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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
- Microsoft can probably work out a pretty good deal with MPEG-LA, and licensing technology is no problem for MS.
- Google aswell and they have to support it on YouTube anyway.
- 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)
- Apple definitely needs to support it in MAC OSX and maybe iPhone too, so WebKit and Safari will most likely support it.
Like with the previous case about Firefox's funding, Mozilla is alone with this. All of the other browser makers have created themself larger reasons to license it.
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? There is a huge market in mobile phone browsers which IE mobile and Opera currently dominate (safari is pretty much just used on iPhone). There's definitely a need for HTML 5 video on those devices and it would create more marketshare and support for Firefox, and HTML 5 Video is something that would actually push HTML5 forwards. Otherwise web developers don't have any reason to move forward from old standards.
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?