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Google Funds Ogg Theora For Mobile
An anonymous reader writes "Google has decided to fund the development of Theora optimized for ARM processors. The article on the Open Source at Google blog notes the importance of having a universal baseline video codec for the Web: 'What is clear though, is that we need a baseline to work from — one standard format that (if all else fails) everything can fall back to. This doesn't need to be the most complex format, or the most advertised format, or even the format with the most companies involved in its creation. All it needs to do is to be available, everywhere. The codec in the frame for this is Ogg Theora, a spin off of the VP3 codec released into the wild by On2 a couple of years ago.'"
This is awesome! Not to detract from it, but why is there so much more love for Theora than for Dirac?
Chris DiBona of the Google open source group claimed that "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet."
This was shown to be false.
Mr DiBona then mysteriously vanished without trace.
Could he please manifest and either (a) support his claims or (b) concede his error?
Thanks ever so much.
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XML serialization of HTML is still there. XForms... I never heard it worked in any browser sans some 3rd party plugins.
So, please, describe what's rubbish in HTML. Those new elements are _needeed_ anyway. It's better to have them than to implement anew every time you need them.
I don't understand what's you problem with audio and video either. They are here anyway with flash. You can disable flash. You can disable audio/video if you really want to. Your problem is?
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Meh, getting 503s trying to log in. Sorry for the A/C Post.
XHTML was interesting and lovely, and no one gave a shit. Ideology loses to practicality in almost every case until ideology is reformed to conform to reality.
I think you'll find that if you look at HTML5, there's not a lot of presentational bits in it. Most of that is still reserved for CSS.
You'll also find that the cases where things are defined at least gives the web a unified a way to handle real web pages that exist *today*. Right now, a new browser would have to reverse engineer what Chrome, FF, IE and friends did in order to know how to render the web. HTML5 at least identifies the reality that exists.
You note that JS is being used to do things it shouldn't. On what grounds? Who are you to tell what should and shouldn't be done with a language and in a given environment? The practical fact is that folks *are* doing amazing things with JS. If you don't like the language, that's your problem. If you don't want it on your computer, don't use those websites. JS *does* lots of things today, and there's no reason to limit it artificially. You want something better out there? Come up with a solution and push it.
Your final comment notes that web developers aren't interested in quality and technical superiority. You're right. Why should they? What they care about is getting a product out. You're asking them to solve problems that they don't have.
Tks,
Jeff Bailey
(an employee of Google, not speaking for Google at all)
Many of its new elements have gone out of their way to bring back the combination of presentation and content that we've tried to get rid of for over 15 years now.
Absolutely not true. The new tags are for things like articles, sections, and so on. They provide more semantic information, not less. The HTML 2 approach removed all of these as redundant because you can implement them with class attributes. The problem with this is that one site will use <div class="article">, another will use <div class="post">, a third will use <div class="blog">, and this makes it very difficult for the browser to render them in a consistent way and for other user agents to know that they represent articles. In contrast, HTML5 pages will use the <article> tag.
Others, like canvas, encourage JavaScript to be used more than it ever should be. Furthermore, the audio and video playback will end up as the next-generation marquee or blink element; annoying, misused and hated by all.
They don't allow you to do anything that you can't do in Flash already. Flash is often abused, but in some cases it's used very effectively. I'd rather have an open standard than a proprietary system. Things like Web Socket are also very useful, allowing you to keep a connection to the server open and incrementally fetch data without polling. Something like Slashdot could use this to insert posts into an open page whenever someone posts them, rather than fetching them in a blob when you hit 'more,' for example.
What's worst of all, though, is that XHTML, XForms and other sensible standards are being discarded for something so much worse.
XHTML is not being discarded. XHTML 2 is. I like XHTML 2 a lot, and if I were creating the web now as a new system, I'd want something like XHTML 2. Unfortunately, this is not the current situation. XHTML 2 is a great standard for designing document formats, but it doesn't in any way reflect how people are building web sites today, let alone tomorrow. If every browser supported XHTML 2 tomorrow, I doubt you'd see more than a handful of sites using it in a year's time. In contrast, people are already using bits of [X]HTML 5, because they're actually useful.
XHTML 2 made the same mistake the W3C did with HTML 4 and XHTML 1. The spec was written before the implementation. With HTML 5, every feature has to have a well-defined use case and must have two independent implementations before it goes into the final spec.
I've written in more detail about HTML 5 in two articles. I don't agree with everything in the spec, but it's a lot better than HTML 4 + Flash.
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Canvas is not needed. You can create dynamic, animated graphics using the existing SVG standard.
And yes, html5 brings back the integration of style and content.
It is defined to maintain backwards compatibility by keeping some elements that are counter to the philosophy of html and yet fails to preserve the definition and presence of those elements. It is even halfassed at meeting its stated goals.
Html5 spec does not specify a single DOM structure, unlike html2, this means that IE is going to continue to require hackish work around for cross platform js.
