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

End of Firefox?

[sopssa]

Now first of all to the Wild Fox project maintainers, this is the right move. Fight to win the whole war, not one battle. Don't die as a martyr and lose it all just by demanding something to happen right now.

Additionally, it looks like Firefox is actually starting to lose support even from the Open Source front. Even Ubuntu is probably changing to Chronium and dropping Firefox. It kind of looks like Firefox lost the track of what they were doing a long time ago.

Apparently Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping Firefox for Chrome. ...
it could be a sign that people are starting to feel less, um, “loyalty” to Firefox.

Not that I'm anymore happier Google's products taking over everything...

Re:End of Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:End of Firefox?

[RAMMS EIN]

``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?

Re:End of Firefox?

[Nakor BlueRider]

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.

Re:End of Firefox?

[BiggerIsBetter]

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.

Re:End of Firefox?

[Beelzebud]

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!

Re:End of Firefox?

[Beelzebud]

Don't install 100 addons, and there is no bloat or memory mismanagement.

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can tell their is no "they".

Their is no they're is no there. So there.

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?

[hairyfeet]

Just because you have FF does NOT mean you can play Theora, okay? I'm typing this on my "nettop" which is a circa 2005 Sempron 1.8Ghz, and I'm typing this in FF. I can watch full screen SD H.264 flash and it plays beautifully. Theora? Even in a window it is a jerky mess. And this Sempron is certainly more powerful than those single core Atom netbooks I see everyone carrying.

So I'm sorry, but Theora sucks on older or low power devices. Not to mention I can slap a $50 AGP card and get full hardware accelerated H.264, and many devices from cell phones on up have hardware H.264 support. Is there ANYBODY offering hardware Theora support?

While I don't like MPEG-LA, I'm also a realist. The only chance we have to tell MPEG-LA to shove it is Google releasing the On2 codecs, because VP6 plays nicely on low power and slower devices like this Sempron, and I'm betting VP8 will be even better. Theora is just gonna end up another Vorbis, a teeny tiny niche nobody but a few FOSS geeks use, just like how everyone plays MP3s even though they are patent encumbered.

Re:End of Firefox?

[bemymonkey]

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...

Re:End of Firefox?

[ultranova]

Why? It capitulates to a non-free standard, and if H.264 becomes the defacto standard for HTML5 it effectively destroys the ability of any free browsers without deep pockets behind them to compete in the market.

H.264 is a free standard in most of the world. That's the point: why should the rest of us suffer from USAs bad laws?

Google Chrome will be fine, as will Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer, but Mozilla may well be toast, and any other free alternatives that want to operate in a country that respects software patents.

So don't operate in a country that "respects" software patents. Operate in an area where it's impossible to patent a file format, such as the EU.

You don't fight a war by giving ground at every turn. Eventually you have to make a stand.

Well, moving operations out of a country where the local laws inhibit competition certainly seems like taking a stand to me. It's just a stand that happens to be inconvenient to US citizens. Maybe you should talk to your congresscritters about it?

Meanwhile, here in the free world, h.264 is an open standard, as are all file formats, so...

Re:End of Firefox?

[drinkypoo]

This ABI could be supported across several browsers.

It already exists. It's called mozilla plugins, and for the most part they work in Chrome/Chromium. My about:plugins in Chromium now:

Plug-ins (7)
Shockwave Flash
Description: Shockwave Flash 10.0 r32
Location: /opt/flash10amd64/libflashplayer.so

iTunes Application Detector
Description: This plug-in detects the presence of iTunes when opening iTunes Store URLs in a web page with Firefox.
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/librhythmbox-itms-detection-plugin.so

MozPlugger 1.13.3 handles QuickTime and Windows Media Player Plugin
Description: MozPlugger version 1.13.3, maintained by Louis Bavoil and Peter Leese, a fork of plugger written by Fredrik Hübinette.
For documentation on how to configure mozplugger, check the man page. (type man mozplugger)
Configuration file: /etc/mozpluggerrc
Helper binary: mozplugger-helper
Controller binary: mozplugger-controller
Link launcher binary: mozplugger-linker

Windows Media Player Plug-in 10 (compatible; Totem)
Description: The Totem 2.30.0 plugin handles video and audio streams.
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-gmp-plugin.so

DivX® Web Player
Description: DivX Web Player version 1.4.0.233
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-mully-plugin.so

QuickTime Plug-in 7.6.6
Description: The Totem 2.30.0 plugin handles video and audio streams.
Location: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libtotem-narrowspace-plugin.so

Interesting, mime types are shown when you C&P, but don't display on the page. I deleted them to pass the filter though. Stupid slashdot.

Re:End of Firefox?

[Hurricane78]

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. ;)

Re:End of Firefox?

[nloop]

When a product runs faster via wine than its native code, I'm not too excited about running it.

Re:End of Firefox?

[BZ]

"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

Re:End of Firefox?

[BZ]

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

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.

Re:End of Firefox?

[camperdave]

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.

Re:End of Firefox?

[SanityInAnarchy]

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?

Re:End of Firefox?

[phoenix321]

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.

