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Oh, What a Lovely Standards War
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "You know something big must be afoot when people start to get worked up over video compression standards. Basically, the issue is whether the current de facto standard, H.264, will continue to dominate this field, and if not, what might take over."
Related, reader eihab writes "Nuanti, a company that develops Web browsing technologies, has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin. Nuanti's Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with Theora in browsers that have Silverlight. It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
Except, of course, a browser that has Silverlight. :-|
Currently hooked on AMP
...Silverlight
it's just as bad as flash only from an even scummier company.
It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software... in browsers that have [the Microsoft] Silverlight [plugin]. c'mon now...
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
The only video codec that every browser can use at the moment is Ogg Theora. Unlike H.264, there are no costs involved beyond implementing support for it in your browser and there are no licencing issues that prevent distribution. Firefox, Opera, and Chrome currently support Ogg Theora. It's a shame that Safari and IE won't support it by default in the near to medium term.
It will be interesting to see what Google does once they own On2 Technologies. They may choose to open source the VP8 codec so every browser can use it and make it the default codec for YouTube, possibly as VP8 in Ogg as Ogg is a pretty good container format.
Installs in Silverlight but doesn't require additional software?
Huh? That's full-on doublespeak.
I'm not sure that the words "standards" and "just works" mean the same thing to some folks. Developing an open source project that uses Silverlight as a platform, while admirable, is pretty suspect on the philosophical front unless there's an angle here.
Just like Adobe, MS wants Silverlight as THE web platform of the future too. And while some folks might deride Apple for lacking plug-in support of any kind on the iPhone/iPad, it's achieved more in the uptick of standards-compliant sites in the last few years than all the other guys combined.
Silverlight's as bad as Flash, long-term, for the web. Worse in-fact because it supports DRM out of the box and can't be cached locally. Yay for big media control and zero benefit for the consumer other than streaming Netflix sucking less than the competition currently. Now if they'd only do something about having decent stuff available to stream.
H264's patent encumbered, but is a supported, documented standard. Ogg will never take off. MKV files don't work on bloody anything reliably except VLC, even though they're theoretically an h264 variant. Then you have various other mpeg4 flavors, and that's pretty much it in terms of getting HD content out there at reasonable bandwidth.
We've been using wrapper plug-ins as a dirty, hacky path to web video since the launch of the web proper. Enough's enough.
So TLDR: no, no, no, no no
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution. Works on Firefox, Opera, and Chrome natively with Ogg Theora, and Safari natively with H.264, and Internet Explorer with Flash (loading the H.264 content).
Naturally the best solution would be that everyone implements Ogg Theora as a standard fall-back solution, and use their "better/proprietary" solution when available.
I wish there was a way to mod the original press release as +5, Epic Troll, because that's what it is with respect to Slashdot - it's going to be way more entertaining than the usual (and already somewhat tiresome) Google vs "do no evil" stories. But Microsoft's Silverlight used to enable support for Theora in pretty much all Windows browsers (and specifically IE of all things), while both Google and Apple stand by H.264 - oh my!
Hold on a second, I've got to fetch the popcorn...
"It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
Other than Silverlight. Gee, that solves the problem.
Ogg Theora won't become relevant until there are hardware decode chips available. Why would I install Silverlight to play Ogg when I can use HTML5 and H.264 instead? Because someone might charge to develop with the codec after 2015?
I don't care because the H.264 standard is open even though it's not free.
Using a proprietary technology (Silverlight) to implement an open-standard...
Probably a good thing, as we'll probably see functioning HTML5 support in IE15, coming out around 2030. It will even manage a 75% on Acid3!
You can also implement Ogg Theora support in browser using the Cortado Java applet:
http://www.theora.org/cortado/
Cool. If it works with Moonlight and has decent performance, I'll be more impressed.
By virtue of the de facto status, it seems like anything that the majority of people use will never be superceded by anything that barely matches or only slightly improves on the de facto standard. From what I've read Theora is quite bare-bones compared to H.264 and hasn't been designed with hardware decoding in mind.
On a more technical side, I found this bit in TFA interesting:
We'll be releasing a high-performance decoder for Theora video/Ogg Vorbis audio streams that plugs into the Silverlight 3 streaming media abstraction ...
I know little about Silverlight, only the most general look and feel, and capabilities. Does this mean that it actually has extensible codec framework, that can be extended from managed code (since any SL code has to be managed, so that it can be properly sandboxed - same as Java applets which cannot e.g. use JNI)?
