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.
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.
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.
No, they just have money.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That may be correct in a technical point of view and a very simple solution to this problem. Unfortunately, the world is a bit more complex than that, thanks for the mess of convoluted rules which each jurisdiction imposes on it's citizens. In this case, if you take a look at ffmpeg's patents min-FAQ" you will notice the following disclaimers:
So, although ffmpeg supports H.264 and other patent-encumbered formats, it does so in spite of the patents that affect the implementations. As a consequence, they make it clear that if you rely on ffmpeg then you are at your own risk. And needlessly putting yourself at risk is never a good thing.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
Isn't it better to use the native video player infrastructure on each platform? Quicktime on OS X, gstreamer/whatever on Linux?
It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end. -Douglas Adams
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'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!
Everyone wins.
Well apart from anyone who wants to host video on the web, who will have to either transcode on the fly (is that even possible?), or store 2 copies of the video, taking up around twice the space (assuming both formats produce the same filesize for the same quality , which as I understand they don't). And then what happens when Microsoft brings out IE X.X (Now with HTML5 video tag support!) which will only play back wmvs, thus requiring a third copy of the file.
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.
The need to "license other codecs" is exactly the problem. You shouldn't be forced to pay a toll to be able to perform basic, every day tasks such as watching web videos, particularly when you are supposed to be following an international standard. You aren't forced to deal with any of that crap if you happen to rely on a format which is patent-free. And that's why Mozilla is pushing for Theora, which is clearly the best solution to this absurd problem.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
I entirely agree with you, however it's irrelevant to the fact that if Mozilla doesn't provide a way for people to license other codecs if they want they're going to watch their market share go back to where it was ten years ago.
Right now there's two bad choices if you want to watch Yotube videos. You can use a proprietary plug-in that's already had a devastating effect on web usability (to the point where one of the most popular browser plugins is Flashblock), or you can use an open API that incidentally requires you to have a license for the video codec that Youtube chose to use. Almost all end-users already have licensed versions of this codec in their video cards and media players, AND hooks that let you use these implementations from the browser. Using those hooks, including FFMpeg, will let people use HTML5 video on Youtube without anyone being subject to patent lawsuits.
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
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.
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
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.
Wrong. On2's (soon to be Google's) patents on VP3 / Theora are totally harmless:
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
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.
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;
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
pretty much every format universal on the Internet today, got that way because the player/viewer was offered free of charge.
Not really; MPEG-4 (aka "DivX") is patented and requires royalties; you just didn't notice because either someone paid the royalties for you or you're infringing the patents.
It didn't. HTML5 doesn't mandate any codec for VIDEO element (just like HTML4 doesn't mandate any format for IMG element). The server specifies the codecs it can provide in HTML markup, and the browser picks the best one it can handle.
It just so happens that the only two major contenders are H.264 and Theora, of which H.264 is technologically superior but patent-encumbered. So Google and Apple are pushing for H.264 (they have already licensed it, so they'd rather go for better quality), while Mozilla and Opera want Theora (it's open and free to implement).
Whoever wins in practice, it will be a de facto standard, not a part of the spec.
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 ]