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Five Years of YouTube and Forced Evolution
NakNak writes to mention that the DailyMaverick has a feature looking back at five years of YouTube, some of the massive changes that have been forced through as a result of its overwhelming popularity, and what changes might be necessary going forward. "Google, which bought YouTube less than two years after it was founded for what was then considered outrageously expensive $1.65 billion, does not want Microsoft or Apple (or anybody else) to own the dominant video format. So it has become the biggest early tester of HTML5. Your browser doesn't support HTML5? Google launches its own browser, Chrome. Need to use Internet Explorer at work because that's all your IT department supports? Google launches a Chrome framework that effectively subverts IE and makes it HTML5-compatible. The final blow will be the day that YouTube switches off Flash and starts streaming only to HTML5 browsers. On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage."
Yes, perish for lack of Flash, just like the Iphone is now.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Checking today there are 3,180 videos matching the term "lighting farts". That and people reviving Rick Astley's career. It's a fun diversion, but you really have to wonder. About civilization.
Why is the title bar red?
Forced Evolution, duh!
Haven't you been paying attention?
coding is life
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage
Or, like the thousands of examples that came before.....people will simply go to another website that does not have such requirements.
But don't let me rain on your parade.
some business school moron could have said "hey, why don't we leverage our power and force a proprietary format on consumers, and they will be our captive audience"
like microsoft
like sony
etc
has any of it worked? no
for all the anxiety about google's increasing power, as long google does something like this: actively undermine and destroy a closed format in favor of an open one, then the consumer wins, google wins, other companies win, progress and innovation wins, and shortsighted greedy assholes who try to manipulate market inefficiencies in their favor lose (i'm looking at you, music and other media companies). in this context, at least, google really is "doing no evil"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage
While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out. If it disappeared tomorrow, than apart from instantly increasing corporate productivity and allowing children everywhere to get their homework done on time, there wouldn't be so much of a change.
There are also (sit down, this might be a bit of a shock) lots and lots of people who rarely, if ever visit youtube. For them, it's existence or change in the tech. it needs will make no difference at all - if their old browsers fail I'm sure they find other things to do on the internet.
While I'm sure youtube will keep going - for some time at least, and will change more over time there's nothing life changing about it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There won't be enough waaaambulances in the entire world to handle the mass-casualty incident at Adobe HQ...
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage
Most users don't know and don't care about the standards wars. What's more likely to happen is:
I believe so - and the Mozilla folks are pushing for Ogg/Theora as a standard format.
Learn about Photography Basics.
oh I wish I had mod points...
" The final blow will be the day that YouTube switches off Flash and starts streaming only to HTML5 browsers. On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage."
Except, YouTube won't turn off Flash until a super-majority of users have HTML-5 compliant browsers. (Actually, since a super-majority is usually considered to be 60% or 66%, that probably still wouldn't be enough - I wouldn't shut off any potential customers until I was north of 90% deployment, though Google may surprise me and throw the switch a bit before that). No business that hopes to succeed just shuts off the ability for any significant portion of their customer base to consume their product.
Except for the fact that H.264 is hardware decoded on a lot of mobile devices.
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.). It will then be up to the user to aquire the required codecs and what not, which can't legally be distributed in North America as entirely free software, (but in practice, patents have never stopped free software before, only creates annoying red tape.) Gstream and ffmpeg have been able to handle h264 for longer than I remember, and I don't expect that to change at all. It's probably a good thing that Firefox will use existing software rather than creating yet another decoder to deal with.
But they've heard of h.264?
The target audience here isn't the general public, its the standards organization and the browser development management teams.
Learn about Photography Basics.
I don't think HTML5 video will ever be successful, flash video/flv is very dominant.
User gets angry at YouTube, not IE
"YouTube no longer uses Flash. Now we use Chrome Frame to provide you with new features. Click here to install Chrome Frame." The user response really isn't that much different from the "Your Flash Player is too old" that YouTube started serving once Nintendo finally upgraded Wii Internet Channel from Flash 7.
What other option do they have?
h.264 patents make it incompatible with a whole host of open source licenses.
And that matters because ...? It's not like the average Joe would know what H.264 is either... or PNG, or CSS, or a ton of other basic web technologies.
Not many people have a clue what 'H.264' is either. You're lucky if they know what 'Flash' is.
