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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Why troll? AC is correct. The article gives a nice answer to the OP. It's the OP that totally missed the point.
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!
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.
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.
It's the patent minefield that is preventing theora from becoming the vorbis of video codecs. The developers can't implement some features, like those you've listed, for risk of patent litigation. It's not about backward compatibility.
You apparently didn't read the article. The issue is not that Mozilla can't get a license; it can. The issue is that it sees doing so as actively harmful to the web and to users.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
There is a $2000 fee to buy a unique USB Vendor ID, and the right to use the USB logo for two years, which is pretty much mandatory if you want to make a commercial product.
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
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;
Not to mention USB/PCI and AGP implementations are all hardware devices, presumably to be sold. Your comparison is horrible.
The day Firefox is "taken" by commercial software will be a sad day indeed. The Mozilla Foundation could probably get a reduced price on a license easily enough, but that's not the point.
Love it or hate it, it will inherit XP, and by such, it will support H.264. This would solve a huge slice of their problem which would only get smaller as Windows 7 adoption increases.
You misunderstand what their "problem" is, even though you quote it in your post. It's not that they would have difficulty supporting H264. It's that their raison d'etre is to promote a free and open Web.
They don't want or need to kill off H264, since HTML5 makes it easy for a site to support both at once. With this you end up with the equitable solution where you can say "If you want to use a browser with a proprietary codec, you can. Maybe it'll even look better. But if your browser only uses free codecs, you're OK too.
They just want to promote a Web where a user without access to H264 can take part in a meaningful way. So, a child in India/Brazil/Namibia/etc. who can't afford an H264 license (nor a Windows license) can still view mainstream video sites. So the same kid can create videos and share them on the Web.
If they didn't pursue those ideals, they might as well pack it in today and let everyone use IE.