If so, the next logical question is - can the same thing be done with Flash, architecturally?
As a side note, this also means that Silverlight CLR JIT produces code that's fast (not just "fast enough", but actually "high-performance", at least if the claims are true) for a video codec, which is quite impressive. I'm not sure you could reach the same levels with ActionScript, due to its inherently dynamic nature, even with Adobe's JIT. But perhaps I'm underestimating the ability of modern JS JIT compilers to do static type inference, and consequent optimization based on that type information?
Either way, pragmatically, this means that any browser running on Windows will be able to play Theora after installing Silverlight - which, by the way, pops up in "recommended updates" list in Windows Update as soon as you install Windows. While Silverlight plugin is only officially supported on Windows in IE and Firefox, IIRC, I haven't had any problems using it in Opera regularly, and I've seen it work in Chrome, so it does seem to be mostly browser-agnostic.
It would be very ironic if Chrome running under proprietary Windows and OS X could play Theora, while Chrome on Linux would only support H.264.
But somehow, I don't think that will matter. Ultimately, Google is the 800-pound gorilla here because of YouTube, and most likely whichever they will go with (and they have already said they want H.264) will become the de facto standard. Apple could probably steal the day, but they stand by H.264 as well...
If they did, everybody could just use that (since it's already on 98% of computers out there) and put a stop to these stupid standards wars.
.jpg/.png editing software.
They probably wouldn't lose much revenue, if at all... I mean, they've always been giving away the Flash plugin for free. They make all their money from selling content-creating software (Flash CS3) right? That wouldn't change if they open-sourced Flash player. Similar to how Photoshop completely dominates the industry even though anyone is free to make
Nuanti's Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with Theora in browsers that have Silverlight. It works entirely without requiring the users to install any additional software."
Makes Steve Job's opposition to Flash look prescient...
HTML5 is a markup standard. Where it pertains to video is in the standardization of video-related markup, i.e. the "video" tag, not video formats. W3C has nothing to teach MPEG about video formats. W3C also has nothing to teach MPEG or ISO about standardization, because the Web is a mess of proprietary IE and Flash while MPEG has enabled 20 years of consumer digital video, including the DVD and Blu-Ray. Right now, both QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer play H.264, both iTunes and YouTube are H.264, both Flip and iPod camcorders are H.264, but I can't make one Web app for both IE and Firefox.
What we are talking about with Web video today is "will our H.264 video playback move from plug-ins (QuickTime Player and FlashPlayer) to native browser playback?" That is all. The format is not in question. The HTML4 Web has already been using the ISO standard format in iTunes, YouTube, and many others. There is no competing format. FLV is still used too much, but it has been deprecated since 2008, it has no HD sizes, it is proprietary to Adobe, the encoder costs $599, and it takes much more bandwidth than H.264. There are no Ogg camcorders, iPods, video editors. These tools and devices were all built for MPEG-4, which is a standardization of the QuickTime file format that was used previously. Google has already said that even if they had the compute time to transcode YouTube to Ogg, the Internet does not have the bandwidth for an Ogg YouTube, and almost nobody has a player.
Ten years ago, Linux users complained that they could not view the video on the Web because it was in QuickTime containers with Sorenson video and Qdesign audio and that was all proprietary, not standardized. Now, the video is all in ISO MPEG-4 containers, with ISO H.264 video and ISO AAC audio and is playable on Linux in FlashPlayer and WebKit browsers and other players, and the complaining continues. It is disheartening.
Indeed, as been mentioned in this thread, Theora support could be very easily added to any browser supporting NPAPI plugins for Flash, Java or *Light.
Let me know when there's an app for that!
Lower their prices. Opera moaned about how extortionate they are. It's reasonable that they should charge something, but make it small. They'll get a lot more cash in the long in the run, and everybody will be happy.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
http://www.osnews.com/story/22828/MPEG-LA_Will_Not_Change_h264_Licensing
mpeg-LA seems to be letting broadcasts go free for the next couple of years. Note that is only for the actual broadcast. They can open a can of whoop ass on various licensing fees whenever they feel it gets entrenched.
Theora support will have problems from those who really don't want open solutions (Microsoft,Apple).
So we have an impasse.
Nuanti has produced a high-performance Ogg Theora decoder for Microsoft's Silverlight
Hardware accelerated H.264 is in the 10.1 Flash Beta. Silverlight 4 will support Chrome. The "high performance" H.264 player will be everywhere and in everything in the next few weeks or months.
Hardware Offload.