YouTube won't turn off Flash until a super-majority of users have HTML-5 compliant browsers.
That's one reason why Google made Chrome Frame: to make every copy of IE for Windows that's not completely locked down into an HTML5 compliant web browser.
That's not a huge stumbling block, AFAIK. There is no reason you couldn't hardware decode Ogg/Theora, and I would be willing to bet the support would be there if it became the standard.
I admit I'm a bit out of my league on this part though. I'm a web developer, this discussion is a bit closer to bare metal than I'm used to.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Management is going to be VERY happy that youtube will stop working with older web browsers. User productivity is going to skyrocket.
Apple, Google, and now Microsoft (among others) have announced they won't be supporting Flash.
Think it's not doomed now?
The industry verdict on Flash: You have wasted too many CPU cycles and therefore must DIE!
Good riddance. There is absolutely no reason why Flash should be such a resource hog. Adobe has become even fatter and more lazy than even Microsoft, and is about to receive a rude awakening (just like MS has been getting from Apple for the past 10 years or so).
... the reason flash became so popular was because there was nothing better.
I think anyone who thinks HTML5 video is going to displace flash has to look to how MP3 was not displaced by better formats like AAC, OGG, etc, etc.
the problem is not that the iPhone doesn't support Flash, the problem is that Flash, as a proprietary overlay to the open Web, even exists.
gad_zuki! makes a good point: Is the open Web capable of delivering an experience analogous to the Flash animations and games seen at, say, Newgrounds?
The bigger issue is not Flash or HTML5, it's which codec implementers of HTML5 will choose to support. Mozilla, for good reasons (IMHO), is not willing to support H.264, but that seems to be the direction YouTube is heading. But as good and open as Theora is, I think don't believe there is any hardware with a Theora accelerator (yet?).
In any case, some support browsers both H.264 and Ogg Theora, some support only one, and we all know Microsoft is unlikely to support either any time soon.
R.Mo
The public has heard of Blu-ray. The codec currently used by YouTube is the same codec used by newer Blu-ray Disc releases.
What use would HTML5 have if Google insists on streaming crystal-clear high-definition unskippable ads to me in a few seconds, but streams the video to me bit-by-bit to the point where it takes five minutes to watch a one minute HD video.
Wasn't it John Adams who said:
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to make fart lighting and Rick-roll videos."
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Like my boss, who owns an ISP, that does not know the difference between Java, JavaScript, and Flash (he calls them all Java). Or the difference between Limewire, Bittorrent, EDonkey, and any other P2P protocol (he calls them all Bittorrent).
The most popular apps on iphones are fart simulators
[citation needed]
Reply to That ||
You don't seem to get it. It's too late for ogg. H.264 is already in EVERYTHING. Your blu-ray player plays h.264, your ipod plays it, your psp plays it, your game console plays it, the graphics card in your PC plays it, your mobile phones play it. On top of that, H.264 has significantly better video quality, and will be free until at least 2015, and I'm willing to bet it will continue to be free after that.
This isn't just about HTML5. The war is already over. Wishing that devices will add support for theora at this point is like wishing that mp3 players would add support for vorbis. No one cares anymore, except about 0.1% of the population.
The video sites I will give you (although if they really wanted to be on the iPhone they would just make the original h264 files available) but people bemoaning the lack of flash games on the iPhone are missing an important point - none of the existing flash games would work anyway!
The iPhone doesn't have a keyboard and (even worse) has no mouse. These two facts alone mean that the vast majority of game would not work. Even games that use the mouse purely for pointing would run into problems, since tapping with your finger is much less precise than using a mouse pointer. In addition, on the iPhone you effectively have multiple pointing devices - how would current Flash apps handle that?
For a quick demo of why sites like newsgrounds will never work on the iPhone, resize your browser window to 480*320 (or 320*480 since that is more usual) and visit your favourite gaming site. Now set your mouse pointer to a big white blob instead of an arrow to similar tapping with a large figertip. Remember to stop playing after 45 minutes to simulate the battery drain. See how much fun you have.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
Well, the average "soccer mom"/"joe sixpack" may not have heard of h.264 but there are definitely a lot more users out there who know that h.264 is a video codec than there are users who know that Ogg Theora is a video codec (admittedly those who know of h.264 through warez probably think it's called x264 but that's still a lot more knowledge of h.264 than knowledge about Ogg Theora).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
It should be obvious that this is a chicken and egg problem. There arent flash apps for the iphone hosted on newgrounds BECAUSE IT DOESNT SUPPORT FLASH. Support it, and they will appear overnight with the proper navigational elements.
