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YouTube Explains Where HTML5 Video Fails
awjr writes "YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash having major issues with the lack of features that the HTML5 <video> tag has and may never have."
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Is the video tag in HTML5 a kludge? Yes. Is it more an ideal than a practical implementation? Sure. Can it compete with a commercial product that has been an accepted part of the web for over 10 years now? Perhaps not. Is it poorly implemented in most modern browsers, with no agreed upon video codec common to any two of them? Yep. Would it be getting any attention at all if Steve Jobs hadn't used it as part of his cheap excuse to block free flash apps from his iControlU line of products? Not likely.
But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's funny that a lot of these points end with something like "HTML 5 is working on it" or "HTML 5 is just begun" or "Hopefully they all merge to one." And that's the idea of an unfinished specification. With one big exception: DRM (or as the article calls it "Content Protection"). While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard. I think they perceive open standards to be inherently insecure (despite several cases of the opposite like OpenSSL).
Right now, YouTube might be forced to stick with Flash in regards to some videos but in the future I think we will see YouTube move as much as it can to HTML 5 and offer Flash as a premium service to content owners who want to deliver their content through Flash's DRM. And I'm fine with that. I don't care that you can redistribute videos of a snapping turtle laying eggs in my parent's garden.
Remember, YouTube is Google and Google has supported HTML 5 at least vocally and with their Chrome browser to the best of their ability.
My work here is dung.
But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
That. MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason. We currently have to choose between two kludges, badly implemented possibilities, one of them being open. The choice is easy to make.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
I don't care about things that are "open" but dont work in practice.
"His name was James Damore."
well, these are the sorts of growing pains that happen with any "new" way of doing something.
I'm in no rush for HTML5 to take over (flash "just works", at least on my systems), but it would be nice to not have Adobe keeping an iron fist on so much of the interactive content out there.
Living With a Nerd
A real site knows what the real work there is behind a major feature like video. What a surprise.
Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.
This rental is currently unavailable in your country.
Surprise, you aren't offering those videos.
Flash kills battery life and stability. After 10 years, it still doesn't work well on modern computers or mobile devices and is likely to never be a good solution. The video tag is young, not quite there yet, and will probably be a better bet in the long run.
Sounds more like they are saying HTML5 needs more work, rather than that they are 'coming down on the side of flash'. Besides I disagree with some of the points:
"video owners require us to use secure streaming technology, such as the Flash Platform's RTMPE protocol, to ensure their videos are not redistributed."
RTMPE is not secure. AFAIK the spec just says (effectively) "please do not let users save the video".
"While WebKit has recently taken some steps forward on fullscreen support, it's not yet sufficient for video usage (particularly the ability to continue displaying content on top of the video)."
Pah, part of the reason flash is shit for video is because it has to convert it to RGB and then can't use dedicated video scaling hardware. I much prefer the 'direct' fullscreen video approach even if it means we lose subtitles (and ads!). It also means you can always fullscreen a video, even when the controls aren't provided (*cough* youtube).
They've got a point about robust streaming though.
Without any content protection whatsoever, they wouldn't be able to offer videos which say only "This rental is currently unavailable in your country", they'd have to actually provide the video to everyone.
The "we need DRM, otherwise we can't provide all the content we want to!" argument is horrible, stupid, and insulting.
DRM does not allow businesses to provide content in new markets. DRM allows businesses to provide old markets in places where they make no sense. Every company which complains they can't do X without DRM really means they don't want to do X without magic fairy dust. Meanwhile, everyone and their grandmother is busy providing X without DRM, and the only difference is the companies which want magic fairy dust aren't getting paid.
Monopolies do not exist. People will always acquire the product they want, and if you aren't willing to sell it, all that means is that people will always acquire the product they want without paying you.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Agreed. I will take something that works over anything that is open any odd day of the damn week.
(Hey, sorry it's a badly documented enthusiast implementation of what *we* think is interesting, but at least it's *OPEN*!)
MMO Vampire Role Playing
And in other news, I continue to close YouTube when I go to a video that doesn't have an HTML 5 version.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
yes. the "choice is easy to make" because *you* arent creating content. only consuming it.
Big surprise here, if you use a proprietary, closed plugin to deliver video with no regards to performance or user experience, then yes, you'll be able to deliver exactly within the use limits the media creators have demanded.
If YouTube truly thinks this is best long-term for its success, I'm afraid we'll watch a slow death as competitors nibble away market-share, one obscure platform at a time that lacks a flash player but was created to use open standards out of the box.
Without any content protection whatsoever, they wouldn't be able to offer videos which say only "This rental is currently unavailable in your country", they'd have to actually provide the video to everyone.
But that is done entirely server-side and is completely independent of flash vs HTML5 vs animated GIF vs ascii-art. You just make the server look the client IP address up in a location database, and then decide whether to send was was requested or an error message.
Can we please have a permanent ban on asking and answering your on questions? I say yes.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Also worth mentioning, is that Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and Google is a supporter of Open Source with an open source operating system. If they did look at this from an outside, objective perspective, I trust Google will do anything they can to speed up HTML5 video support.
Not trying to be confrontational but I don't understand your comment and hoped you could explain further.
I took your comment to mean that even though there were better formats available, MP3 became standard because it was open.
My confusion is thus-
1-when MP3 first started being widely used (I started using it extensively in 1997) it was competing with WAV files. There were no better formats.
2- MP3s are only 'open' in the sense that they don't have embedded DRM. It is still a proprietary format with license fees attached.
" ... Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice? ... "
I do! I like the fact that I can jump to any part of the video and even direct people to that part of the video with a single url. the video tag doesn't really do steaming in that sense.
"The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior"
ORLY? name a major media format that is used widely that IS open format! Your idea that open format is superior is an opinion with very little to back that up.
America, Home of the Brave.
"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash having major issues with the lack of features that the HTML5 tag has and may never have."
Oh no...can we survive w/o youtube????
On my iPod, why does the 'video tag' not get handled inline in Safari? The thing always opens up a full screen Quicktime Player. I suppose that could be termed 'HTML tag enabled.' So could an .au link back in 1993 in the same spirit.
No, the notion that it is HTML5 compliance that was considered important by Apple is laughable. It's the not-Flash that is important to them.
" After 10 years, it still doesn't work well on modern computers or mobile devices"
[citation needed]
Flash allows proper streamnig, video tag does not. Proper streaming needs a server side solution. If HTML5 isn't going to be ready till 2022 for a browser standard, how long will it take for a server-side standard?
America, Home of the Brave.
Oh, you mean like the inability to have pop up ads like you've recently added to a huge portion of your flash videos??? Yeah, thought so.
I think his point was that we have the choice between one open and barely capable kludge and one closed but broadly supported and well understood kludge.
Personally I would rather buy a crutch for my broken leg so it can heal, then have a sprained ankle that I was "free" to walk on day after day until my foot fell off. Oops, sorry, I am taking BadAnalogyGuy's job away from him...
Translation: "We are at war with Apple and anything they support, we must now oppose. Thus, we are going to throw our support behind an buggy, laggy, piece of crap like Flash just so we can stick it to Apple a bit more in our ongoing effort to knock both them and Microsoft out of the picture. Thanks for your information, we will use it to make money."
Maybe I'm just getting jaded in my old age but I always seem to see nefarious reasons behind "business" decisions of late.
That or I just need my morning coffee now...
Text, the most widely used and open of all.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I think you miss the point. Flash is a poorly performing closed POS that makes video on the Internet beholden to a single vendor. That is a problem any way you slice it. It's unlikely that adobe will actually fix the situation unless they're absolutely backed into a corner.
Yes, the new unfinished standard doesn't have complete support in browsers yet. Whoop-dee-doo. The "no agreed upon video codec" thing is a bit of red herring. Safari, IE, and Chrome are all supporting H264 already, and unless WebM takes off, H264 is the de facto video codec standard of the decade. Whining about how much you love DivX isn't going to change that. Even Flash is supporting H264 (That's right! If you're arguing in favor of Flash, you're arguing in favor of H264 being the de facto standard). Blaming Apple for this is also silly. They made a choice based on what they believed would provide their customers with the best product. Going by their rate of sales, I don't think their customers disagree with Apple's views all that much.