Without you are just another video codec.
Yes, this codec supports 3D ultra defenition holographic video and will only support Internet Explorer 13. The patents won't expire until 2099. So take that Ogg boys.
Yes.
For one thing, I dispute your assertion that Google is doing evil. It's a company, it's doing what's in its best interest. Still, I know of few companies who have contributed so much to open standards and yes, even open source software, to the technological community. But I digress...
For another, it boils down to one simple question. Do we want a de facto web standard to depend on a patent-encumbered standard? We've been there before. Remember the GIF kerfuffle? Remember the JPG morass? Remember how long it took Microsoft to get a browser out there that supported PNG, which is a better image rendering codec, and a standard that all browsers (or any other software developer, open source or otherwise) can implement? Wouldn't it be nice if, just for once, we could bypass all of the stupidity and just settle on something up front that's easy and that everyone can support?
Also, what the hell good does it do to write a web standard designed to get people out of the Flash embedding hell that we're in right now, only to put us into yet another hell of a patent consortium that may or may not charge exorbitant fees to develop software with its standard built in?
Let's not fool ourselves. Anyone who wants H.264 to become a web standard, whether it be codified or de facto, is basically saying, "I hope that Firefox dies a miserable death." Why? Because Firefox is open source, and as such, it can't build in a patent-encumbered codec like H.264. On the other hand, most other browser makers (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.) have a choice. There is nothing stopping them from implementing either or both. "Evil" Google has taken the middle road, and Chrome handles both. We have yet to hear from Microsoft. Apple has chosen to deliberately not support Ogg Theora, even though it would be trivially easy for them to do so. It has taken this position, I believe, because it knows that Firefox can't implement H.264. I honestly think they want to kill off Firefox so that there's more marketshare for Safari.
So yeah, I will gladly cast my lot with those who support Ogg Theora as THE video standard of the web, and I don't care who they are. If Microsoft wants to come on board, then hell yeah, +1 for finally doing something right and that will ultimately benefit all video producers and consumers. Google and Firefox already have Ogg Theora built in, so they've already earned their +1, even though Google was one of the objectors to Ogg Theora being codified in the HTML 5 standard. I've given up on Apple getting anything but -1 Troll for this issue.
I guess the title pretty much sums it up, there's now an open source solution for watching videos online and I will most certainly use it. Silverlight or Firefox with flash? Who wants to use closed source software, and Microsoft's EEE plugin or that horrible plugin from Adobe of all things? Not me. At least we're replacing the closed nonfree video with open nonfree video.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Now, the video is all in ISO MPEG-4 containers, with ISO H.264 video and ISO AAC audio and is playable on Linux in FlashPlayer and WebKit browsers and other players, and the complaining continues. It is disheartening.
The complaining continues because Linux users still cannot play video using FOSS solutions, due to licensing fees associated with implementation of H.264. Given the overall Linux philosophy, it's a perfectly valid complaint.
Forgetting the codecs for two seconds, what does the MKV container have going for it over the MPEG4 container? Why would I want to use it over MPEG4, assuming the codec I want to use is available for both containers?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Comparison of container formats
Matroska
Chances are, if you're asking the question, then you're not missing any features provided by MKV.
So you install Microsoft's Trojan^WSilverlight into Internet explorer, and you assume that you don't install anything more? Buddy, you're going to be running more software than you can imagine, all installed FOR you by friendly Internet people !
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Theora can be decoded on the cpus of all the devices you listed, at the applicable screen resolutions, in real time. Heck, the arm optimized version of theora can decode HD at a significant multiple of real time on a CPU slower than the one in the 3gs.
All of this craze and expectation of hardware acceleration comes from H.264 being an utter pig. They overestimated how much faster cpus and memory would become by now, and we're only coping by using lesser profiles or adding hardware acceleration.
Well, open-sourcing Flash wouldn't help the H.264 situation.
Why not? Mozilla is willing to ship with Flash today, that includes an h.264 encoder. Perhaps they could simply embed a Flash player whenever an HTML 5 video player was encountered...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Couldn't have said better...
MKV files work just fine in anything that uses mplayer as it's base, pretty much. Which describes a rather large portion of the available media players out there.
Including set-top and handheld?
mpeg-LA seems to be letting broadcasts go free for the next couple of years. Note that is only for the actual broadcast. They can open a can of whoop ass on various licensing fees whenever they feel it gets entrenched.
They can, but you know they will not until 2017 (expires in December of 2016). You can plan around and to a date.