When you chose what your customers will have or not have, calling them evil isn't a long stretch.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Right, because creating a free, high-quality web browser and open sourcing the codebase didn't do anything to help customers. Allowing users to use a standards-compliant web browser AND access the systems required by their job didn't do anything to help customers. Shifting to (relatively) open standards won't do anything to help customers.
It almost sounds like your problem is that Google isn't being evil enough. I find myself lacking sympathy.
Feeble Pulse?
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
I've been selected to try out the new YouTube video page. If that's forced evolution, then I don't want to be a part of it...
There are no normal links anywhere anymore. Whereas previously the video links were http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxx, they are now monstrosities with a hundred characters in the URL.
It's all full of AJAX. I haven't tried disabling JS to see what happens... The layout has changed, it's confusing, and it's ugly. When the video you are watching stops, the next one starts automatically, as if it were all a giant playlist.
If you get that piece of garbage (which is a clear devolution, not an evolution), delete YouTube's cookies. I'm not sure which one was responsible; I just got rid of all of them and got normal YouTube back.
I never once advocated the format - you have one hell of a large chip on your shoulder there. I was just pointing out that Mozilla was pushing it.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Yes, there's no reason you couldn't hardware decode Ogg/Theora on a mobile device, but all the existing deivices don't have the capability to do so. So if html5 adpot Theora as the standard, all existing smartphone users would be left out in the cold. I'm not saying they shouldn't adopt Ogg/Theora, in fact I think they should, but there are drawbacks.
Can't legally be distributed in the United States. Canada does not have software patents so it can be distributed here. I don't know about Mexico.
While youtube is nice for idling away some downtime, it's not the internet-dominating force this article makes out.
Wow, do you ever misunderstand the calculus of adolescent outrage. Ever joined a condo association rife with government retirees? If you have a busy career, there's a lot of battles you aren't going to fight on time investment alone.
Teenagers don't have much clout in the adult world, but they do have a lot of time, they're well connected, they function as mobs, and nothing makes them yowl louder than exclusion from mob norms.
For example, in many split families, if one of the parents has YouTube and the other can't be bothered to torch IE6, guess which parent won't be seeing much of the kids, if the kids have the option about which bus to take home after school that day?
I know families which function exactly this way. Kids start to get on your nerves, wait for an incident to occur (never in short supply), then shut off the Xbox for a week, then they predictably spend the next six days out of seven staying over at Dad's place. Nice little time out. In the example I'm thinking about, Dad doesn't make the kids do homework, so eventually you have to turn the Xbox back on, to make sure the little rats don't flunk the entire school year.
I like the way Google is presently working to lock-out lock-in.
On that day all browsers will be HTML5 compatible or they will perish in the flames of user outrage.
People won't blame their browser (IE) they will yell at YouTube for needlessly breaking something that was working just fine. Seriously, users don't care AT ALL about the politics behind this. They just want IE6 to keep working. Well, "working" might be a generous description, but you get the point.
You would apparently be surprised, then, by the number of mp3 players that support vorbis(not even counting the ones that can be rockboxed). Some will even do so without mentioning the fact.
Or you can write an app for the iPhone, like Bejeweled. Play it in flash on the browser, or on the iPhone as an app.
I can't find the article now, but there were a bunch of interviews done with people working at some of the larger Flash gaming sites. It turns out that they were given "hints" from Adobe that Flash will make it into the iPhone eventually, and that they should prepare touch-interfaces using some simulation tools. I wonder how many man-hours were spent developing UIs for a device that would never support the software.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
The average "soccer mom"/"joe sixpack" are pretty good at leeching torrents nowadays and most of them learn that stuff labeled with "h264" are better than stuff labeled with "xvid". Ogg Theora, nobody knows about that, except a few nerds.
H.264 has significantly better video quality
Wrong. Ogg Theora is nearly identical in quality to H.264. Both are a lot better than H.263. Judge for yourself: http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
will be free until at least 2015, and I'm willing to bet it will continue to be free after that.