"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash having major issues with the lack of features that the HTML5 tag has and may never have."
I guess my point is that this sentence is terrible. How did you possibly allow this, /. mod?
Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.
"This rental is currently unavailable in your country. "
I miss the WORLD-wide web :(
You can't take the sky from me...
"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash having major issues with the lack of features that the HTML5 tag has and may never have."
That is a horrible sentence.
*whoosh*...
1-when MP3 first started being widely used (I started using it extensively in 1997) it was competing with WAV files. There were no better formats.
You don't remember .aiff? And all those other file formats? Oh, and atrct (or whatever Sony called it)?
It was never wav-vs-mp3.
You can't take the sky from me...
No better formats or no competing formats in 1997? You seem to forget Yamaha's VQF, RealMedia audio, ADPCM, etc.
In the end NaCl (Native Client) will be the chosen over flash for this and other problems as it offers the benefits of native OS applications with the same distribution model that the web has enjoyed (including architecture portability with PNaCl); something flash attempts to do with the huge drawbacks of being closed, insecure, slow, limited in capability.
In addition, it's likely to be far more robust than flash, an open solution, far better performing, and able to access the GPU and other hardware. It's thus possible for youtube to directly implant an advanced video player (eg. VLC or something lighter) into its pages or anything that provides the advanced functionality needed, and have these run as efficiently as desktop apps across mutliple OSs. It doesn't get much better than that.
Learn more:
http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/
Flash is about to die but not at the hands of HTML5. Long live NaCl.
Monopolies do not exist.
MS, Intel, Apple, and Google would all like you to convince the FTC of that.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.
*click*
This video is currently unavailable for rent in your country.
Yes, I see how with content protection you are not able to offer me videos like this.
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
Specious argument, really.
Content "creation" with Flash is really a poor substitute for the real tools that are completely available on all the mainstream OSes- to the point of some of the better answers being available for free or next to it on all of the aforementioned.
If you're doing "content creation" on something like Haiku, I might understand slightly, but you should already understand that you might be on your own on things like this if you choose to run things like Haiku and other up-and-coming OSes.
"Creating content" is a straw man.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
PNG
"The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?"
This is why the Red Sox won't let me walk on and play right field. Free that doesn't work doesn't, well, doesn't work.
I'm waiting for the FOSS community to develop HTML5 addins that will work. Just remember, if such a thing happens, expect outfits like YouTube to capitalize on that and make money off the efforts of the free.
And yes, I would not mind a bit if the Red Sox kept charging wht they do for tickets if they let me play right field for free. No, I would not play for the Yankees. Or the Diamondbacks. Not worth it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Actually I believe there's one more important detail in the MP3 success: CPU usage and bitrate quality
A 486 can play MP3s with reduced quality (not encoded quality, but playback downgrading). Pentium with full quality. Encoding times were far from realtime.
I believe competing formats used too much bitrate for same quality or too much cpu power.
how long until
Steve Jobs and the CIA told us this was going to be a slam dunk! What happened?
A x264 developer blogged about problems with both HTML5 and Flash video some months ago.
Proprietary browsers are all supporting H264 already
There, fixed that for you. Free browsers will never be able to support H264 and this is one half of the problem. The other half is that, for some reason, proprietary browser developers don't want to support open video formats. It's not a red herring, it's a real problem that threatens the principles of openness on which the Web has been built (openness in the "anyone is free to make an implementation" sense).
Google has a reason to keep Flash around: Android.
Selling Flash as part of a "premium" experience is not entirely unexpected given that Google and Apple are locked in battle over the mobile device market. Google has a client that supports it and a huge web property that makes use of it.
In a parallel universe, Windows Phone 7 is rapidly growing market share and Microsoft is blogging about how Silverlight is the premium experience, but nobody is surprised by the motives.
So that's why YouTube tried out the TEXTp format!
That. MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason. We currently have to choose between two kludges, badly implemented possibilities, one of them being open. The choice is easy to make.
None of those competing formats achieved widespread adoption before MP3s rose to prominence, however. MP3s occupied a convergence between portable size and acceptable quality than other formats did not. WAVs were better quality, but huge, and many of the other small formats were small, but awful.
Even MP3s were somewhat corporate -- Fraunhofer owned the code/decode engine and made various patent rumbles for quite awhile.
MP3s are actually a terrible example.
I like the fact that I can jump to any part of the video and even direct people to that part of the video with a single url.
HTML5's <video> element supports JavaScript seeking to a new playback position. Your video page can read the fragment identifier from the URI, parse it, and then set the video element's currentTime attribute to make the player seek. The back end uses an HTTP/1.1 range retrieval, the same thing that resumable downloads use.
the video tag doesn't really do steaming in that sense.
Steaming as in a "steaming pile"?
Er... Are you implying that making a video available through a tag is somehow harder than through a flash app ? Care to elaborate what you mean by that ? Because using html5 with youtube is actually a few clicks operation : http://www.youtube.com/html5
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Flash only kills battery life because of intense decompression and decoding -> high cpu usage. If flash is just a a container for h.264, and you use h.264 with your video tag, then what's the difference?
THL phish sticks
I get really irritated when I hear people making these concessions in the name of "providing a good experience." What they're talking about is staying competitive so that they can keep making money. There's nothing wrong with that, morally, ethically or otherwise. So why can't they just say it? Record companies are the same way: they always do this silly stuff in the name of people enjoying the content. For once I would like to hear some corporation just say "We'd like to support X, but for now we think the better way for us to make money is to support Y."
Yes sorry, saying MP3 was open is a bit far-fetched. However, despite its patent issues, the Fraunhoffer institute did not prosecute anyone (to my knowledge) implementing a free encoder/decoder. It was an unwritten agreement that only commercial implementation would need patent license. And also, compared to many of its competitors (Apple's and Microsoft's formats) it did not have any DRM.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Firefox has - what? - 28% of the overall market, and it doesn't support H264. Hardly 'de facto' when the second most-popular browser doesn't support it, eh?
"They don't like the thing that I like, and while they provide all kinds of solid technical reasons why the thing I like isn't good enough, I'm going to completely ignore them and assume they're just 'nefarious'".
I mean, who really wants to argue based on, like, logic and reason and junk? It's so much easier to simply attack the messenger, plug your ears, and yell LA LA LA as loud as you can...
Only because it's been around long enough to be public domain. ;)
1) Standard Video Format: A fully open Firefox cannot offer Flash. 2) Robust video streaming: Final spec will probably have this, as it is sorely needed. 3) Content Protection: "Content Protection" cannot offer Content Protection either. 4) Encapsulation + Embedding: Frames? Oh, I forgot, you want to be able to make my browser do things that I, the one running the browser, don't want it too. 5) Fullscreen Video: If the browser doesn't implement this, a plugin could. 6) Camera and Microphone access: "Every day, thousands of users record videos directly to YouTube from within their browser using webcams, which would not be possible without Flash technology." What makes recording from streaming webcams impossible without Flash? Also, how is this relevant to a discussion on browser video display? And I'll add a list of things that flash can't do that HTML5 video (+ plugins if necessary) should be able to (unless the spec authors suck): - Arbitrary video codecs. - Arbitrary resizing in browsers. - Arbitrary speed control. - Arbitrary video filters.
You agree with me.
The problem is that something that's open might eventually work, whereas something that isn't probably won't unless it's on a blessed platform. Which is the point, if it's a site devoted to Windows or OSX, having content that's not particularly well available beyond those platforms is possibly acceptable. If it's general interest like Youtube is having it be restricted artificially to a couple platforms is clearly not acceptable. Admittedly there's only so much they can do or really should do, but this sort of artificial narrowing of the market is absurd.