Html5 may not be total crap compared to html4, but compared to the competing and now defunct standard xhtml2? It is utter irredeemable crap.
If Google was serious, they would release VP8 as open source, and open source the patents. They did just buy On2. Why support a codec that was state of the art in 2000?
This is beyond awesome, it's a game-changer. Google is one of those rare companies that singularly has the power to move markets, and it is revolutionary to see it do so in favor of consumers as it has. I understand the reasons why it has preferred H.264 over Theora, but it is really nice to see that it also understands the reasons why we should be preferring an open format instead. It's especially nice in an age of companies wanting to lock everything down and be the gatekeeper to everything, the major player in technology is pushing yet again to open things up.
Sometimes I think that Google is about the only company that "gets it." They understand that more people using the Internet translates to more money in their pocket. Even if those people are not using Google's services directly, they are increasing the market such that collectively, it has more opportunity, which in turn translates into more $$$. They seem to not really care if other people are making more money as well, which really separates them in my mind from other companies, who are of the "it is not enough that I succeed, but everyone else must fail" mentality.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, one reason I've seen people regurgitate in why H.264 is the right way to go is because it is supported on hardware. Congratulations to Google on working to negate that argument.
XHTML is easy to generate, manipulate, and validate? Have you ever written software that tried to handle XHTML? It's as complex as writing an XML handler which is not trivial to do properly. Things like tag attributes add a whole extra layer of complexity to getting a machine to actually understand the document. Your contention that HTML5 is regressing with respect mixing presentation and content is ignorant and borderline stupid. It makes me wonder if you've even read the spec. HTML5 eliminates presentation tags like center, tt, and the font tag. It does add tags that make it easier for user agents to determine the context of different parts of a document.
For instance the header, footer, and article tags let the UA figure out in a search which parts of the document they ought to pay more attention to. Search engines can focus on text inside article tags and ignore text matches in the footer or nav tags for instance. Screen readers don't need to try to parse pages based on tag attributes like they have to with HTML4/XHTML. A screen reader can know that it doesn't need to bother reading the contents of the footer or it can more easily provide a verbal menu based on the sections of the document.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Neither Apple's or Microsoft's products support Flash out of the box either, yet Flash is fairly ubiquitous right now.
Really? The last two Macs I've bought have come with Flash preinstalled. Not sure about Windows, but someone mentioned a few days ago here that their new Windows machine had Flash preinstalled, although it's not clear whether this was done by MS or the OEM.
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Theora is perhaps better than H.263 and MPEG-2 (from the mid 90s), but does not come close to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC or VC-1. (The frozen Theora bitstream format is lacking many features found in H.264 and VC-1.) Results might be similar to H.263+/MPEG-4 ASP.
The Ogg container also has some documented flaws.
Note that there are many sites which perform misleading or flawed comparisons of the two; for example, they might compare the result from YouTube's H.264 encoder with a lossy source (which optimizes for encoding speed) to a locally ran Theora encode with a lossless source.
Since OS X 10.6 and Windows 7 come with H.264 decoding, and Windows 7 supports H.264 hardware decoding with compatible hardware from any source, I recommend sticking with H.264. (OS X 10.6's H.264 hardware decoding support appears to be limited to videos played in QuickTime X from MPEG4 or QuickTime container files on systems with nVidia 9400M GPUs or newer, even though Macs with capable GPUs started appearing in 2007.)
Theora lost because it wasn't as good as H.264 and it's still not as good as H.264 bit for bit. The only reason why the opensource world support it isn't because it's better, but because it's the only "open source friendly" option. Sorry, but that just because it fits an idelogoy doesn't mean much to the part of the world that uses the product. It's like suggesting that a professional 3D/video shop use Blender instead of Maya or Cinelerra instead of Final Cut Pro or Avid. The professionals are going to take a look at it for a while and go, "Nice toy, now I've got to get back to work."
If the opensource world wants Theroa to succeed, you're going to have to produce something that's better than H.264 end of story. Until then the people are working in Video are going to continue using H.264 because it's everywhere and is currently the best mainstream codec available.
I worked in Video production in the late 90's through about 2005. H.264 was a godsend when we finally had a single Codec that was adopted by pretty much all recording hardware and editing software. Before it was a Codec Hell. Nobody I talk to in the industry, and I still have a lot of friends who work everywhere from their basement to large production shops, have any interest in embracing Theora or anything else. They only want to support 1 Codec that works everywhere, and that's H.264. Even if it costs them a little bit of money. Because whatever it costs them is likely cheaper than the headaches of having to support multiple formats.
Now, if Theora or some other patent free format gets to the point where it can offer at least the same (really it has to be BETTER than H.264 in features and quality) only then will the production houses be interested in switching. And by better, offer at least the same quality as H.264 at a lower bit rate than H.264.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Tags like header and footer denote semantics which are part of the content (content denotes what is displayed, not how it is displayed). They don't say "the footer should be in a 10pt font" -- that is up to the CSS. They (and the other layout elements) denote the semantics of what is currently being done in an ad-hoc way. They allow things like search engines to identify relevant information (e.g. ignore the footer sections).