If there are no alternatives, I'm sure H.264 will not remain free. Once everyone is hooked, why on Earth wouldn't the owners start charging money for it? Because they're such nice people? LOL. If they have no plans to start charging for it, why don't they make it free forever, starting now? Since they have not done so, obviously they are hoping they can eventually charge money for it.
The war is already over
Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already. The fact you feel you have to make a proclamation suggests you're not sure yourself, or that you have a hidden agenda. You say it's everywhere, and that's why it has already won. It's not nearly as widespread as you seem to think. Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I think more user outrage would be focused on youtube then on the browsers if this change were made.
And nobody mentioned the IE 6 ban in G-Docs... Google is moving the internet foward.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Don't a lot of pr0n sites still depend on flash? I presume n00die vids are still a large percentage of web traffic?
HTML5, in its current form, won't dominate until there's a way to handle ccntent the creator(s) want to protect. Flash currently handles this.
I just can't imagine a site like Hulu serving any video in HTML5, knowing that any user is a right-click away from downloading their content. They're FAR too protective of their content.
because he doesn't use the shift key
anyway, so what do you think of google's embrace of html5?
i'm sorry, is that less important?
this world is full of mindless hate, but gee, thanks for adding more
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
[...] Just delegate it to the OS [...]
So next time there is some remote code execution vulnerability in DirectShow and/or its codecs, you want Firefox users to be affected too?
Face it, with the amount of "plugins" installed by default in Firefox these days in the back of the user (Acrobat, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Media Player, etc.), Firefox has become as much vulnerable as Internet Explorer, if not more because of its lack of usage of Vista's integrity levels.
Let's not add another nail to its coffin.
You don't have to put your promotional videos on YouTube to make them available on the net.
You say it's everywhere, and that's why it has already won. It's not nearly as widespread as you seem to think. Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
AVC/H.264 Licensees currently number 760.
Reading the list is, as I have said before, like watching a freight train built up speed and momentum. The geek is not going to be able to stop this thing.
1) Sure linking to a comparison on xiph.org, that'll be unbiased. Please, can we have a comparison that isn't devoid of all neutrality?
2) Lots of companies in the MPEG LA have an interest in making H.264 videos free to play, like say all those selling H.264 cameras and selling editing software and encoders and whatnot. Microsoft and Apple are already licensing it for Windows and OS X, I'm sure they have licenses that are permanent to make it a base technology like that. In other words, this is getting very close to patent FUD.
3) Look around, everywhere MPEG2 and H.263 is considered legacy and slowly being replaced with H.264. Theora is like Vorbis, the only place I ever hear about it is on slashdot. To your "Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already." is that some people here are like the Iraqi information ministry. There is no threat from H.264, the glorious Theora is victorious on all fronts.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.).
Last I heard from Mozilla was "we could, but we'll do no such thing to protect your freedoms". Has that changed recently, or are you talking about a patched version that won't come with Firefox's trademark?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Or you can write an app for the iPhone, like Bejeweled. Play it in flash on the browser, or on the iPhone as an app.
What happened to write once, run anywhere? No money in it I suppose.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
your news is more current than mine, but hardly matters. If Firefox wants to martyr itself, a new and better fork will be up in less than a day.
OP is totally correct with this.
I went to newgrounds yesterday with my Nokia n97 (on wifi) to try and play vector TD. The site is way too heavy for my phone to handle, and I gave up after 10 minutes of click, wait, wait, chug chug.
I think that flash games on the mobile could definitely work, but in most cases it's going to require a change to the games, as they're just not made to work with low-end hardware and touch
However, there was a more fundamental problem, in the minds of some internet service providers and powerful telecommunications companies. YouTube pays for the transmission of half that awesome amount of data it serves (in theory only, in practice it's less). The other half is paid by those who receive it, by way of the telephone company used to get internet access. The users may consider that fair, but the telephone companies saw the equivalent of newspapers being delivered using their vans while they see none of the advertising revenue. YouTube, and Google and Facebook and other big traffic destinations, they argued, should pay to reach those customers.
Now, think about this for a moment. If I am renting a van from you, paying what you asked for mileage, filling up the tank when I brought it back, etc... why should I give you more money for using it to deliver newspapers, than if I used it to pick up a couch and bring it back to my place?
Seriously, where the hell did they think up this analogy?
Warning, knife is sharp. Please keep out of children.
H.264 is significantly better then Theora. The comparison on xiph only shows similar quality because Youtube uses suboptimal settings on x264 and the Theora guy cranked the settings as high he could get them.