At least with VP8 it's available to any platform at present, whether it's been ported is a moot point as the necessary bits to port it are available.
Everyone seems to forget one thing about this blog: it doesn't say that Flash is the holy grail for video streaming and that we should all flock to using Flash and put a ban on the HTML5 codec. No, the author of the blog applauds the efforts being put into HTML5 but warns that the video tag simply isn't finished yet. The moral of the story is that while HTML5's video codec is a great start, it's way too soon to put a ban on Flash because it still offers a lot of functionality that HTML5 does not. There still is valid use for Flash over HTML5.
Steve Jobs really messed up when he chose to make this fight. He should have also used Apple's massive cash position to purchase H264 or the patents, or whatever it would have taken to solve the H264 issue by making it open source. With that one move it would have removed so much uncertainty and jump started the whole idea by several years. Now we have HTML5, but madness in the codec arena.
Mod parent up!
The end of this standards misery is closer than most might think.
However, NaCl must still provide an API for playing video of course.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Also do we want HTML to have all the features of Flash?
Things like camera and microphone control?
Yes. Camera and mic would require a click to activate, just like Flashblock does today.
Or even the ability to go full screen?
Currently, HTML5 user agents support full screen operation: press F11 to activate it in Firefox.
And DRM?
For digital restrictions management, I'd recommend sticking to plug-ins in a PC web browser or custom apps in a mobile setting.
He's generalizing, but there were no other formats that could do 12:1 compression like MP3 did when it came out. Few people remember that if you wanted to rip a CD it was a 50 megabyte file. I still remember playing back a small little file with a .MP2 extension on a Dell 486 running Windows 3.1 and going WOW - thats amazing! (gives you kind of a timeline on how long ago this really was). It was some tune from Kimagure Orange Road.
ATRAC btw was only used internally at Sony for DAT and Minidisc (and later AT3 cd's) - there was never any way then to make or play back an ATRAC file on a home PC until somewhat recent history (and only then to try to lock people into using ATRAC over MP3).
I have pretty much come down on the side of the summary having major issues with the lack of grammar that a good summary has and may never have.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not like HTML5 solved countries having borders.
Just sign up for the HTML5 beta on YouTube and give it a try. It doesn't fucking work! Videos stutter, the audio gets replaced by static, some videos don't play at all. And this is in Chrome! I'm all for doing away with Flash but right now the video tag is just not a viable alternative.
Going by their rate of sales, I don't think their customers disagree with Apple's views all that much.
I love my iPad, but on more than a few occasions I've had to put it down and pick up my laptop to view a site or video on the internet. On even more occasions I didn't even have my laptop with me, so I was SOL. This, because Apple decided no flash would provide me with the best experience.
My laptop fans spin up and cpu usage spikes on any page with the most simple flash sprite animations without any video. They slow down when I close the offending tab.
It suggests that the runtime is broken and does not properly idle, making it unsuitable for battery powered devices. While it's possible that flash could at some point be a low resource consuming UI for the video, that does not seem to be the case. Adobe has had 10 years to fix the issue, so one has to assume that it's either not possible or they are incapable of making the runtime not consume huge amounts of resources for even simple operations.
All of these boil down to Youtube simply not liking how the browser they downloaded today, happens to play video. The thing is, nothing about today's implementation are damning of HTML5; they're just damning of today's implementations of it. A user-initiated request to the browser or player is what should initiate full-screen video (or any other "zooming" of content), not javascript. A user-initiated request to the browser or player is what should handle seeking. The browser or its lower-level networking library should be doing the buffering. And so on.
They are really praising HTML5's strengths here. Website creators shouldn't be burdened with micromanaging how the details of how a video plays, just like they don't worry about how to incrementally display an image, how to view an image full screen, or how to implement selecting and copying text. And yet, these guys are arguing that for video, they want their javascript programmers to have to work on that shit. The sane thing to do is to push it onto the browser guys (who can then push it onto the player guys, who may end up pushing some things onto the OS guys, whatever).
I won't even touch the DRM point, because I'm not in the DRM market so I can't imagine what kinds of DRM viewers are asking for.
The only points they have which has any real legitimacy, are the camera/microphone one and concerns about serving live content, rather that content sitting in some finished and indexed file. Yes, HTML5 video isn't really intended for that, so if youtube want to deal in those areas, they've got a point that using mere web tech isn't going to do they job; they need users to download applications (i.e. Flash code) instead. Fair enough; Youtube wants to get into new markets where they'll make some money. But for most of their video and pretty much everything Youtube is known for, HTML5 is the right answer.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Sony format never counts unless they're trying to buy out the market with cash.
iPod didn't get full HTML5 player support until iOS 4. I tried it out with Audio, and the player controls don't work quite right. Haven't tried video.
Free browsers don't support Flash either. You need a proprietary plugin.
I agree it's a horrible sentence - I only understood it after having read the article, and even then I had to read it about 3 times. People love to hate "grammar Nazis", but this sentence could have been so much easier to understand with a comma, and a couple small changes:
"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash, having major issues with features that the HTML5 tag does not, and may never, have."
I think that's what the person who wrote the summary was trying to say, but I can't be 100% certain.
HTTP Streaming vs. RTMP. Yes, you can stream with HTTP on Flash, but for long-format video or live streaming, HTTP doesn't really have what it takes.
"Er... Are you implying that making a video available through a tag is somehow harder than through a flash app ?"
It is. It's more effort because you need to sniff for user agents and then decide either which browsers to support or not, or create different content for different clients depending on which codec they support. On the other hand we have Flash which is basically guaranteed to work as-is in over 90% of clients. I'd call that the easier choice.
Meanwhile, everyone and their grandmother is busy providing X ...
Am I the only one who misparsed this phrase in my head ?
I don't have any studies to cite. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox have all started running plugins in a separate process. This is primarily due to Flash taking down the browser repeatedly.
Safari even added a special error message to keep people from hating the browser:
http://fukamachi.org/wp/wp-content/photo/misc/flash_crash.png
Before this was supported, I personally checked out the stack traces on most Safari and Firefox crashes. It was almost always executing a flash function.
When it's not crashing, it's draining a lot of battery. I suspect this is because it simply loops instead of sleeping for events.
YouTube has been using Flash to do it for 5 years now, and when was the first time you saw the dreaded "buffering" on a RealVideo clip on your Netscape browser?
Just this past week, I've seen buffering (video playback stops and displays dots moving in a circle) in YouTube's Flash video on my Firefox browser (whose engine Netscape used in 8 and 9).
But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
Users.
Youtube doesn't magically know your paypal information or even which account to get info from. Your browser must have sent that, i.e. your agent not only granted permission, but helped get it done.
Free browsers will never be able to support H264
That is entirely incorrect. Most OSes provide APIs for playing h.264 video, which free browsers can easily use.
Mozilla is just choosing to not take advantage of this offer.
Because in the iPhone for example, H.264 decoding is handled by a dedicated chip, which is there to give greater performance-per-watt for its specific task. The video tag is intercepted by QuickTime which hardware decodes the video.
"If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"
Firefox supports h.264 just fine.
As long as it is wrapped in Flash.
I much prefer the 'direct' fullscreen video approach even if it means we lose subtitles
People with hearing problems and people who don't speak every known human language do not share your preference.
Nobody complains that HTTP does not have a standard image format and does not have DRM built in and you have to go and find another language just to make a webpage.
What are your options?
Watching a different video.
How is it 'punishing' YouTube
Videos not compatible with HTML5 get fewer views, therefore fewer ad impressions, therefore less revenue.
Free browsers will never be able to support H264
In the USA that is. Remember, not every country in the world has those stupid laws on software patents. Actually, there's a version of FF somewhere around which comes with H264. Anyway, I would like to see WebM take off. About the article, ten years ago no one thought about using XMLHttpRequest to make better looking pages with AJAX and this technology evolved into what it's today. I'm pretty sure that most of the people who support this H264 non-sense today, would be backing IXMLHTTPRequest because it was better in the days (how many ActiveX pages have I puked on, ugh!). But look, some community effort and the current standard was set by Mozilla. I'm sure the video tag will also evolve, even faster than Flash and H264, because it's open and free, to support more features than Flash could imagine and run faster and better than H264 would.
