Firefox With H.264 HTML 5 Support = Wild Fox

Elledan writes "Two countries have software patents which make it impossible to freely use video codecs such as AVC (H.264). This has led to projects such as Firefox not including AVC support with the HTML 5 video tag in their releases, which makes the rest of the world suffer indirectly the effects of software patents as well. To rectify this situation at least somewhat, I have created the Wild Fox project, which aims to release Firefox builds with the features previously excluded due to software patents. This software will be available to those in non-software-patent-encumbered countries. Any developers who wish to join the project are more than welcome."

Comments

H264 patients in various countries

[Unfocused]

"Only two countries in the world have software patents"

That's not exactly accurate - MPEG LA has been granted patients in numerous countries: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html

Re:H264 patients in various countries

[Billly Gates]

As we saw with Decss it doesn't matter if other countries support the law. Us law is international law due to corrupt treaties paid by lobbyists. They can have the president issue an order like they did to poor Jon Johnsen for daring to have people watch their own dvds that they own on their own computers with Linux.

Unfortunately, this is not going away anytime soon.

Re:Ubuntu should stick with Firefox.

[GigaplexNZ]

Chromium does have addons now, and since it is an open source project it'll be rather difficult for Google to hide snooping mechanisms in it. Also, I highly doubt that Ubuntu will decide to stick with Firefox as the default purely because one user who knows how to uninstall software and install an alternative expressed that they will change from the default.

Re:End of Firefox?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Because it would violate patents in many countries, unless you stripped out all of the infringing codecs, including h.264.

Also because it's the wrong way to go about this. Why bundle the codecs when you can call out to native, shared systems like GStreamer and have them provide the codecs for you? That'd handle the legal issue, too.

Re:End of Firefox?

[buchner.johannes]

Two things:

1. Forks of good* projects have it hard:
Wild fox will not be able to keep up with the good infrastructure of Firefox (developers, build system, connections). Mozilla is pretty big and provides a excellent service. Wild fox will have a hard time to keep up with upstream.

2. Mozilla has a bigger target. They aim for a free Internet (and free software). They have been quite successful against IE in these terms (correctness regarding CSS, HTML4 & XHTML, inclusion of HTML5, JS speed).
The FSF, GNU & Red Hat have the same goal for free software. The Linux kernel has the same goal too (no closed source modules).
Ubuntu does not. Wild Fox has not.

It is shortsighted to find the "tolerant", "pragmatic" projects better. It is not just puristic zealots against "I just want it to work". The availability of free software increases the options users have.
Projects that cut the corner slow down the OSS development of free replacement packages, and can damage the upstream process.

Don't get me wrong. It is nice that we can view Flash videos. This binary blob comes with security issues, memory bloat and crashes. At the same time Gnash ran out of funding and most developers had to abandon it.
Contrary to what Ubuntu users** believe, good free software doesn't come from screaming loud enough, but actual, continuous work.

* you could also say: projects that don't sufficiently suck
** Enough Ubuntu bashing :-) They are very good at taking an end-user view on projects, which is valuable feedback.

Re:End of Firefox?

[Tarquin Sidebottom]

Currently if Firefox comes across a html5 video using an unsupported codec, it already allows you to play the video in an external player or save the video. The problem is the HTML5 Javascript function canPlayType(); things like the Youtube trial detect that h264 isn't natively supported so the javascript never dynamically creates the VIDEO tag.

Downloaded the Firefox source and edit content/html/content/src/nsHTMLMediaElement.cpp.
Change the line

case CANPLAY_NO: aResult.AssignLiteral(""); break;

to

case CANPLAY_NO: aResult.AssignLiteral("probably"); break;

If you recompile the browser then join the youtube html5 beta, it will now try to serve you video via html5. At this stage the video is "protected" behind a transparent DIV so you can't right-click it. Use Firebug, or the following Greasemonkey script to delete the DIV.

// ==UserScript==
// @name youtube anti-div
// @namespace html5hackery
// @include http://.youtube./*
// ==/UserScript==

// video-blocker
function addGlobalStyle(css) {
var head, style;
head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
if (!head) { return; }
style = document.createElement('style');
style.type = 'text/css';
style.innerHTML = css;
head.appendChild(style);
}

addGlobalStyle('#video-player .video-blocker { display:none;');

You now have a version of Firefox 'compatible' with Youtube's HTML5. Currently it doesn't work with Vimeo's HTML5 beta and I haven't bothered to find out why.