Re:End of Firefox?

[Tellarin]

But these count hardware patents, not only software patents. Remember that both are wildly different beasts.

The guy proposing Wild Fox is focused on going around software patents. It would be pretty hard to add hardware to Firefox. :)

Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[Kethinov]

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.

Re:Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole concept of patents is to protect the patent inventor against competition and give him or her a monopoly. 'Patents are anticompetitive' is a tautology. It never in the past therefore was considered a valid argument against patents.

Re:Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, "profoundly." Well, fuck. Then that changes everything.

Are you really going to hang your argument on an adjective? The point, as you've been told, IS to BE anti-competitive. Adjectives and your personal judgement of their application don't change that underlying fact.

Re:Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, that's an adverb.

Re:Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[smoot123]

It's defensible because someone had to do the research to figure out the H.264 algorithms. In retrospect, it's easy to say "Duh, of course quarter-pixel motion estimation is a good idea", but someone had to do a lot of grunt work to prove that's really the case.

I'm quite certain math geeks are beavering away at new compression algorithms in corporate labs. Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents. Not all of it, just a lot. So the benefit to society is we get a 2160i video standard this decade, not next. Is that worth it? I don't know, maybe, but it's not cut and dried.

Re:Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[Bigjeff5]

The whole concept of patents is to protect the patent inventor against competition and give him or her a monopoly.

You've got the method, but you don't have the purpose. The purpose for patents is to spur the sharing of inventive ideas for the benefit of society. See, before patents, ideas would generally be held as trade secrets by guilds. Often times these ideas would die, never to see the light of day, if the guild wasn't in a position to make use of them. This severely hampered innovation.

We want to get these innovations to be spread and known as widely as possible. This allows for the fastest implementation of those ideas, as well as speeding up the process of new innovations which are founded by those same ideas.

So, how do you make it so that everybody knows how the latest innovation works, yet still allow the inventor to extract sufficient profit out of the invention to make it worth the effort (and therefore worth inventing the next great thing)?

Simple, you give him a limited guaranteed monopoly that is long enough to extract most of the value from the invention, but make him describe his invention in detail such that another competent engineer could recreate the device. Then, the next great widget can be invented based on the revelations of the previous great widget, regardless of whether or not the new inventor is the same person as the old. Also, it gives the inventor of such a widget many options for monetizing his invention so that he can afford to create new inventions.

The purpose of patents is to benefit society. It is not to benefit inventors. We dangle the carrot of a limited monopoly to encourage as much invention as possible, but the success of the inventor is not the goal of patents. Spread of knowledge is the goal of patents. This is the same goal as copyrights, by the way.

Any time you see someone attempting to limit the spread of knowledge via patents or copyrights, you know immediately that they are working counter to the goals of copyrights and patents.

Re:Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[drinkypoo]

Having a patent doesnt do anything by itself, it gives the holder of the patent specific options.

Specific options that I don't want anyone to have over me; options they won't have if I don't encode anything with H.264.

Let me ask you, how many people has the MPEG-LA sued over h264 ... there are OSS implementations ... how many of them have been sued?

I don't trust the MPEG-LA. Past performance is no guarantee. Frankly, if their US licensees have any inkling that x264 is cutting into their profits, as publicly traded corporations they are legally obligated to push the MPEG-LA to enforce those patents anywhere they are valid. Apple and Microsoft both qualify. They have a legal obligation to their stockholders to push H.264 over Theora since they get money whenever a H.264 encoder or decoder is sold.

I suppose the fact that Novell, Redhat and Canonical all are patent holders just slipped your fucking mind too right?

Redhat grants use of their patents.
http://www.redhat.com/licenses/ccmpl.html

2. GRANT OF RIGHTS

a. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, each Contributor hereby grants Recipient a non exclusive, worldwide, royalty free copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of,publicly display, publicly perform and distribute and sublicense the Contribution of such Contributor, if any, and such derivative works, in source code and object code form.

b. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, each Contributor hereby grants Recipient a non exclusive, worldwide, royalty free patent license under Licensed Patents to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import and otherwise transfer the Contribution of such Contributor, if any, in source code and object code form. This patent license shall apply to the combination of the Contribution and the Program if, at the time the Contribution is added by the Contributor, such addition of the Contribution causes such combination to be covered by the Licensed Patents. The patent license shall not apply to any other combinations which include the Contribution. No hardware per se is licensed hereunder.

Novell licenses their contributions under the GPL version 2 (they are still carrying notices to this effect, not difficult to locate.) It does not permit redistribution if patent claims prevent it. Novell cannot simultaneously distribute Linux and make patent claims against it.

The Canonical contributor agreement requires that you promise that no patent claims will come from your contributions to canonical, and they make the same promise back to you. Further, Canonical submitted a letter to the European Patent Office arguing against the granting of software patents for EPO EBA referral G3-08.

Or, in short, you are using three companies which have promised not to sue over software patents in comparison to a group which exists specifically to handle licensing and lawsuits of a group of patents encumbering a supposed standard. This is so wrongheaded I just can't even begin to figure out where you're coming from.