HTML5 is looking to be a great standard. Not perfect by any means, but it is a good step forward (giant leap?) in the right direction. Having a defined way of processing HTML5 and having an XML variant (XHTML) unified to the same DOM makes it easier to choose how you want to write/generate your HTML content.
There were some nice ideas in XHTML2, but it didn't pan out. That does not mean that some of those ideas cannot be integrated into HTML in the future like section has been.
It is also good to see Google seeking to improve video support.
Gradually, HTML5 support will improve, as will support for CSS3 as these standards get finalised. Also, audio and video support will stabilise as well. These, with all the advances in support for MathML, SVG, SMIL and other standards as well as performance improvements for JavaScript and hardware-accelerated page rendering mean that the web is only growing in strength.
As for JavaScript, it is just a scripting language -- you can do anything with it and hook it to anything. You do know that the "fetch more comments" feature of slashdot uses javascript? You do know that thunderbird and firefox make use of javascript for binding their UI together?
The article, section, header, footer and aside tags don't have any presentation information (except that section/section/h1 is similar to using h2). A HTML5 browser should only have the following presentation logic done via CSS:
article, section, header, footer, aside { display: block; }
Anything more fancy is done by CSS. Which means that you can have a single CSS theme file (WordPress, ZenGarden, whatever) that is used by *any* website that uses HTML5 markup.
Sometimes I think that Google just didn't "get it" in the first place when choosing H.264 for youtube.
YouTube started out on Sorenson H.263 because Flash Player supported that out of the box. When iPhone and new versions of Flash Player started to support H.264, YouTube reencoded uploaded videos in the new format. It was a happy accident that Chrome and Safari supported the same codec for the HTML5 <video> element. Now that platforms stuck on Flash 7 (namely Wii) have upgraded to a version with H.264, YouTube appears not to do H.263 anymore. Theora is somewhere between H.263 and H.264 in quality, roughly on par with MPEG-4 part 2 codecs such as DivX and Xvid, but H.264 still uses half the bitrate of Theora for the same perceived quality.
Ogg may indeed be less than ideal, but that article exaggerates it's problems.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
How does SVG handle sprite graphics? Far better than canvas does. To move a sprite, you can transform its position, with a canvas you have to re-composite the image. The sprite itself can be a traditional bit-mapped image if desired.
Pixel art editing is somewhat possible. Canvas can generate a bitmap of the output, but SVG can not without and external converter. As you add pixels (really rectangles in the DOM of the svg) you dramatically explode the size of the DOM tree causing performance issues. With good partitioning algorithms, this can be partially mitigated by combining adjacent like pixels into single DOM objects.
No web browser ever supported xhtml2, but then the only after the xhtml2 spec was shelved did browsers start to roll out any significant support for html5 either.
1. XForms are a huge improvement which currently does not work. Good or bad bad it is.
2. What? There already is a standard. Microsoft decided it does not need to do it the way it's written. Why would you think they'll implement something else?
3. XHTML5 (XML serialization of HTML5) can include MathML and SVG too. Your point is? HTML serialization will be able to do that or so I heard.
4. Predefined styles are backward compatibility. I don't like them either (aside from, maybe, b/i/etc) but I doubt browser vendors will do something about that. Otherwise users complain it's broken. And no, you cannot educate them on the issue. They do not care.
5. This is something I don't like myself (sometimes). However, you can't really make something about that either (same reason). Well, you can somewhat - use XML serialization of HTML. However it'll only check validity of XML. Good thing anyway, you don't want a browser to analyze if it's allowed to have one element in the other - you may need to introduce new elements someday.
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Ogg may indeed be less than ideal, but that article exaggerates it's problems.
Which begs the question: why not use the free/open Matroska container instead? It can hold almost any media stream, including Theora, and supports multiple selectable sound and subtitle streams for a video stream. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Javascript does not magically do AJAX possible. It works because browser does it and give access to needed objects to javascript. This can happen with any language integrated with a browser.
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I've recently read the short description of the MPEG-LA license terms for broadcasters. (Not the full licenses, though)
If I understand it correctly, by purchasing a license, you're allowed to use h.264 for YOUR distribution, but the terms does not mention re-licensing to third party. To my best guess, that would mean re-licensing is not allowed.
But, and here's the catch, when YouTube-videos are embedded into other sites (Facebook, or Joe Shmoe:s blog) isn't that a form of re-sale to third party?
Can someone with more insight comment on this?
H.261 only supports two video frame sizes: CIF (352x288 luma with 176x144 chroma) and QCIF (176x144 with 88x72 chroma). Although still useful (and widely supported as you rightly mentioned), the supported resolutions are rather low. It can probably compete with a low resolution youtube video, but for more advanced uses, H.261 is not a player.