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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."
You said,
As far as I can tell, they aren't actually proposing a wholesale fork
As far as I can tell their is no "they". It's more like a person who is looking for programmers:
As I (Maya Posch AKA 'Elledan') am just a single person, help is required to set up this project successfully...
I think the news on this story is a bit premature.
This project is yet more proof that software patents are profoundly anticompetitive. People have written open source H.264 encoders and decoders. Software patents literally make these open source projects illegal. Why should anyone have a monopoly so they can charge for what others are willing to give away for free? How does that benefit the economy, or the progress of technology? Absolutely ludicrous.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
``could Firefox devs not offer a means to pipe the video stream to the player of the user's choice? Eg, vlc or mplayer running as a content-transparent plugin?''
Yeah, they could. But then they'd be doing the same thing that browser vendors have been doing for the object element since the 1990s. Then what would be the point of the new HTML 5 video element?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
You're right, only I don't know that it's premature for Slashdot. It certainly doesn't belong in a mainstream news article of any sort, but we know the feelings here on the topic; perhaps a little /. exposure is what the project needs to get its feet off the ground.
Yeah, they could. But then they'd be doing the same thing that browser vendors have been doing for the object element since the 1990s. Then what would be the point of the new HTML 5 video element?
Well, it would make all that bitching about which codecs to standardize on a non-issue for a start. It's a browser, why should it know how to play audio, video, decode images, display fonts, or lord knows what other things will come along - 3D support next? Pass it to the OS or build against external libraries and let something else figure that out.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
If Ubuntu omits Firefox, it will be the first thing I do on any new version, is remove Chromium, and to manually install Firefox.
Until Chromium has addons like Firefox I'm not interested in using it. If they actually go with Chrome, that will be a joke. I actually value my privacy rights, and I don't want Google's browser snooping on me, and reporting my web usage to their advertising servers.
Of course Firefox is losing support among the OSS front. It's feature-rich, and is widely used.
Perfect time to turn our backs on it, and kill it!
This is a technological work-around for a legal problem.
When the music industry shut down Napster, some clever programmers wrote up distributed filesharing applications. Hooray, right? Well, no, then the lawyers and the CEOs and the lobbyists went crying to the legislators. And one by one, each country started enacting stricter and stricter copyright laws. Grandmothers are being thrown in prison. Citizens are being fined thousands for a half dozen song downloads. Pirating has reached social acceptance, but hey, so has pot smoking. Social acceptance hasn't changed the fact that your government can throw you in jail at any minute.
Look at the story of The Pirate Bay. We're running out of safe havens, because "routing around" is so much easier than making a stand in your own country, against your own government. Who really wants to go down to their local state/federal legislature and march and protest for the "right to copy data"? Most of us just fileshare for the sake of having some good entertainment to watch in the evening. It's hard to get worked up over relaxation. We don't want to have to work at getting our entertainment, so let's just route around and hope the lawyers don't catch me.
Somewhat related example: China builds a firewall. The clever computer nerds know how to get around it, but for fear of imprisonment, they can't go around blabbing the details. Their own neighbors will turn them in at the drop of a hat. As a result, political dissidence remains horribly unorganized and ineffective. The tools are there, but it doesn't matter, because no one can use them for anything bigger than reading Western newspapers or downloading porn.
Routing around doesn't fix anything. If anything, it releases just enough steam that the public's anger never reaches the critical point to turn around these abominable laws. Quit bragging, about your clever programming tricks. They won't help you when the government/corporations own the tubes, the clients, the servers, and the courts.
Don't install 100 addons, and there is no bloat or memory mismanagement.
All this is doing is making H.264 standard and this is going to kill Linux and Firefox once the lawyers come out when it monopolizes the market.
This patent bs has got to stop. If enough users (firefox users) do not support it then we have a fighting chance to fight it.
http://saveie6.com/
One of the main reasons to use Firefox is: Addons!
There's only about 5 or 10 that I absolutely need to have installed, but even with those, the memory usage is so high that I frequently get out-of-memory errors with 2GB of RAM... highest I've seen was almost 800MB, and there were less than 50 tabs open...
