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?

[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?

[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.

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: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.