YouTube library if they wanted to offer it in Theora.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license
Yeah, that'll happen right after you start paying $5.99 to install the browser.
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!
People license stuff all the time, even standards. Mozilla needs to get over themselves and provide a way to play standard H.264 videos.
Licensing something like h264 is very different. Its not just the fee (about 5Million pa for FF popularity) its the restrictions that the contract has. Like promising to enforce DRM or not permitting redistribution. These licenses are simply not compatible with GPL 2 or 3. Since I am not free to redistribute FireFox without getting a license from MPEG-LA.
And proving a H.264 *content* will require licenses after 2010. Have fun with that
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
More importantly, you generally BUY SOMETHING with USB, PCI, or AGP, therefore you give the company money to pay the fees with. Mozilla is given away freely, recouping some money with advertising links. They can't promise to pay lots of money and MPEG-LA has already cut the "loss leader" deals with big companies.... gotta get the money from the little guy. Worse yet, the MPEG-LA is notoriously fickle and as soon as fees kick in we'll have another situation like MP3 where everybody THOUGHT they paid up, but companies in the patent pool use loopholes to revoke MPEG-LA's consolidation of license fees.... then go after everybody "again" just like happened with MP3.
Why would you use H.264 instead of Ogg Theora to create your videos? What we're talking about here is how you would play videos created by someone like Youtube. The standard doesn't mandate H.264. It just fails to mandate Ogg.
If you only put Theora videos on your site, they won't be viewable in Safari (using default Quicktime components), iPhone or Android.
Professor Markup says:
There is no single combination of containers and codecs that works in all HTML5 browsers.
To make your video watchable across all of these devices and platforms, you’re going to have to encode your video more than once.
As long as there are mainstream platforms that don't support Theora, either you have to encode to H.264 yourself (and pay) or have someone else (e.g. YouTube) encode and host it for you.
Nah, I would imagine they would be open to it for a very favorable rate. If the license for free streaming content expires, anyone who wants to use h.264 online will need to pay for an encoding license. The only reason you would want to pay for a license to encode (when there are alternatives that are free on both ends) is if the tech is good and your viewers can all decode the content
If the MPEG-LA wants to sell to content distributers (who are more willing to pay since they actually depend on the content), they will want firefox's 33% of the market. They might not do it for free since mozilla also has some amount of willingness to pay but I doubt they are in a position to gouge them (and a "donation" to the nonprofit mozilla foundation might be a nice annual tax writeoff).
Bottles.
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