Firefox has a large enough install base to actually stop or at least slow down H.264 adaption.
The geek refuses to look beyond the browser.
Firefox is roadkill. Little Dolly Dumpling tied to the railroad tracks.
H.264 has the support of 817 of the biggest names in global manufacturing: Fujitsu. LG. Mitsubishi. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Toshiba...
In cable, broadcast and sattelite distribution. In CCTV.
In home video.
In PCs. In cell phones. In mobile devices of every sort.
It is backed by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft - and Canonical.
Uuum, the player uses the standart OS facitilies anyway. On Linux e.g. ffmpeg or xine. On Windows DirectShow. On Mac CoreVideo.
I always said that, and I’ll say it again: Just bind to ffmpeg.
Then you don’t only get one codec, but ALL. Plus lots and lost of processing functionality. And if you do it right, you can make it optional, and offer the lib separately. In all distributions of Linux, a simple (optional) dependency on ffmpeg would be enough. Which would make the whole “problem” dissolve into thin air.
Yes, that’s right: The original Firefox team could do that, and be out of “trouble”.
I told ya: If there are two things that seem to be an either/or choice... I choose both. No compromises*! :)
(* WARNING: Requires brain power. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
"Most of the world" by which metric? If you weight countries by number of Firefox users, most of the world has a patent-encumbered H.264.
Unless you're laboring under the same misapprehension as the Wildfox author about the patent status of H.264. It's patent-encumbered in way more than two countries. See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html
The article is wrong. According to the MPEG-LA, there are patents on H.264 in at least the following countries:
Germany, France, UK, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Bulgaria, Liechtenstein, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Slovenia, Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India, Canada, Mexico, Australia
See http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/PatentList.aspx
Exactly the worst enemy of "perfect" is "good enough". It is why Plan9 died at the hands of Unix.
To make people think that Plan 9 is dead is all part of Plan 9. Plan 9 is proceeding perfectly.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Directshow, Gstreamer/FFMpeg and Quicktime is going to cause the Internet to catch fire and explode ("performance tuned code with little security").
Because Flash is so much better. And where are they getting their Theora implementation, hmm?
The second issue is that WinXP and Vista don't have H.264, you need to install FFDshow or Nero, etc to get that support.
So what? At least then it's possible to get that support.
Basically, their argument is, "It might be hard for the average user to get H.264, at least on older OSes, so we'll make it actually impossible." WTF?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It may or may not have all the required libraries. How will the webpage know? How will the user know?
You know why I use VideoLAN for media playback? Because it has its own codecs for everything. Drop a file in it, works, everytime. If it doesn't, an update is already available or the file itself is damaged.
Modular solutions are a nice way to implement functionality and has its advantages, but the monolithic model is sometimes the way to go. The average user will have one tool to download and that's it. They don't know about the difference between codecs, or even what a codec is at all.
We have come a long way to bring Firefox some market share among the usual tech support leeching crowd around us, family, friends and fools, so to speak. And I want to be able to continue saying "download Firefox and everything will work", knowing that missing plug-ins will be auto-downloaded from a probably known-good source (mozdev etc) and updates for all components are auto-enabled as much as possible.
Since using the web is a must-have feature for everyone and their dog, this functionality should be assumed and fulfilled by a quality product of free open source software.
And I'd rather sacrifice the free part of the video-codec than letting Joe User migrate back to IE8 and IE9. Which they will do, because they - at least some of them - are the most pathetically ignorant crowd you could ever imagine and they want to be able to use their YouTube, Facebook, whatever stuff to maintain their 1000 friends network. They will not ever care about patents, copyrights, fair use and DRM. They will leech off whatever they need to off PirateBay and be done with it. They don't even care about malware, spyware and trojans, as long as their steady download of porn, music, games and movies isn't slowed down too much. These Joe Normals are nice and friendly people, and for them, we need quality free software.
Giants like Apple and Google can take over market share much much faster than the Mozilla foundation, so we need to take great care here.