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No HTML5 Hulu Anytime Soon
99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "The Hulu website briefly commented the other day about why they would not be implementing HTML5 video for their service: 'We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs. Our player doesn't just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren't necessarily visible to the end user.' They plan to release a dedicated application for the iPad and iPhone instead, likely a paid subscription service. Perhaps this is a good sign for Web-based television, as it will move more users away from the single, locked down channel from the networks and to more diverse options less interested in extracting subscription fees (like YouTube)."
That's not the right kind of "variable bit rate". The kind of VBR you're describing is merely varying the bit rate within a stream for compression efficiency. Hulu dynamically switches between streams at different bit rates, depending on the speed of your connection.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Go to archive.org, find a video you'd like to see, copy the link address for the file, then open that in mplayer. Works with absolutely no drama for me, whether I choose avi, mpg, ogv, etc. IOW, Hulu's explanation is mostly bullshit. They have exactly one reason, and that is "securing the content" -- which is pretty much nonsense. It isn't like your average "consumer" bothers with unauthorized copying/downloading. The hysteria on the "piracy" issue is completely absurd.
Caveat Utilitor
What 'single locked down channel' are we discussing here? There is presently more than Hulu alive on the web now, is there not?
Hulu is a joint venture of Fox, NBC, and ABC (now pulling out). The idea was they could maintain a singe front for providing mainstream TV, even as users moved way from cable and towards the internet for entertainment video. They were scared by YouTube and the like and wanted to make sure they could be the gatekeepers controlling the content as a cartel (like the RIAA has done with radio). That way they could extract more money in subscription fees going forward and at the same time reduce the threat of independent TV programming from being a more democratized source of content. Fox (for example) doesn't want to have to sell programs to users. They want to be able to sell subscriptions to all their content at once and so get paid just as much by people who think 90% of their content is crap.
Please do clarify, dear submitter.
Does that clarify my somewhat vague submission? I sort of assumed Slashdotters knew the history behind Hulu and the network's strategy with it.
You don't understand. By variable bitrate, they mean changing the bitrate on a per-viewer basis. So, if someone has a particularly bad connection, it gives them a lower quality picture so that they can keep up. And if they're connection improves (they turn off their torrents, for example) then the bitrate they are being provided would improve.
As far as I know, the object in HTML5 does not allow swapping out the referenced video while it's playing with another one encoded at a different bitrate. Silverlight does this for you with its streaming engine, with Flash it's at least possible to synchronize all the components, but it's rarely done. (You need to synchronize audio and video to a high degree of precision to avoid the user noticing.)
This is a valid complaint, and actually one of Microsoft's major selling points on Silverlight, and it's why Netflix adopted it for their online viewer. The variable bitrate per viewer playback that adjusts itself according to your connection is extremely important to providing at least a basic experience. Netflix's implementation is a little bad (it does pause the video if your connection quality goes down, but there are other Silverlight players that do it seamlessly.)
"Why on earth our own Quicktime, even with DRM since V5 not even considered as an option?"
QuickTime does not have DRM in any meaningful sense in this context. It can decode Apple's DRM'd media, but it does not provide a mechanism for other people to add DRM to their media that is then playable with QuickTime.
They didn't even bother to ship Quicktime X for Windows
They also don't ship it for OS X 10.5. It's a complete rewrite with hooks into the display subsystem for things like GPU acceleration and some superficial similarities to QuickTime. Porting it to Windows would be a lot of effort, for a negligible benefit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Flash is a horrible dog. It's only VERY, VERY recently started performing well on Windows, because they gave up decoding video, and handed it off to the OS, which can accelerate it via the videocard. For fuck's sake, Flash didn't even do the most basic hardware overlay until maybe a year ago, available in the mid 90s on damn near every video card, and standalone video player.
And while Flash may have gotten lucky on Windows, no such luck on other platforms. Flash on Linux is as big of a dog now as it ever was. Jumpy, flickery, tearing mess. And don't claim they can't do better, VADPU support on Linux has been in MPlayer for many months. Besides, I shouldn't need hardware acceleration just so stupid 480kbps 400x300 Hulu videos don't bring my 2GHz+ CPU to a grinding halt...
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