Meanwhile Theora is an unknown patent quantity that may or may not be challenged at any time. It's the schrodinger cat of codecs, so no-one even wants to hold the box much less look inside.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The iphone's hardware decoder can only play a fairly limited subset of h264. Same thing for most other hardware decoders. The subset makes h264 just as weak as Theora, a fact the Xiph people quietly exploited in their comparison with youtube.
ffmpeg-nonfree = OSS
The H.264 patent license does not meet the Open Source Definition, which is almost word for word identical to the Free Software Guidelines used by Debian (and hence Ubuntu). It requires a royalty in some cases, discriminates against fields of endeavor, and does not apply to redistribution.
Video... Back in the day is was an analog signal that was digitized to 1's and 0's and was therefor you could perform the opposite opperation and make it back into analog and it would play just fine, yes?
So now we have camera's that have a light sensitive chip that gets all its charged area's scanned n times per second and therefor we skip the analog part since we directly have 1's and 0's, yes?
So I assume that the amount of data being pulled off the chip is rather large and therefor is it beneficial that it is compressed, aka zipped or some other compression algorithm. This video needs to be in sync with the sound, if there is any, yes?
Now I have had the occasion to work on still images and I would imagine the "raw" format is just those bits uncompressed, yes?
So is it a true statement that all one really needs is a compression tool to make the video file a reasonable size for transmission, yes?
So I fail to understand why this all seems so difficult. Put the collective minds together in the FOOS world, come up with a compression scheme for both video and audio and there you have it. Give the code to the world, and if it works well, will they not use it instead of something that requires a license or some other such nonsense? I am again assuming that all the "containers" everyone speaks of is simply a file type to hold the video, audio and what ever syncing information is required, yes?
Seems like a problem that is easily solved.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
What are you talking about? The only thing preventing firefox from incorporating H.264 is the fact they don't want to pay a license fee to do so. Open source has absolutely nothing to do with it. If that were the case Chrome wouldn't have it included. I know you figured you'd get some more mod points by claiming firefox is somehow defending open source with their decision, but that's not even remotely accurate.
"Slashdot is operated and hosted in one of those countries."
New Mexico?
This makes IE support Theora. You can then serve up video in Theora format, avoiding the MPEG LA fees.
It'll be fast enough to work, but not as fast as the native Theora video in Firefox and Chrome.
Given that computers are getting to be plenty fast, I think you can sum up the situation this way: better battery life for Firefox and Chrome users.
yeah but given the overall reality philosophy, thats life
Lets just clarify the statement you made to clear it up for you:
Ten years ago, Linux users complained that they could not view the video on the Web because it was in QuickTime containers with [patented] video and [patented] audio and that was all proprietary, not standardized. Now, the video is all in ISO [patented] containers, with ISO [patented] video and ISO [patented] audio and is playable on Linux in FlashPlayer and WebKit browsers and other players, and the complaining continues. It is disheartening.
Patents do not work well in the open source world. What surprises you about that?
HTML5 is a markup standard. Where it pertains to video is in the standardization of video-related markup, i.e. the "video" tag, not video formats.
The problem is a standard video tag is of limited use if there is no baseline codec that a web developer can use and expect any web browser to render it.
MPEG and ISO come from a world where it is considered acceptable to make descisions that force everyone who wants to use your standard to pay license fees. That doesn't fit well with the free and open nature of the web. They are even considering requiring license fees for merely distributing the files rather than just encoding and decoding them at some point in the future!
Some FOSS projects take the approach of ignoring patents and this works for smaller more under the rader projects but it's a risky strategy. Those behind the projects could end up facing huge legal problems at any time. A further complication is that while the expiry of patents is a good thing in general patent holders sometimes get very litigious when thier patent is about to run out and extracting money from it becomes a case of now or never.
So the obvious thing for those creating the web standards to do would be to make the baseline format one that was developed to avoid relying on patented technology. Unfortunately certain major vendors refuse to implement it claiming it is a "submarine patent risk". So the HTML 5 guys are left with a choice between not specifying a baseline format at all or alienating one of the major groups of implementers.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
If it isn't Free, it isn't a standard, it's just a racket.
when are they going to finish making snow? i've used early versions of it and it eats h264 for breakfast, and theora? yeah it's an open codec, which is great but it's based on vp3 and that's more ye olde than mp4. everyone's hardware can handle h264, it's about the same to do snow decoding, but the quality and compression is measurably better.