You may notice he sacrificed things like seeking granularity to increase Theora's effectiveness, if he had used similar settings then it wouldn't be as close.
Well, close. Firefox will be unable to include the decoding of h264 right into the browser. But there is already work underway to simply hand over the video to an underlaying OS system, (Gstreamer for Linux, as example.).
Last I heard from Mozilla was "we could, but we'll do no such thing to protect your freedoms". Has that changed recently, or are you talking about a patched version that won't come with Firefox's trademark?
Hopefully. Personally, I'd rather have the freedom to choose h.264 and the freedom to finally dump flash than the freedom to examine the Mozilla codebase (which I've never done nor do I plan on ever doing). But, you know, I'm a tool and all that.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Microsoft and Apple are already licensing it for Windows and OS X
Canonical is on the list of licensees I posted above.
Google and Adobe, Netflix and Nullsoft. The list goes on and on and on.
Hardware acclerated H.264 video is in the Flash 10 Beta 2 for Windows. Silverlight has it now.
Flatulated Pants!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Fornicated Penguin. http://www.mobileimage.com/images/penguingetshot.jpg
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Adobe is releasing a version of Flash that will compile to an Apple-spec iPhone app.
The same could be said about any library or OS service Firefox uses [...]
True, but vulnerabilities are found much more often in high-level, complex services such as DirectShow, MSHTML or the JScript engine, than, say, basic stuff like the C Runtime Library.
"There arent flash apps for the iphone hosted on newgrounds BECAUSE IT DOESNT SUPPORT FLASH."
But the people complaining about the lack of Flash are complaining that they can't play *existing* games, which nullifies your point. And AndrewStephens is correct in that current Flash games wouldn't work anyway because the hardware and UI paradigms are too different.
No one wants developers to make *new* Flash games for the iPhone either. We want people to make native iPhone games instead that will run faster, use the GPU, save state on exit, etc.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Your blu-ray player plays h.264
What Blu-ray player?
your ipod plays it
Nope.
your psp plays it
No PSP.
your game console plays it
Try again.
the graphics card in your PC plays it
Sure. In software.
your mobile phones play it
I have one mobile phone, and it barely takes pictures.
We want people to make native iPhone games instead that will run faster, use the GPU, save state on exit, etc.
That's the ghetto mentality that Apple is famous for. Box their customers off in their own world. Then sprinkle in some "it's better this way" for good measure.
And once upon a time, it was a dismal failure, as 'everyone' questioned quite why a company was trying to control them. Apples weren't bad products back then, they were just ... unpopular, because 'everyone' wanted control over their own stuff, thanks.
So it remained the preserve of the apple-fanboy, who would bleat about how Macs were the best thing ever, when more informed individuals pointed and laughed at their one button mouse, getting stomped hard whenever they tried to play an FPS, and getting burned on 'apple pricing' for equipment, because they had no choice about it.
I find it intriguing to note how the world has changed. Now it seems that the consumer market has expanded enough, that there's a steady influx of people who know no better, and do actually want to be told what they can or can't do. I'm not quite sure if that's a relection on recnet changes in society.
It will then be up to the user to aquire the required codecs and what not, which can't legally be distributed in North America as entirely free software, (but in practice, patents have never stopped free software before, only creates annoying red tape.)
Such red tape is particularly annoying for those of us outside North America.
It would be nice if various Linux distributions automatically installed all the useful, patented codecs iff I didn't select USA (or Canada?) as my location.
Well, after three years of using a Sinclair ZX-81, one year with an Acorn Electron, side dabbling with Commodore +4 and finally 22 years of using DOS/Win3/WinNT/2000/XP/95/98/Vista PC's, working on HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Linux and whatnot, I have recently switched to Mac. Likewise I have gone through Walkmans, Discmans, iRiver and iAudio MP3 players, the iPod Classic to finally end up with the iPhone 32GB 3GS.
All I can say at the end of the day is this: It *IS* better this way. ;)
You're right - it's those greedy corporate bastards who insist on profiting by re-writing apps over and over, when the masses would rather have one binary that works everywhere.
Wait - that doesn't make any sense at all, does it?
It's a noble concept but platforms are so different that you end up rewriting a lot of client UI regardless.