Youtube says that while Flash may suck, it sucks in a variety of different ways in which HTML5 can't yet suck.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
No, flash implemented poorly kills battery life and stability, just as anything else implemented poorly. Until HTML5's video tag can implement things like RTMP, it's going to be playing second-fiddle to Flash, and that's just in terms of video playback. Flash's animations are already fantastically faster than anything HTML5's canvas can kick out.
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/flash-player-cpu-hog-or-hot-tamale-it-depends-.html - I think its been proven that Flash performance isn't that bad - once hardware acceleration has been finished for Mac OS its performance will be on par with Windows and it performs better than HTML 5.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/02/adobe_cto_talks_flash_performance_on_macs.html - I think its been proven that Flash reliability isn't that bad either. I personally can't remember the last time Flash crashed.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/ - I think its also been proven its an open spec.
Stop repeating the words of the all mighty turtleneck and come up with your own ideas.
Unfortunately flash is also guaranteed to leak memory in about the same number of cases. As well as causing a host of other problems. While HTML5 might not be the panacea some have wished for, there is a reason many are wishing for just such a thing, and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact. And a decent framework can take care of most (but not all) of the problems you mentioned.
Its "Open" and not under control of a for profit company, but yet the only reason its gotten SO much support is because a for profit company (Apple) is backing it because they block another for profit company's (Adobe) product on their devices.
But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
That. MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason. We currently have to choose between two kludges, badly implemented possibilities, one of them being open. The choice is easy to make.
HTML5 is open, but the codec that everyone is referring to, H.264, is not.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
My interpretation?
Flash enables us to pre-roll ads, overlay ads, bumper ads, and sell more ads, and has a pretty strong DRM.
Flash lives because it lets us make more money off of your content! And allows big media to "protect" their "content".
Free browsers can support H.264 through system-wide codecs. Mozilla isn't going to do it and they give you an excuse when you ask them why not: they say Windows Vista/XP users don't have the codec preinstalled (and neither do they have Flash preinstalled, but that's apparently not a problem). Then they have a Stallmanistic desire for a completely free environment, and say they won't use support already present in your system, and for which you already paid (either directly or through your OS license). Other free projects, like Chromium, have no such problems.
Mozilla is positioning itself as the only loser in this. They say they won't sacrifice freedom for anything, but they already sacrificed lots of Firefox's principles now (lightness and speed come to mind). Refusing to use the support that is already in the system would be as stupid as blocking sites or plugins because they don't convey the exact same mentality as the project. Imagine if Firefox blocked ubuntu.com because Ubuntu isn't a 100% free OS and, therefore, people should stay out of it.
For your last point, anyone is free to make an implementation of a browser supporting H.264. You may call gstreamer/QT/DShow or you can license it directly and write your own codec. I see the point in putting the freedom of the code above the freedom of the developers, but when you take away the freedom from the user (to use the video support he paid for) because of the freedom of the code, that's a real issue.
Because it's inherent lock-in. Flash bundles its own proprietary decoder and will never change -- Adobe doesn't abide by standards other than their own. It would be semi-OK (but not ideal) if Flash had a decent decoder, but it doesn't (and can't). Flash still takes massive CPU time for 720p videos on most machines, while these same systems can see 1% 1080p playback in conforming players after changing the system's registered H264 decoder.
AIFF is uncompressed, ATRAC didn't have publicly available encoders/decoders that I can find record of until 2002 or so. By 2002 Vorbis 1.0 was released, though earlier non-frozen spec software was available.
The first public mp3 encoder was released in 1994. MP3 had a long time of being unchallenged for home use. Musepack, Vorbis, and AAC all started being useful ~2000(+-a year), but by that time MP3 = audio compression to many people.
So if you got into audio compression 1999 or later, you'd think there were always good options. Before that time, it was pretty much MP3 vs uncompressed audio..
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Free browsers are able to support H.264 without problems as long as they don't distribute the decoder themselves. Since most modern operating systems come with an H.264 decoder and you can easily install one on older ones (e.g. the Divx7 decoder on WinXP) there is no problem in supporting the format for the majority of the users as long as they use the system framework instead of decoding directly. Mozilla made a lot of weak excuses for not using system codecs and at the same time they had no problem implementing a gstreamer backend for Fennec so that H.264 could be played back on their mobile browser using the system's codec framework.
They even went so low as posting a Theora encoded video and a bigger H.264 encoded file on their site to show that Theora is actually better than H.264. The comparison was bunk of course. Upon closer examination it turned out that the H.264 file had been stuffed with hint tracks doubling its filesize. They also used Apple's H.264 encoder which is one of the worst when it comes to quality.
No, without DRM, the "This rental is currently unavailable in your country" videos wouldn't be available anywhere. Why don't people understand this? Without protection, content owners will not distribute their content in ways that they think need protection. It's not that hard to understand. They won't say "oh well, we can't do anything to protect our content - lets just upload it all to usenet and go home for the weekend". Your logic is insulting.
Can we please have a permanent ban on asking and answering your on questions? I say yes.
Thank you?
Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
End-users. Nuff' said.
Fraunhoffer submarined the patent. they also were beaten to the patent by IBM, but what the hey.
Remember, compression algorithms were not patentable because they were Maths. Until Fraunhoffer jumped all over everyone after MP3 got popular. And in those days, you DID have dedicated hardware to do the decoding, so you were much more stuck with it than nowadays.
Flash uses an incredibly poor implementation of an H.264 decoder. I can use rtmpdump and grab the flash video then play it back in VLC and on either of my Macs (one PowerPC, one Intel), VLC uses less than 50% of the CPU that the flash player uses. On a laptop, this corresponds to a lot less battery usage - on a handheld this is even more true.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
80% of what they wrote is just to cover for the fact that they want the DRM. Google thinks they are going to make itunes type money from streaming Hollywood movies in the future. They aren't going to be able to do that with out DRM. Every thing else they wrote is just a smoke screen to cover that fact.
It isn't even a question of whether I want to use flash or not. Adobe has decided I am not allowed to view Youtube content so I won't. For a company that has made as much money as they have off of open standards Google is just seems so off base here. Why don't they just drop support for every thing except Windows as that is basically what this decision is.
actually, you don't need to do any user agent sniffing at all.
Here is what you do. take your video tag in a common format, use it. If it fails, by web standards, the tag is supposed to default to the contents of the tag instead.
Put a video tag inside that in a format supported on other browsers. If it fails, by web standards, the tag is supposed to default to the contents of the tag instead.
Put your flash video object inside of that.
A 486 can play MP3s with reduced quality (not encoded quality, but playback downgrading). Pentium with full quality. Encoding times were far from realtime.
Indeed, with Winamp the main decoder component has a quality setting (Full, Half, Quarter). I believe I had to set it at Half to get acceptable playback on 486 DX.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
it requires the video to find the first keyframe, and then play from there.
Ever noticed a delay in changing the channel on digital cable or satellite TV, or jumpiness when rewinding or fast-forwarding a DVD? A lot of that is waiting for the next keyframe. There is a tradeoff between bitrate and seek granuarity because more seekable encodes have to use more keyframes. In fact, a few codecs have an option to have a frame incorporate motion relative to multiple keyframes. Such a "B-frame" can use ordinary keyframes (I-frames), semi-keyframes predicted from prior keyframes (P-frames), future frames (the P-frame or I-frame after a B-frame), and even a long-term reference frame (a golden frame). If a scene uses a golden frame across multiple shots, good luck jumping into the middle of that scene.
Using ranges to try to stream is a massive, massive hack.
Or in other words, a "steaming pile of hack". But MKV already has cueing data, and Xiph is working on an Ogg index for more efficient seeking. The <video> element would reference video data URIs at multiple levels of detail, and a player would download each video's index.