The price of admission is sending people to the four times a year MPEG meetings. The chips are the patentable intellectually property. The game is to get your IP into the standard by any means possible. When you are in the standard then you get profit participation in the MPEG-LA revenue stream.
When I was involved, the Japanese had a notorious reputation for sending lots of people and stacking the meetings. They would use procedural methods to extend the meetings into late night and then after others left they would use their numbers to force through their proposals.
Of course other players had other ways of stacking the deck. Remember that big corporations can afford to employ people full time to chair committees and that gives the extra clout (MicroSoft, apple, Sun, Philips,...).
This all means that smaller independent groups, like the one I worked for, had a very difficult time making any headway. No matter how good the technology, political considerations had a lot more impact.
The trick is that while MPEG is an open international body that supports "open standards", MPEG-LA is a foul black pit full of zombies, orcs and lawyers. In fact, the orcs and zombies are at the bottom of the heap, because the lawyer are the bad asses who run the show.
How are licenses fees set? Nobody knows. How are revenues divided? Nobody knows. How much is spent on MPEG-LA costs? Nobody knows. How do they decided to engage in legal action and who do target? Nobody knows.
It is a completely independent body with no oversight by any of the international standards bodies, or any government for that matter. It is only constrained by the software copyright rules in an individual jurisdiction.
It is a closed black box that can charge as much as it wants, and because it is an "international standard", it is almost impossible to compete with it based on cost or quality, and and you can't go after it using the legal system. (This one reason is why Ogg Theodora is not looked at as a meaningful option by the big players; it is not a standard, so it gives big companies headaches. Who is responsible if there is any trouble? What happens if a key person is hit by a bus? Having access to the source does not fully address all these legal issues.)
The reason that this such a bit deal is that large amounts of money are involved. I Googled around and I couldn't get a clue about total amounts, which is suspicious in itself. Remember, from the corporate viewpoint this is "free money", because the initial investment is small; a lab with some computers, some PHDs, a travel buget and some lawyers and the cost of their shark tanks. Very high rate of return over a long period of time.
And a shout out to all you libertarian morons out there: THIS IS A TAX!!! It is a tax collected by corrupt self serving insiders who have subverted the legal system. It restrains trade and stifles innovation. It is not subject to competition. Those who are taxed have no say in the matter. It is arbitrary, and you cannot escape it by taking your business elsewhere. It is all the things you claim to hate about government. How come you this behavior is good when done by business for greed and bad when done by governments, which are more accountable to the people?
Why is Snark Required?
With the way GPUs have lately been becoming more and more powerful for parallel tasks, and the way multicore CPUs haven taken off, I wouldn't be surprised if most video was transcoded on the fly in 2016.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
... in browsers that have [the Microsoft] Silverlight [plugin]. c'mon now...
Here's a comparison of who has what. Yes, it seems Silverlight 3 is the most popular version... (cough).
Note: I have no idea how valid this sampling might really be, but it pretty much jibes with my experience.
Breakfast served all day!
Seriously... Vorbis has not even taken over MP3, despite it being far superior.
And you expect Theora to beat H.246??
The fact is, that apart from us few experts, nobody cares what format it is, as long as it works, and has the best quality for its size.
Look at what movies are used on BitTorrent nowadays. It’s mostly H.264, since the quality is simply superior. And XviD, since that’s what most pre-bluray standalone players can play.
Even though I’m a supporter of open formats, I support H.246 right now. Because there are two groups of sources I have:
1. Commercial video streams (YouTube, Daily Show, South Park, etc), who can handle the legal rights, and usually have a license anyway to distribute physical media etc.
2. P2P-shared movies, that don’t care for laws anyway.
(Bonus question: Guess how I would release my work? ^^)
But: Offer me something that has all features of H.246, plus only one single tiny superior property, and I’ll be the strongest supporter of that format, that you will be able to find.
Until then, it’s no war. Because one side has no teeth at all. (Sadly.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
So I fail to understand why this all seems so difficult. Put the collective minds together in the FOOS world, come up with a compression scheme for both video and audio and there you have it
If life were only that simple:
The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) was formed by the ISO to set standards for audio and video compression and transmission. It was established in 1988. MPEG has grown to include approximately 350 members per meeting from various industries, universities, and research institutions. MPEG's official designation is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 WG11 - Coding of moving pictures and audio (ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29, Working Group 11).
Joint Video Team (JVT) is joint project between ITU-T SG16/Q.6 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 for the development of new video coding recommendation and international standard. Moving Picture Experts Group
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a standard for video compression. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003.