Although the biggest criminal here is the web. Yes the standards are sloppy, but writing a decent web gui is a royal pain in the arse, it is not just IE, but it is certainly the biggest culprit.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
That was fun, and an excellent proof of concept. But it's missing two things: sound effects and music. Videos on YouTube play sound. Games on Newgrounds play sound. Can you give me an example of a DHTML game with sound?
Because Youtube is totally blocked at my office, and I really want to watch a piano playing cat right now.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
After some years of using a TI Silent 700 dialup, an Exidy Sorcerer, being on hardware design team of the Commodore +4, years of using standard hardware PCs, using HP-UX, UNIX Systems III, IV, and V, Amiga UNIX, Sun Solaris, AmigaOS, BeOS, BSD, many flavors of Linux, and also designing Macs back in 1997, I have come to the conclusion that you're an idiot to rely on any company's proprietary hardware for something as important as your computing needs, unless there is no other choice. So maybe at the very high end, no other choice. On the desktop, plenty of choices.
For music, I've gone from "Six transistor!!!" radios, home made AM receivers, a dozen boomboxen and another dozen portable CD players, MP3 CD players, half a dozen dedicated MP3 players (including an iPod), another bunch that quality as PMPs (including a Zune), and finally ended up with the Motorola DROID. This is the one device that really replaces all those little pocket boxes with LCDs attached: GPS, cheap camera, Palm T|X, cellphone, guitar tuner/chord book, PMP (with greater than SD resolution), MP3 player (with my choice of fully functional player apps, such as Museek and Pandora), web terminal (on par with the small Nokias as far the browsing experience goes), etc. No software is locked out, anything can run as a daemon or background program, multitasking works just dandy, and I still get longer battery life than iPhone users. I can download the SDK, put an app up on my web site if I like, and every Android user can use it, no hacking the system needed. And even more amazing, it even works very well as a phone.
Apple is the wrong way. It's a throwback to the 1970s/1980s, when everyone made their own proprietary computing environments. Apple's done a fine job tying up the hardware so you have to pay 2x-3x as much fo the same PC you can buy from anyone else. Now they're working hard, not on the Mac, not yet, but elsewhere, to eliminate price competition in software, and have absolute say about what you may and many not run on your purchased software.
-Dave Haynie
Yup.
Basically, the HTML power-that-be set out to establish video as a first-class thing within HTML, via the tag. Much as with , they would not dictate precisely what kinds of video would be supported, but basically allow the browser to play it or fail. BUT... there was general consensus that, as with JPG and GIF, originally (and later, PNG) there ought to be known standard formats that everyone supported.
The Mozilla folks, backed by Opera and a bunch of FOSS entities, back Ogg Theora as the video CODEC that should be "built-in" on all web browsers. They do this because Theora is open source... it's based on On2's VP3.2 CODEC, which was released as open source after they had produced their VP4 CODEC. They gradually opened the source even more, eventually granting the Xiph Foundation a "do whatever you like with it" BSD-like license, including the free use of any governing patents. "Theora" is named for Theora Jones, a character from the "Max Headroom" series.
Anyway, the opposition, including Apple, Google, and various others back H.264 instead. Some of this is de-facto.. H.264 is already the standard used in most modern video these days: satellite and some cable TV, European HD broadcast, YouTube, iPhone/iPod, etc. It is, of course, not free, but administered by the MPEG-LA, the same licencing organization that deals with other MPEG and related IP. The FOSS folks reject this because it means no built-in free H.264 CODEC, and as well, potential frees for internet broadcast, even per-view fees (which have been promised, but regularly rolled back to date).
Big companies are also somewhat concerned about the patent implications of VP3 and Theora... there aren't tested in court, and there's no organization like the MPEG-LA ready to take the legal heat if there's any new patent exposure. It's so far just a fear, but not a trivial one. The other is for streaming video: companies like YouTube spend nearly all their money in network fees... the cost of delivering video. Ogg Theora is less efficient than H.264, so switching to H.264 would result in a quality loss or much more costs, neither of which is deemed acceptable.
I actually understand both positions. But Mozilla takes it one step further... they won't just not support H.264 as a built-in, but they do not intend to support external video CODECs. That seems to be a very stupid position: video CODECs for many different kinds of video are now a standard part of every major OS, just like device drivers moved from hacks or in-application to in-OS back in the 1980s or so. Many OSs (for example, Windows 7 and MacOS X) ship with H.264 drivers built in. It's actually important to at least have the option of using an OS driver in preference to anything you might build in to your application, simply because OS-level drivers can very often use your hardware better.