Yes....... HTML5 is the future............... The very distant future. Nice to see somebody laying it out straight for once. I'm enthusiastic about it's potential and really do hope it replaces flash eventually, but lets be realistic. This is years down the road. I wish more people would realize that. Thank you Steve Jobs. Thank you for keeping all the less tech-savvy users so well informed.
Close. What you actually do is use source tags within your video tag specifying multiple different sources.
Its not making a video available that is the issue, its all the other things associated with what a content provider wishes to do with, on and around that video that is the issue.
Wha?! It has a lack of features and simultaneously it may never have that lack of features?
A proprietary plugin like Gnash?
It's all down to the decoder. There's a dedicated processor in the iPhone which handles h.264. For the Flash player to be as efficient as any old h.264 you want to play on the iPhone, it would have to use that processor. However Adobe doesn't have the greatest history of using accelerated features (essentially dedicated processors for decoding h.264) of the hardware they target--in fact, they only recently started using accelerated decoding on Windows.
If they don't use the dedicated chip, then they're going to be using the main CPU. It's going to be far less efficient, both in energy usage and in CPU usage. And this applies to all portable devices with acceleration, not just the iPhone. Many laptops have acceleration via the graphics hardware.
Worse, of course, is what happens when you try to move to a platform that Adobe doesn't support? Want to use 64-bit linux? Too bad. Apple wants to change their decoder on the iPhone? They have to convince Adobe to adapt to the new one. That's vendor lock-in, and it's bad for the consumer.
Smart. That's like saying Windows "implemented poorly" is "slow" and can thus be excused. Yes, Gnash exists. But guess what? So does ReactOS. And they are both irrelevant, until they are *actually* used. Unlike Flash, <video> is already more stable, and due to its nature, cross-platform (able to use underlying OS rendering/decoding support), and thus theoretically more performant. Flash's demise is inevitable and stems from its own design failures.
For YouTube, the content creation isn't done on Flash. It's done in a video editor.
Flash is, however, the content delivery system, and that's of interest to the content creators. Or at least, the content deliverers, like YouTube. And both care a lot more about getting the content delivered to the vast majority of potential users than any other concerns.
Content providers need to understand that in order to compete with bittorrent they need to provide the content in a form that is more comfortable to access. It'll even work if they provide the content for a fee, if paying the fee isn't a massive pain the ass. (for example accommodate people without credit cards via SMS payments)
Their content will end up on bittorrent regardless of how obfuscated it is with DRM, but most people won't bother with bittorrent if they can just go to an official website and watch it streamed.
I have checked out the VOD sites in my country recently, they all either wanted WMP, a custom DRM "codec" installed or a windows-only Java applet. So I ended up going back to tpb, if they're not making an effort, I don't feel obliged.
Not true at all, unless you define "original" in such a way that it means no original work has ever been created, which would just make it meaningless instead.
Successful creators often get sued by less successful opportunists, though, but that's got more to do with the U.S. legal system being played like the lottery.
Am I the only one who misparsed this phrase in my head ?
You're the only one parsing phrases in your head, so yes.
MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason.
WinAmp was released in 1997.
The iPod in 2001.
The 1.0 reference standard for Ogg Vorblis wasn't available until July '02.
"Better quality" is of little real consequence when you are talking about PC audio or portable music players in the late nineties and beyond. Microsoft's USB Digital Sound System 80 [1998] with its 44 watt Philips subwoofer and twin 16 watt speakers was the exception, not the rule.
But you cannot give a disruptive tech like MP3 a five year head start and expect to accomplish more than play catch-up:
If you search on Google for Ogg files, you'll see that more than 80% of all the Ogg files on the web are from Wikimedia related sites Vorbis
A search of Google Videos for "MP4" returns 6,800,000 hits.
VP8, 1,410.
This news looks good on Jobs. Maybe he will be taught a lesson before implementing new standards before knowing that its actually any better.
Funny. YouTube HTML5 streaming seems to work find for me. Also do you really need a citation for Flash's performance? Try the following... Got to any laptop and open a YouTube video. Keep an eye on CPU. Now pause it and note the CPU cycles. Now Switch YouTube to the HTML5 beta and do the same. Big difference. HTML5 video which is paused uses 4% CPU while Flash paused uses 32%. NOTE: all of the videos were complete streamed before starting the playback. Also Pause is better than Playback because nothing is suppose to be running.
With one big exception: DRM (or as the article calls it "Content Protection"). While I don't think it's impossible, I think it's a pretty big effort to produce DRM that content owners (like the MPAA or RIAA) are satisfied with as an open standard. I think they perceive open standards to be inherently insecure (despite several cases of the opposite like OpenSSL).
And in fact it's the exact opposite :
Flash's DRM is a stupid joke - in short the key to decode the encrypted RTPME streams is a a couple of filestats of the ".swf" player application, i.e.: something publicly available. No password or crypto key involved (for a longer description, look for a mirror of RTMPDump). So there's no real encryption happening and as such, Flash' DRM might even not be covered by the DMCA or local clones.
HTTP's Authentication or Session and/or HTTPS provide already enough content protection at the hosting/serving level of the video. No need to add more DRM shit on the player level.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Offtopic: Can someone explain the "That." meme to me?
Checking... WTF? Damn you HTML5, damn you to hell for doing it wrong. Not only do they use source elements, but they also have a poster attribute for failover to an image.
HTML5 is pissing me off more and more every single day. XTML2 why hast thou forsaken me!</rant>
Does Gnash play H264 movies? If not, then we're back to it being insufficient for playing movies on the Internet. If it does play H264 movies, then we're back to needing a license.
Gnash might be interesting, but it doesn't solve any of the relevant problems.
But all that's missing the point. The point is that it's *OPEN* and not under the control of any nasty for-profit corporation. And that makes it superior. Who *cares* if it doesn't work worth a damn in actual practice?
That. MP3 became the de facto standard despite the existence of far better quality formats for the exact same reason. We currently have to choose between two kludges, badly implemented possibilities, one of them being open. The choice is easy to make.
I'm pretty sure the MP3 compression algorithm is not open. These folks make a nice bundle of money from it. A little more background information is available here. Rates and fees are covered here.
I don't know if The Fraunhofer Society is "for profit", but it would seem they co-own the rights to MP3 and via Thomson Consumer Electronics, they do collect money for it's use.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
This Escher-like description of fallback attempts sounds markedly worse than using a presently widely-supported technology that uses a single codec, and this is precisely why web developers don't particularly want to move to HTML 5 video. Spend many, many man hours encoding different versions of every single video plus a Flash container for all the various IE versions that it seems will never die? All because HTML 5 is 'exciting' and 'progressive'? No thanks.
Until the HTML 5 spec is sorted out and a video encoding standard is agreed on, it's useless. Flash has its problems, but it's also mature and has deep penetration. HTML 5 is no Flash killer, just overhyped by way of its future potential. Web devs are working on the web now, not in the utopian future.
once hardware acceleration has been finished for Mac OS its performance will be on par with Windows and it performs better than HTML 5.
The issue isn't just hardware acceleration. It's a poor performer all around. I can't run any Flash on my laptop without the fans kicking on. Sometimes banner ads do it.
I think its been proven that Flash reliability isn't that bad either.
Adobe can claim "Flash doesn't crash" all they want, but it doesn't change the facts. Maybe it doesn't crash on Windows, but I've supported many Macs and it crashes constantly. Apple's crash reports show the same thing. Flash is probably the most unstable software on most people's Macs.
I think its also been proven its an open spec.
Whether the spec is open, the player is closed. And it stinks.
But dont you remember AIFF containers wrapping MP3 codecs with 128 bit rates ????
I think his point was that we have the choice between one open and barely capable kludge and one closed but broadly supported and well understood kludge.
Personally I would rather buy a crutch for my broken leg so it can heal, then have a sprained ankle that I was "free" to walk on day after day until my foot fell off. Oops, sorry, I am taking BadAnalogyGuy's job away from him...