H.264/AVC is the latest block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), and it was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content. H.264 is used in such applications as Blu-ray Disc, videos from YouTube and the iTunes Store, DVB broadcast, direct-broadcast satellite television service, cable television services, and real-time videoconferencing.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards body in the United States approved the use of H.264/AVC for broadcast television in July 2008, although the standard is not yet used for ATSC broadcasts within the United States.
One of the most notable industries that has benefited greatly from the technology is the CCTV (Close Circuit TV) or Video Surveillance market. Prior to this technology the compression formats used within the industries DVR's Digital Video Recorders was based on low quality compression formats. With the application of the h.264 compression technology the quality of the video recordings [improved dramatically.] Over a short period of time starting in 2008 the surveillance industry promoted h.264 technology as "high quality" video. The term h.264 is now use to identify "high quality" digital recorders verses lower quality recorders.
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
This stuff is hard.
It takes years to accomplish anything meaningful.
H.264 has become deeply - deeply - entrenched across a broad range of industries.
the Free Software Guidelines used by Debian (and hence Ubuntu)
Seeing how Ubuntu now apparently chose, to replace OpenOffice by a not only proprietary and closed-source, but also remotely-controlled office software, I say that argument is extremely moot.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The complaining continues because Linux users still cannot play video using FOSS solutions, due to licensing fees associated with implementation of H.264. Given the overall Linux philosophy, it's a perfectly valid complaint.
Since when did Linux=FOSS?
Or, more precisely, since when did the Linux user become the FOSS purist?
If that were true, he would have to jettison damn near every set top box and mobile device he owns.
ACTA is a treaty on copyrights and trademarks, which are totally different than patents.
It is if we have plants, animals, and minerals (to use the old "20 Questions" categories). And you being so ill informed that you think the mineral Iron might eat you, before it goes on to reproduce.
If you don't understand IP laws, even in a passing way, please STFU.
Do we have to play words? We both know that, at the very least, a considerable proportion (I dare say, a majority) of Linux users prefer FOSS over non-FOSS, and at the very least, open standards unencumbered by patents (and associated fees) to closed ones. The fact that many of them still use proprietary software (and hardware with such) - NVidia drivers, Android etc - does not change that. It just means that sometimes, pragmatism outweighs purism. It's not black & white, after all.
It doesn't mean that they like that state of affairs, however. Back when GIF was patented, I haven't heard of anyone disabling that code in their browsers - but there was, nonetheless, a big campaign in support of a switch to PNG.
Now, the video is all in ISO MPEG-4 containers, with ISO H.264 video and ISO AAC audio and is playable on Linux in FlashPlayer and WebKit browsers and other players, and the complaining continues. It is disheartening.
The complaining continues because Linux users still cannot play video using FOSS solutions, due to licensing fees associated with implementation of H.264. Given the overall Linux philosophy, it's a perfectly valid complaint.
On top of which, the Linux Flash implementation is very poor. It's impossible to play full-screen video without a lot of frame dropping. This is not a limitation of Linux since other video players on Linux have no such problem.
All this means is that it won't be present in the base distribution out of the box. However, you can bet that, as soon as one navigates to a website which will require this (say, YouTube, once it is migrated to HTML5 video), you'll get a dialog telling you that you can't view this site until you install a plugin, and would you like to do that? And most users would of course click "yes".
It works in precisely that way for Flash already.
Ten years ago, Linux users complained that they could not view the video on the Web because it was in QuickTime containers with Sorenson video and Qdesign audio and that was all proprietary, not standardized.
And the response then would have been something along the lines of "Windows/Internet Explorer is the standard."
MP3 and MPEG-2 users have both been nailed by surprise ligation for unknown patents which were not covered in the MPEG-LA licenses. The MPEG-LA license pack explicitly disclaims all warranties and rejects all representations that the license contains all the patents necessary to implement the formats, much less ones which might not be strictly necessary but that your implement ion might practice for good performance.
So, if you use H.264 you have to pay the license fees, plus take the risk that someone will sue you for practice some patent not in your coverage. With Theora you only have the latter risk.
Whatever argument you can make about increased confidence in H.264 due to wider deployment can be countered by the fact that its a much newer format during the design of which NO effort was taken to avoid patented technology (the MPEG and ITU processes both forbid IPR discussions during the main standardization process for anti-trust reasons). Whereas Theora is a more conservative design built from the ground up (by On2) to be free of third party IPR.