A couple examples. It's impossible to play 1080p H.264 in software on a 1GHz ARM A9 processor. Yet, in the nVidia Tegra 2 chipset, you can not only play 1080p H.264 video, but you can play it at very low power, around 200mW. They have a rockin' accelerator for it... same as most every handheld device today. Another one... most desktop PCs play 1080/60i or 1080/30p pretty well, as long as they have dual core or so CPUs. But 1080/60p is pretty challenging. I have been shooting 1080/60p video for sports video, much better. It'll play in VLC, sort of... it's choppy, and using 40-60% of my total CPU, this, on a Q9550 PC. Running in evil old Windows Media Player in WIn7, I get perfect 60fps, full screen on one of my 1200p monitors, using 12% CPU. Why? That video CODEC is tapping DXVA 2.0, which is offloading much of the work to my nVidia 8800GT, which would otherwise be sitting around, all 118 stream processors given nothing to do.
So with Mozilla, it's not just sound open source philosophy, it's religion. There's no reason they shouldn't support OS-level CODECs, they're just trying to leverage Firefox's popularity to force others to adopt Theora as the one and only default CODEC.
-Dave Haynie
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
Oh boy, this page AGAIN. I shall stop the sarcasm engine I started up last time someone quoted this thing as an irrefutable fact. From that page:
The primary challenge is that all files at these rates will have problems, so the reviewer is often forced to decide which of two entirely distinct flaws is worse. Sometimes people come to different conclusions. That said, I believe that the Theora+Vorbis results are substantially better than the YouTube 327kbit/sec. Several other people have expressed the same view to me, and I expect you'll also reach the same conclusion.
Why, several people have expressed that they thing the Theora codec might be better, and he (one of the xiph.org people) tends to agree. I'm sorry, but could you please do something a little more than encode the same video with two different codecs and then a jedi-handwave accompanied by saying "Oh this looks so much better, and my buddies with a xiph.org e-mail address tend to agree" ?
How about pointing out flaws in the generated videos, artifacts that will definitely be present at low bitrates, the effect of the encoding on colors, or how well both codecs perform in a scene where everything moves?
The war is already over
Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already.
Does anyone here remember the CD-i? DVD-RAM? MD ? How about the more recent one HD-DVD? (I'm sure someone has an xbox, so that should be a bit more popular). Format wars are never over. Hell, people still argue about Betamax vs VHS. A format war is good for only one thing: making geeks froth at the mouth like a cappuccino. For the rest, the industry will play its part and the war won't be won on technical merits. By the time this thing is settled another format war will take and it'll be cappuccino time all over again.
a hidden agenda
Oh noes! THEY ARE AMONGST US! Posting on our boards, subverting our free codecs by spreading words.
Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
My mother doesn't own a DVD-player, nor does my grandmother. I'd call the DVD pretty much a (set of) standard(s) though. I strongly believe that the next big thing in media-land will no longer be a physical medium, and what's more, we'll beg the industry for more a dollar at a time. And I think that ultimately that will be the deciding factor on this whole debate, but I might as well be wrong in that belief. Only time with tell, but in the meantime: froth on, kind sir!
The main reason you might not be able to hardware decode for Ogg Theora is simple: these devices already exist, they don't necessarily have the hardware, and certainly not the software, for accelerated Theora decoding. So it's going to take some work to even discover if some reasonable percentage of today's devices could decode Theora. Which means you need a real incentive to get device manufacturers and OS creators to do this.
Now, look at who these folks are. You have Google. Apple. Microsoft. Palm. RIM. Nokia. Does anyone have a strong incentive here, unless somehow, magically, Theora DID become the web standard? Not to mention that the hardware's already cast, and may simply not be retargetable to Theora so easily... the acceleration in the ARM/PowerVR and TI SOCs was designed with H.264 specifically in mind. It's a bit different on desktops... much of the very good H.264 acceleration you get today is done by graphics cards, using more general purpose resources.