Re:Software patents are profoundly anticompetitive

[Junta]

Software patents literally make these open source projects illegal

The context you skipped was speaking directly to OSS H264 implementations. A patent does not *force* the patent holder to be anti-OSS, but if the patent holder doesn't explicitly grant that liberty, then the OSS project distribution in geographies where the patents apply are illegal and are liable. You may argue that this should be the right of the patent holder to make these restrictions, but don't pretend that all software patent holders are just fine with OSS and that it has no impact.

Let me ask you, how many people has the MPEG-LA sued over h264 ... there are OSS implementations ... how many of them have been sued? I can count to one higher on my dick, so just stop with the retarded bullshit you're pulling out of your ass.

That argument could have been made about GIF and VFAT for *years* before the respective companies started going after their royalties with force. One of the devious things about patents is that they can be 'submarined' while the industry standardizes on it and then the holders can raise their hands and make demands upon the whole industry. In cases like Novell and RedHat where they explicitly license their patents, its ok. For closed/open projects that explicitly get signoff from a patent holder, they are ok. In the case of H264, there are clear demands as to how to legally license that are ignored by many who are *currently* ignored in turn as the holders think it the best current business course of action. Because of the overall soft stance in the community on h264 licensing, they reap the benefits of open source implementations as validating it as a standard while not incurring the risk of losing their right to sue by explicitly granting rights.

Re:"impossiblefreely".... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Story posted at the speed of kdawson.

Re:watch out for importation to USA

[gzipped_tar]

Not to mention concerns over invasive species... ;)

Re:"impossiblefreely".... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, thatanewword.

Hmm, is that a malamanteau ?

Ubuntu should stick with Firefox.

[Beelzebud]

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.

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:Ubuntu should stick with Firefox.

[Bigjeff5]

Google knows that 99.999% of users will keep Google as the default search on Chrome

Hell, 99.999% of Firefox users keep Google as the default. Also remember that nothing makes money for Google like Google Search - it's 95% of their revenue.

They don't need to track you through their browser, they already track you through their search engine and you* love them for it. ;)

* By "you" I mean people in general, not necessarily you specifically

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:watch out for importation to USA

[Elledan]

That's why I specifically mention on the site that this version of Firefox is not meant for anyone in a country which has such patents. No American, South-Korean or anyone from another country which has or will get such software patents can not, is not allowed to and shall never use Wild Fox. Period. Unless they cough up the licensing costs for using a h.264 decoder.


Maya (Wild Fox maintainer)

For <audio> tag

[figleaf]

Please include support for mp3 and aac.

Thanks for creating this project. Support H.264 for the <video> tag is the right thing to do.
Good luck for your effort.

Re:This is what the Internet is for

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Say no to H.264

[Billly Gates]

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.

New 'video' tag without standardized codec

[FlorianMueller]

It's true that the new <video> tag in HTML 5 would suggest that a standardized codec be used by all browsers claiming to be fully HTML 5 compatible.

However, the new tag could also be used (even though in a less useful way than otherwise) if there is, which is unfortunately the most likely scenario, no industry consensus on a single codec. Assuming that there are two camps (H.264 and Theora; or maybe three if Google pushes for VP8), web servers could then provide different Uniform Resource Identifiers for the files, based on the browser that makes the web page request; or the file names (thus the URIs) could be identical but dependent on which browser is in use, a different file could be provided.

I have discussed the HTML 5 aspects of this in a recent blog post, "Video codecs: The HTML 5 dimension". While I am against software patents (I founded the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign in 2004, I just try to take a realistic perspective on the fact that software patents exist and get enforced all around the globe (as far as codecs go, there's aggressiv enforcement even in Europe, such as dozens of search warrants and confiscations every year at the CeBIT trade show.

Re:Not quite.

[joaosantos]

Scripting, showing and hiding controls, and I doubt that you can apply css3 transformations to an embed plugin.

Can't say no to H.264 without reliable alternative

[FlorianMueller]

As much as I regret to say it (btw, I founded the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign in 2004), I don't think this kind of resistance to H.264 is going to lead to a solution in the event some of the patents in the MPEG LA pool (just the H.264 pool contains 1,135 patents, and they have more pools under management there) get infringed by an alternative format that everyone would advocate, be it Theora or VP8. In that case, "the lawyers" would come out anyway to collect royalties and impose other terms and conditions.

As a result, whatever alternative that infringes on those patents would end up being unfree (neither free beer nor free speech) anyway.

The call for resistance to H.264 will make a great deal of sense if and when there is a reasonably reliable basis on which it can be assumed that a format such as Theora and/or VP8 doesn't infringe patents. While it's impossible to check on every one of the millions of software patents that exist around the globe, at the very least the proponents of Theora or VP8 (which Google might opensource very soon) should make a well-documented patent clearance effort with respect to the patents held by the MPEG LA consortium and explain why they their preferred codec doesn't infringe on those. Companies like Google or a deep-pocket non-profit such as the Mozilla Foundation could certainly do so if they wanted. I explained this thinking in a recent blog post.

Re:Stupid.

[westlake]

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.