How can you possibly know what is contained in the ACTA treaty? While the actual contents remain secret (and they're likely to remain so until passed into law in the signatory countries) we have nothing to go on but leaked documents. Documents leaked already suggest the treaty aims to go well beyond simply protecting copyrights and trademarks. But of course all the countries involved in the negotiations already have laws to protect copyrights and trademarks so if the treaty didn't go beyond that there would be no reason for it to exist.
Replying to your subject, not the content:
It may be both an ISO standard and a de facto standard. The latter is more relevant, because there are multiple official standards -- MPEG-1 (ISO/IEC 11172), MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818) and MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496). Each of these standards contain multiple parts that can be used independently or together. A format is a de facto standard if it is in use in a reasonably large majority of cases, which given multiple ISO standards is much more important than whether any particular format is or is not one of them.
The question of whether it actually _is_ the de facto standard is an interesting one. My suspicion is that a larger chunk of the video being consumed out there is actually MPEG-4 Part 2, as I understand this is what is used in most digital TV systems, along with a very large chunk of what's available on TPB (DivX and xvid both being implementations of it).
I believe most digital TV is either MPEG2 or H.264; certainly, from my experience, DVB-T uses MPEG 2, and BBC HD is broadcast in H.264. Wikipedia also suggests that ATSC uses MPEG2 as well.
Youtube already recode. Youtube existed before they used H264 (they used H.262 before, and what before that?). So they had to change once. Add to that that many submissions to Youtube aren't in H.264 or the right resolutions or the right bitrate etc, so are transcoded by Youtube as it is.
Your argument is just that: an argument not a reason. Full of fail.
Analogy: Ogg Theora is to video what Intelligent Design is to biology, in that it's almost completely irrelevant to the large body of experts and professionals in the field, and is clung to by a small body of religious zealots, because the realities of the field (the wide acceptance of a patent-encumbered technology on one hand, the repudiation of the Creation story on the other) is deeply offensive to the True Believers. Ogg has nothing going for it except its compatibility with the Open Source religion, but that's irrelevant to just about everyone who actually produces or consumes media.
Sorry, but this just doesn't matter, and isn't going to, no matter how many stories get posted to Slashdot about it.
Like you licensed DVD CSS? Does that mean you can legally play DVDs on your linux box? No. Because your license doesn't let you.
Same with your h264 license. Check to see if that license lets you distribute a player for h264.
Or see if it lets you pass that license on to Mozilla so they can distribute it to YOU.
1) The main point really is that you can now relatively easily deploy Web video in Theora without sacrificing much potential user base. (Cortado can fill in some gaps in native browser support already, but Java applet support is dwindling.)
1a) It might not yet be default(?), but MS is actively pushing Silverlight for Windows users, so the installed base is already fairly large and growing.
1b) Apple I hear has some at least semi-official Moonlight-based support, but this I know less of. Comments?
1c) Though not the best in quality per bit, you can make the quality of any codec better with more bits. Bits are only going to get cheaper. H.264 can potentially get much more expensive.
2) No, H.264 won't die a gruesome death now.
2a) Yes yes, we all know it's better technically, it doesn't matter, it still can't be a baseline Web codec.
2b) Yes, some players, especially those with vested interest in the MPEG-LA racket and excluding smaller competitors, will almost certainly use H.264 on the web for a long time to come.
2c) Isn't it nice though that a widely deployable option exists that probably has already played a hand in how much money the MPEG-LA can squeeze from you if you _do_ decide to go with H.264 anyway?
3) Using H.264 for everything won't be as unified as you think.
3a) Much of the material on the web incidentally doesn't use the very advanced features of H.264, because many decoders are limited in what profile or subset of H.264 they support (thus also reducing the quality advantage to Theora, but I make no claim of its elimination)
3b) Some material (like pirated stuff that doesn't care for copyrights or patents alike) will use all the bells and whistles, but then you may well still be stuck with having to transcode for different devices even if everything does "H.264".
3c) Such conversions can be relatively well automated when needed while keeping the original not to incur generation loss; I don't really see some need for transcoding persisting as a huge deal, except of course to the extent that anything you do with a patented format might be illegal depending on jurisdiction and circumstance.
4) Yep, no "hardware" (DSP) decoders for Theora abound.
4a) Mobile devices have enough oomph to decode it anyway in relevant resolutions (Theora is lighter than H.264, too)
4b) Yes, battery life will probably suffer somewhat, doesn't make it useless.
4c) Some DSP work has already been done on Theora decoding as already previously commented, though even when ready, deploying it would probably require user intervention and sufficient access unless shipped by the OS itself. ("Install this to improve your battery life with this site.")