No, actually, you just revealed BadAnalogyGuy's secret identity
What part of `yes no` don't you understand?
Probably because on a mobile form factor, handling video inline is still not mature enough?
yes. the "choice is easy to make" because *you* arent creating content. only consuming it.
Oh, really:
Users upload 24 hours of video every minute to YouTube Flash and the HTML5 tag
There are of course many special-interest websites like The Weather Channel that invite submissions from amateurs.
Do you like to ask questions? Of course. Do you like to answer your own question immediately? Absolutely.
Now you're repeating yourself, and I point you back to u17's comment. The question of Flash plugins is a totally separate problem decoupled from H264. Free software implementations of the <video> tag will not be able to handle H264 either.
You're confusing the issue by mixing two separate problems.
He knew it was basically wav vs mp3, but wanted to make himself sound smart by bringing up obscure shit
I deny that it was a simple dichotomy and I call on geeks to bring forth their knowledge of obscure shit. Come on, nerds, bring forth the little-known details!
Trolls pollute our thread with insults and ad-hominems, and should be modded down, not up.
You can't take the sky from me...
He's generalizing, but there were no other formats that could do 12:1 compression like MP3 did when it came out. Few people remember that if you wanted to rip a CD it was a 50 megabyte file. I still remember playing back a small little file with a .MP2 extension on a Dell 486 running Windows 3.1 and going WOW - thats amazing!
I never used mp2 for audio... I remember being very fond of a rip of the Dune theme song (oh, Toto, you outdid yourselves) which was in either .aiff or .au (I remember having a few files in those formats), and I even had a few files encoded in Real audio, but the file format I was really into before mp3s... I can't even remember what it was called, but it wasn't a direct rip, it would... replicate a song by breaking it down in elements that it then recombined... Argh, any geeks reading this with a better memory of defunct audio compression schemes? early to Mid-90s, it was the big new thing on BBSs back then.
Anyway, like you said, nothing else was doing rips at 12:1, so mp3s were a big step up, and although they aren't big-F Free, their license was ubiquitous. The point was that there was way more going then than wav-vs-mp3.
You can't take the sky from me...
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
Sure, in theory.
No, without DRM, the "This rental is currently unavailable in your country" videos wouldn't be available anywhere.
If they don't make their videos available, they don't make any money. They're in business to make money, therefore they would make their videos available.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Is the video tag in HTML5 a kludge?
I don't care.
Is it more an ideal than a practical implementation?
I don't care.
Can it compete with a commercial product that has been an accepted part of the web for over 10 years now?
I don't care.
Is it poorly implemented in most modern browsers, with no agreed upon video codec common to any two of them?
I don't care.
Would it be getting any attention at all if Steve Jobs hadn't used it as part of his cheap excuse to block free flash apps from his iControlU line of products?
I don't care.
Does it print money.
I don't care. Does it run on my iPhone4?
YouTube can come down on whatever side they want.
I still block Flash.
I suspect you're thinking of MOD files and other tracker formats - which don't actually have anything at all to do with audio compression. :D *Some* people would make MOD files of *some* songs which sounded *something* like the original, but not exactly.
Tracking is still commonly done today in the demoscene, btw.
Also worth mentioning, is that Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and Google is a supporter of Open Source with an open source operating system. If they did look at this from an outside, objective perspective, I trust Google will do anything they can to speed up HTML5 video support.
But Google has sided with Adobe in their spat against Apple, and YouTube has a lot invested in DRM, at the behest of the media cartel. That DRM is included in Adobe products, and not in the html5 spec. That's an internal conflict for Google, and in the "principles VS revenue" conflicts, the principles rarely win.
You can't take the sky from me...
The question of Flash plugins is a totally separate problem decoupled from H264.
It's not. Many sites are using Flash to publish H264 videos, which means your Flash player needs to support decrypting H264. Either Gnash isn't going to help you there, or else the people distributing Gnash will have the same licensing issues that Mozilla has in supporting H264 decryption.
Flash doesn't really solve the patent-encumbered-codec problem; it just covers it up so that, if you don't understand the issue, you can ignore that it exists.
more and more, it seems like html5 means different things to different people.
for a few people its yet another lost cause to get very excited about.
for a few others, its a chance to have a laugh at those people as they desperately try to lift it off the ground, though sheer willpower and zeal.
for apple, html5 is a a dodgy fig leaf as they try to control the internet in the name of increasing their bottom line by neutering any competition to their appstore.
and yet for everyone else (99.9%) html5 means nothing and will continue to mean nothing. they'll just keep using Flash without even realizing it.
I'm guessing your thinking of .mod (or mod. for it's origins on the Amiga).
Free software can handle h264 just fine.. Indeed.. all free software video players and encoders support it be default for the past 8 years or so. There does exist a patent threat if certain patent holders decided to attack commercial distribution of such software in afflicted countries. And given it's high profile in MS crosshairs, Mozilla decided not to take that chance. But Mozilla's continued stuborness to not work around their limitations (handing off the video stream, or even just the damn url, to the OS to choose another program that can handle it would work out of the box today) is holding everyone up.
Text, the most widely used and open of all.
Just make sure you use a non-copyrighted typeface, or you're in trouble.
I don't know if anybody remembers TwinVQ, aka .VFQ, but it was a pretty good format. However, required quite a big more processing than MP3, which in the early days, when many computers couldn't even handle MP3, was a big problem.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And at the time my computer had a 1.2GB hard drive, so this was a big deal.
Oh there was better, I had a wrapper that would cram an MP3 into the metadata of a wav file and leave it as a 1 sample long file, so you were left with all these wav files that were really short :)
...
I do. Propriety is bad, but open and poorly designed and controlled by a non-profit is STILL BAD. Free software is never going to be taken seriously if we allow "free" to be more important than "software."
Whoops. I made a faceplant there.
if it's a site devoted to Windows or OSX, having content that's not particularly well available beyond those platforms is possibly acceptable. If it's general interest like Youtube is having it be restricted artificially to a couple platforms is clearly not acceptable
Windows and OSX, Flash and H.264, have as close to 100% of the mass consumer market - YouTube's market - as makes no difference.
Your cell phone, tablet, HDTV, Blu-Ray Player, video game console, or set top box with its embedded OS supports H.264 and quite likely Flash as well.
I suspect you're thinking of MOD files and other tracker formats - which don't actually have anything at all to do with audio compression. :D *Some* people would make MOD files of *some* songs which sounded *something* like the original, but not exactly.
That's the one! Thanks! :)
Yeah, it was useless on most songs, but for techno stuff like Axle's Theme from that funny 80's cop movie, it worked well. I thought of it as a kind of audio compression because of the file size difference. Wow, took a side road down memory lane in this html5 thread
You can't take the sky from me...
That's what I said to your mom last night.
In the US, typefaces cannot be copyrighted.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You dropped a zero.
if you wanted to rip a CD it was a 50 megabyte file.
CDs are up to 700 mb, the CD standard is 640 mb, most CDs are shorter. 50 mb is about average for a CD ripped to MP3 (amount of compression and length of CD makes this vary, of course), CD ripped to wav usually is around 500 mb.
Free Martian Whores!
Except Flash doesn't work either.
It crashes all the time (and crashes your browser with it), uses a lot of memory, CPU and battery for nothing, and only runs decently on Microsoft Windows.
On Linux, and even to a lesser extent on Mac OS X, its so slow the fullscreen option is not even usable.
And I'm not even talking about portable devices...
Are you talking about ASCII, Unicode or EBCDIC ?
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Yes, by renting them in the traditional manner, or via services that offer the protection they think they need. It's really not that difficult to understand.
"... if they're not making an effort, I don't feel obliged."
Awww.. they aren't makeing the effort you would like with their content.
Sounds more like your problem than theirs.
And I don't remember reading the "not obliged" provision in copyright law.
I'm betting it's the Fark "this" meme, only "that". If this is the case, then it's a statement of agreement with the parent.
