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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.
Google is not dumb. One major effect of a broadcast licensing fee for all web video is to make it harder to set up a Youtube competitor. Sure, Google has to pay the fee too. But it might well be worth it to them given the stifling of potential competition.
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).
Time for Mozilla to face reality and pay up the license as Apple and Google have done. Otherwise, watch Chrome really destroy Firefox.
Time for Linux users to face reality and just give up and use Windows, as most other people have done.
Oh, we didn't do that in 2000 and we have a strong, functioning, free as in freedom operating system now? I wonder how that could have happened.
Debian used to have the "Non-US" repositories. I can't see why they couldn't go back to it.
As much as everyone hates it, Ogg isn't going to win this. As far as I know there isn't a single hardware decoder for it yet. Almost any newer Nvidia card will do it. VDPAU under Linux works AWESOME. It will even upscale SD content (feature set C). Broadcom has their MiniPCI card that a ton of NetBooks run. I bought one for my AppleTV so that I can do 1080p. XBMC supports it. OS X should support it soon.