Hope this summary will clarify things somewhat.
I said something like this earlier and got modded -1
To put it bluntly, no hardware support, nobody cares about Ogg. It's in 0% of anything. The Ogg people need to realize this and get *someone* who builds hardware to use it, and not some FOSS type of hardware that 6 people will buy. I'm talking about the PS3 or a future generation of Wii or next generation multiband UMTS phone.
There are no video cameras out there that support Ogg, and until there is, nobody is going to convert from AVC to OGG and then back to AVC, since there is no OGG to OGG path to the web.
Nah... java applets, trust me, it will WORK! This time...
Reminds me of a comment on a dutch tech site, remarked how much smarter a dutch tv station was, for choosing silverlight over flash, because it was more widely supported, except that particular function just happens to only be available for windows.
Silverlight may or may not be good, but after ActiveX and COM and such, why do people keep building their business model on an MS product? You know that sooner or later they will pull a move that screws you.
It would be like putting a bet on Apple announcing a sensible, non-sexy, non-drool inducing, cheap and essential item. Or IBM doing anything interesting in the consumer market. I don't know about leopards, but I do know companies never change their spots.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You're absolutely right, and if I had mod privs today, I'd mod you up.
Remember even ESR gave up on the "Everything should be in Ogg" argument in his World Domination 201 essay, and called for a Linux consortium to license H.264 en masse for Linux clients. And that was four years ago. Ogg has made no meaningful inroads since then.
you'll get a dialog telling you that you can't view this site until you install a plugin, and would you like to do that? And most users would of course click "yes".
If it's anything like gstreamer*-plugins-ugly, then the next dialog is "It may be illegal to install and use this package where you live." One of the places where ffmpeg-nonfree is illegal is the United States, home of Slashdot.
Maybe we should start distributing browsers and hosting websites only from countries that don't recognize those patents.
Maybe the U.S. should bully ISPs into blocking web sites the use of which would infringe a U.S. patent, perhaps as part of the next anti-child-pornography bill. Or how do you plan to get users like myself out of the United States and into a country without software patents?
OMG... :D
Someone else who doesn't recoil in horror at the idea of SVG instead of flash
It has hardware support, it's been linked a couple of times upthread.
Not true. Most of the world can play H264 just fine without any legal implications. Even in the US, there is nothing to stop someone setting up a legal process for users to register and pay the paltry fee to use the codec legally.
Why is it when the industry adopts a standard the OSS community must switch to something else? Take an Old Xbox with XBMC. Try playing these H.264 encoded videos then try playing an XVID encoded video. XVID is superior as I can actually watch and enjoy them on older technology. DiVX is a standard. My DVD player can handle XVID, my Xbox and my computer. Almost ever mkv, mp4, etc I download I convert to XVID. My second point is that everybody seems to be encoding for 720p. 480p is acceptable. Vote Xvid. Hell I think youtube should move to streaming XVID.
Can we get Timothy to be less stupid in the future? That was obviously slashvertising from eihab and Timothy let it through anyway.
> Nuanti's [proprietary] Highgate Media Suite will enable support for standards-based HTML5 video streaming with
> [nonstandard} Theora in browsers that have [proprietary] Silverlight.
Or you could use ISO/IEC 14496-10 (MPEG-4 part 10, H.264) and playback not just in Silverlight, but directly in hardware on every device that can play video on the planet, including PC GPU's, iPods, smartphones from all manufacturers, game consoles, and in FlashPlayer and QuickTime Player and Chrome and Safari.
What is the point of using standard HTML5 markup if you don't use standard ISO/IEC video? No fucking point at all.
If it's anything like gstreamer*-plugins-ugly, then the next dialog is "It may be illegal to install and use this package where you live."
I would imagine that it would be, but do you know anyone who even bothered to read the dialog, much less stopped installation because of it?
Leopard to snow leopard is the changing of the bits BETWEEN the spots. Not the spots themselves. Coincidence, I think not.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
the open-source community will be stuck with emulated, software-only, lower-quality Theora. That doesn't sound like a good outcome
But it's still an outcome.
A little something is much better than nothing at all.
Lower quality, software-only Theora is better than no video at all.
And this buys us time until we can develop a good better quality alternative (just like PNG replaced GIF as a web standart).
Better start pouring some resource and brain cells into Dirac/Schroedinger, Tarkin, Google latest acquisition and other crazy modern ideas.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]