Then, you have video streaming guys like Google... they're happy with H.264, and do not want Theora as a standard, because it's less efficient. That means real money to them... YouTube's primary expense is the cost of streaming video. In fact, Google recently bought On2, ironically the company responsible for the VP3 CODEC upon which Theora is based. On2 has VP7 and VP8 CODECs today... supposedly, VP8 is even more efficient than H.264, particularly at low bitrates. It's quite possible Google's planning to switch from H.264 to VP8 on YouTube in the not too distant future... that would actually save them fairly big bucks, if VP8 is as good as claimed.
-Dave Haynie
Not to mention other things. H.264 is used in satellite and cable television. It's the recording CODEC for nearly all tapeless HD consumer video cameras, some pro cameras (Panasonic's AVC-Intra) and an increasing number of digital still cameras with video. Some smartphones record in H.264. So you're going to want interchange... if I ever buy a "tablet" computer, it'll be able to dock to my camera or camcorder, and play back 720p (camera) or 1080p (camcorder) on that 10" screen... or I'll wait for a tablet that can. H.264 is the standard CODEC for the early 21rst century. If it's replaced, as it's has largely replaced MPEG-2, that will take something substantially better. Not something worse.
-Dave Haynie
if you actually WATCH the videos it's not hard to see that the theora encode looks FAR worse than the h.264 on practically every frame
Indeed. And consider... this is the Xiph web site.. these are the Ogg Theora development people. So what you're seeing there is the best argument they could construct, and it still fails.
Theora is at an inherent disadvantage, and always will be. It was, after all, based on On2's VP3, which they tossed out there for free once VP4 was shipping. They're on VP8 now, and recently bought by Google. Anyway, they are inherently limited by the improvements they can add, because they're likely to trip on any number of video encoding patents that have been filed in the 10 years since VP3 was released. This, in fact, is one big concern from the big companies involved in HTML5... if you're an MPEG-LA licensee, you're covered should any new patents emerge on H.264, as unlikely as that is. But Theora hasn't been all that tested.
I have absolutely nothing against some open source CODECs being available, I think that's great, and would put pressure on the MPEG-LA to keep H.264 free. But Theora is the wrong answer. Right answers? Well, it needs more work, but the BBC's Dirac CODEC is more competitive, if just as much of a problem on handheld gear. Google could release VP8 to the FOSS community, which is said to be noticeably more efficient than H.264 at lower bitrates. Both still could have patent entanglement issues, however.
-Dave Haynie
Yeah... except, the Mozilla folks have already said they're not going to do this in Firefox:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html
To summarize: there are functions in the OS that do these things, that every other piece of software uses, that have been in the OS for over a decade, and that do these functions better than a CODEC embedded in our Web Brower ever will. Thus, we refuse to use those interfaces.
I suspect next, Mozilla will be writing their own video drivers, file system, PDDs, etc. since they can't trust any of those to be 100% functional. Or maybe, they should just write the stinkin' web browser, and use the parts of the OS that are written by folks who know those functions better than Team Mozilla.
Of course, what'll really happen is that someone will hack Firefox to use the OS routines, and before you know it, Firefox will be about as popular as Navigator is today. Or it may slip completely, overtaken by Chrome. Religion is like that... it's a guaranteed fail, when it's put up against rational thought.
-Dave Haynie
So those Windows programs that just run on Linux (without Wine) are so numerous, right?
To preface, I despise Flash as much as anyone, primarily for its closed nature. But I have to play devils advocate here.
You make valid points about the lack of a keyboard and mouse on the iPhone inhibiting the use of current Flash apps by iPhone users.
Your argument for resizing a web page to 320x480 is where your short sightedness is completely revealed though.
Many web sites, flash or no flash, do not display well on a 320x480 screen resolution, or rather a 3.x" screen even at the higher resolution of 480x800--but that is why most sites have adopted a mobile version of their website.
The lack of a keyboard and mouse on a non-flash web site can be just as detrimental, but again we have seen an adaptation of web sites to accommodate big blob fingers.
The Wii's built in browser and flash support motivated a whole slew of Flash games with the Wii motion controller alone in mind--no keyboard.
Now imagine that Adobe is allowed to bring Flash to the iPhone. Surly Flash programmers would adapt their apps and games to accommodate the lack of a keyboard and giant click areas--heck Adobe may even offer an API to support multi-touch.
Now I am not fan of Apple and its closed nature. While I have an iPhone and MacBook, for the purpose of creating iPhone apps, I hope for Apple's demise.
But I despise Flash even more than Apple and find it quite amusing that Google and Apple are helping to bury Flash.