What about the broadcast rights of the snapping turtle, you insensitive clod?
Would that make you a "bad analogy" for BadAnalogyGuy?
[ponders for a moment] *head explodes*
No, they have a third option - rent them traditionally, or via methods that offer the protection they want for their content. Not everything is black or white, and not everything is YouTube. This isn't rocket surgery.
Moreover, Firefox is by a wide margin the most *chosen* browser. People who use IE rarely explicitly choose to do so.
...use a comma!
"YouTube have pretty much come down on the side of Flash, having major issues with the lack of features that the HTML5 tag has and may never have."
See, doesn't that help?
I love how people here are complaining about Flash locking you into one vendor. The Flash spec is freely available and the VP8 code is now open. Why don't you OSS advocates use these tools and make a free version of the flash player?
Oh right, I forgot. It's easier to sit in front of a screen and complain about how terrible Flash is rather then using the tools you have to do something about it.
What do you mean "man hours"? Transcoding can be scripted and automated with ffmpeg. You could probably produce the requisite HTML5 with Perl. No humans are involved in day-to-day operations of such a system, so where are the "man hours" you complain about?
$ make available
The music industry had that attitude. And they were exactly right, online music died completely after they removed the drm.
And what does this have to do with OSS? Open standards and open source are two different and unrelated things.
Clever signature text goes here.
And what 'open' standard doesn't have 'license fees' attached? You obviously define 'fees' as having to do with currency, but you're ignoring the other requirements of the license because they are not related to currency. Thats just dumb.
Lets define an open license: ... as long as they agree with the licenses constraints.
Anyone can implement it for whatever they want and there will be no discrimination against who licenses it or what they do with it
The entire mpeg group falls well within that definition. It only doesn't fall into that group when you add an additional specific constraint preventing a certain form of license constraint, relating to the transfer of currency.
You aren't bitching about open, you're bitching about free/ no cost licensing. Stop trying to confuse people by ranting about 'open' when you really mean 'no cost'.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
ASCII or EBCDIC?
Free Martian Whores!
>>Text, the most widely used and open of all.
ちょと、反対する
That must've been a 486DX 'cause my ol SX couldn't do mp3s. Damn math co-processors! I had to settle for midis, .ra, and .au files. But not too much since Win 3.1 and all the other crap took up a lot of space on my 210MB hard drive.
Won't even discuss the old XT with dual 5 1/4 drives...which did wonders with some sheet music and GWBASIC's "play" command. Meh, the machine played arkanoid well enugh.
Yeah, now they've got mp3 players smaller than a pink pearl eraser. Damn these kids and their newfangled technology! I guess this is where I yell something about demanding that the juvenile miscreants evacuate my cultivated patch of grass.
My 486 sx/33 could do MP3's, if I didn't do anything else on the machine.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I've never had Flash crash on me, and I'm running a computer that's approaching 6 years old playing 720p+ video streams fine (a little taxing on since I'm still running on an AGP bus.).
As for draining a lot of battery, you might want to:
1) check if hardware video acceleration is enabled, because your CPU is going to get hit hard if HTML5 or Flash isn't hardware accelerated.
2) stop playing *ville. Those will take a chunk of your battery written in HTML5 or Flash in the browser.
3) don't use sites that have crappily programmed Flash applications, since dead loops instead of sleep events can also drain a lot of battery with HTML5.
You don't have to use Flash to use YouTube. In the below user.js, replace "application/x-mplayer2" with the identifier for your favourite media player.
// ==UserScript==
// @name YouTubeWMP
// @version 1.0
// @description Replaces Flash player with WMP in YouTube.
// @run-at document-start
// @include http://www.youtube.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
flp=document.getElementById("movie_player");
w=flp.getAttribute("flashvars").split("&");
for(i=0;i<w.length;i++)
{
x=w[i].split("=");
switch(x[0])
{
case "t": t=x[1]; break;
case "video_id": videoid=x[1];
}
}
flp.outerHTML = "<EMBED type='application/x-mplayer2' width='" + flp.width + "' height='" + flp.height + "' src='http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=" + videoid + "&t=" + t + "=' autostart='true' autosize='-1' displaysize='4'></EMBED>";
What do you mean "man hours"? Transcoding can be scripted and automated with ffmpeg. You could probably produce the requisite HTML5 with Perl. No humans are involved in day-to-day operations of such a system, so where are the "man hours" you complain about?
Perl writes itself, does it? Never changes, works as is forever, etc?
Why? None of them are actually monopolies in any area, Intel has AMD, and the other three in your list have each other to cover the rest.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No, without DRM, the "This rental is currently unavailable in your country" videos wouldn't be available anywhere. Why don't people understand this? Without protection, content owners will not distribute their content in ways that they think need protection. It's not that hard to understand. They won't say "oh well, we can't do anything to protect our content - lets just upload it all to usenet and go home for the weekend". Your logic is insulting.
The threat to take their stuff and go home is an idle threat. Look at just about every industry under government regulation. Do they bitch about it? Yes. Do they keep doing it? Yes, because they still make money on it. I can with 100% certainty say that if we passed the anti-DMCA bill and DRM was outlawed, they'd still be trying to sell their movies. They can move from a DRM-free platform to a DRM'd one, but if we reject all the DRM'd platforms they'll start selling it openly, just like the iTunes store does for music. Which last I checked, has not lead to the collapse of the music industry despite the hyperbole. When home recording got big the VCR was likened to Jack the Ripper. The content industry keeps crying wolf, and the fairy tale is coming to its classic end.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
NOTE: all of the videos were complete streamed before starting the playback. Also Pause is better than Playback because nothing is suppose to be running.
Wait a minute! You mean I have to let a video download for three minutes to find out it wasn't what I wanted and move on? I don't know what site you're on, but that isn't YouTube.
In the US, typefaces cannot be copyrighted.
...yet.
Renting in the traditional manner provides no protection against copying, and leaves them at a competitive disadvantage vs those who rent online. In a DRM free market those who chose to take their ball and go home would quickly be replaced by those who adapt to new realities. It's really not that difficult to understand.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The vast majority of things that "work" are not open source. Unless you don't think the majority of phones work, the majority of PCs don't work, the majority of car computers don't work, ad infinitum.
And saying something "might eventually work" is no way to get it adopted. If a currently non-working open source product goes against a currently working proprietary product most companies (and consumers) would choose the working product.
The FOSS community will never agree to implement DRM, and the commercial video sites will never agree to support a format without any DRM. It would seem we're at an impasse.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Those would be an oligopoly
If Flash was any good, and by good I mean if it achieved a higher standard of quality and quality management that would make Adobe look a tiny little bit more like a professional, commercial enterprise dedicated to the improvement of its products instead of a bunch of morons who try to keep the abusive monopoly they got from the lack of real competitors using methods that are counterproductive for the end user, then perhaps some would consider the fact that HTML 5 is Open not enough to counterbalance the technical superiority of Flash.
But Flash sucks. It sucks badly, it's unstable it uses too much memory, it doesn't provide must have features that nobody else can provide. It sucks.
And it has been sucking for EVER !
I mean I more or less discovered the internet in 2000 and for the last 10 years I've been reading people complaining about flash.
I think no product has had more commercial success with such a disappointing product. (it's worse than windows..)
It would be very interesting to survey just how many of Adobe customer are "satisfied" with Flash, and then compare this to the market share of Flash.
What sort of DRM does YouTube implement?
DMCA.
This would work just fine for an FOSS player, because it's not the player, but the server, that has to comply with DMCA.
And players need only support DRM if they want to patronize DRM-ed services. Yes, a little disingenuous, but if free services existed, then free players would work.
The reality is that players need to support the content. So maybe FOSS players are going to have to go it alone?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Is flash video on anything other then a windows desktop a kludge? Yes. Is it more an ideal than a practical implementation on all other devices? Sure. Can it compete and become a standard on these existing non-pc devices as well as future non-pc devices with the help of it's current position on the desktop? Perhaps not. Is it poorly implemented, if at all, in most modern browsers on mobile devices and other non-pc devices , with no agreed upon set of features to cut out from the bloated desktop pc version to adopt to non-pc version, with nothing in common to any two of them? Yep. Would it be getting any attention at all if had not bloated itself into a ad-serving machine that barely runs on it's native platform, sucking 4ghz cpus into the ground like there's no tomorrow? Not likely.
But all that's missing the point. The point is that flash is a wonderful piece of software delivering what consumers^H^H^H^H^H^H advertising conglomerates want. God Bless Them.
HTML5 video which is paused uses 4% CPU while Flash paused uses 32%.
I just did what you said, paused a Youtube vid in Flash, and the browser CPU usage dropped to around 2-4%.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The fact that Apple is trying to impose a proprietary codec it owns partially (h.264) as the de facto standard video codec for the next 10 years is NOT consubstantial to HTML5.
HTML 5 is an open source open standard, and the fact that some companies(and by some I of course mean Apple) are trying to impose their solution as an inherent part of the open solution that is HTML 5 is just BULLSHIT.
HTML 5 is NOT h.264. and HTML 5 is NOT responsible for the codec war that mozilla Google and Apple are waging.
A war that has by the way turned to Apple versus the rest a the world since Google provided an Open-source codec (VP8) that Mozilla has supported.
Don't try to put this on HTML 5 it's Jobs and Jobs alone that is at the origin of this non sense.
Ffmpeg is another matter, but it's been doing flash->h264 for a while now
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Youtube doesn't stream anything yet. They offer progressive downloads. Their complaints about streaming in HTML5 are quite valid and the issue has been raised by others before.
I think they were talking about per song. It was about 50 megabyte per song.
Scripting is a non-zero-effort technology. It isn't a huge effort, but it certainly is more effort than not worrying about it at all.
PS: f*** you, Steve Jobs.
Sincerely,
YouTube - The largest collection of online video on the planet.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Flash kills battery life and stability. After 10 years, it still doesn't work well on modern computers or mobile devices and is likely to never be a good solution. The video tag is young, not quite there yet, and will probably be a better bet in the long run.
it does work on 90% computers and 100% smartphones (if you exclude iphoes). if you have a computer on which flash does not work properly perhaps your computer has shoddy/outdated hardware/software.
for me, flash video works flawlessly on every computer i've ever used, from windows 2000 to ubuntu 9.10 to windows xp to windows vista to windows 7 to opensuse 11.2. on my 2yr xp laptop (with crappy intel graphics), 720p on youtube plays like butter, though 1080p is unwatchable. on my nokia e71, youtube plays in a sort of lite flash player. the ui looks and behaves just like on a pc. hell, the majority of games that i played on my se phone were in flash lite.
i've heard flash performance is crap on apple pcs. i've also heard that unil a couple of weeks ago, apple had not exposed the apis needed for flash to use hardware acceleration to play videos. it seems to me that this is apple's fault.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
flash can also use hardware acceleration to play h264 video, exactly like it does in your pc. problem is that apple does not allow it do this on iphone.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Successful creators often get sued by less successful opportunists, though, but that's got more to do with the U.S. legal system being played like the lottery.
Yeah, that's what I meant. George Harrison wrote and performed "My Sweet Lord" and then lost a million-dollar lawsuit over it. How do I either A. prevent myself from accidentally sampling an existing work or B. minimize the damage if I do end up accidentally sampling an existing work?
And your fonts suck, too.
this.
i once used osx to browse for about 10 minutes and i was like 'have my eyes gone bad?' windows font rendering is miles and miles better.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I guess Jobs saying flash is close and limited to a single vendor makes it true. OH WAIT, IT DOESN'T. Flash is an open, royalty free specification. Other people are making secondary Flash players already, and they can write support for whatever codecs they support. Other companies have input into Flash as well.
So instead of selecting from multiple codecs that Flash supports (WebM, H264, etc.), we fix ourselves to H264 ... to a single vendor (MPEG-LA for the uninformed, which the APL is part of, probably in a big way) ! To boot, it's not royalty free and the "Patent Pool" can jack up the rates and / or sue any open codec implementations if they so choose to change the licensing. Flash? While they could close up any future versions, the ones that are here are free to use and be modified by anyone.
So you might want to actually do a little bit of research before claiming that supporting Flash = H264. Typical Apple fanboy, not bothering to actually verify facts. Don't kid yourselves, everything they do is for the benefit of their own pocketbook. If it so happens they can spin it to be a "customer facing" advantage, then they do so.
It's a shame really. A 1GHz single core mobile Snapdragon processor puts your 2GHz+ desktop computer in its place by playing desktop Flash applications at a reasonable speed without destroying battery life. You know, because Adobe and Google actually sat down together and made it work well instead of not letting anyone near their ecosystem despite claiming to be open and whatnot. If the Nexus One has 2GHz under it's hood... man, it'd be embarrassing to compare performance..
Also, "going by their rate of sales"? Most users have no idea what's going on in the background -- just as long as it works and looks pretty. Most users (on any platform) are oblivious. Some are blinded by marketing and the lies, some are disgruntled from OSX's gimping of Flash. Most of the people I know buy APL products because it looks "pretty", not for any technical reason (now don't take this as an over-generalization of all APL users, this is just my experience.)
Either way, I will get the choice between HTML5 and Flash on my phone and (if I get one) tablets. You, presumably don't. Enjoy!
If it's general interest like Youtube is having it be restricted artificially to a couple platforms is clearly not acceptable.
Don't confuse general interest with publicly funded. It wasn't Youtube's fault that Flash didn't work on Linux/*BSD/QNX/RISC OS/Amiga OS/Zeta... they picked the most widely used way to show video on the web. That left a very small proportion of their potential audience in the lurch and still earned them a shitload of money. I doubt not only that Adobe are claiming royalties but also that Youtube didn't make their decision with crippling the remaining 5%'s market (i.e. profit) share.
It's unacceptable to you, apparently, but that doesn't make the choice to use Flash impractical, illegal or most importantly immoral.
Going by their rate of sales, I don't think their customers disagree with Apple's views all that much.
Apple's customers aren't even aware of Apple's views -- they just like to buy new, snazzy products.
The fact of the matter, as we have already established here on /., is that the average consumer is not concerned (or at least not aware) of the long-term reprocussions that can come about from blindly supporting large, powerful companies [or governments] and their policies. Consumers are caught up in the moment and always do what will serve them the best 5 days from now, not 5 years from now, and much less 15 years from now.
Moderators, please RTFA.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The point was to remove any possibility that downloading the video would affect the test, nor would decoding. The point was to compare the power usage of flash doing practically nothing to an HTML5 video doing just the same.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Except Flash doesn't work either.
It crashes all the time (and crashes your browser with it), uses a lot of memory, CPU and battery for nothing, and only runs decently on Microsoft Windows.
On Linux, and even to a lesser extent on Mac OS X, its so slow the fullscreen option is not even usable.
And I'm not even talking about portable devices...
yeah, its so bad that it runs well only on 90% of computers!
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
I don't think the poor implementation from Adobe is the root issue; I think it's that no-one but Adobe can do anything about it. If we were happy with Flash we wouldn't bitch about it so.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
From an open source developer's perspective that's exactly right. If your proprietary so-called standard has a licence fee or other strings attached that mean they can't afford to use it then it matters not one jot how good your solution is technically — it can't and won't be used. That leaves two options: give up or use something that's open. I'm guessing from the tone of your post that you would prefer the former, but fortunately there is a good supply of users and developers who are willing to put freedom before convenience.
If you're interested in MOD files, btw, get on over to http://modarchive.org/ . It's probably the biggest collection you'll find. (It includes newer formats too, like S3M, XM, IT, and others. Like I say, tracked music is still made today. :)
How do you "accidentally" sample something ? It's like saying "I accidentally ate a cake", or "I accidentally drove to work".
You either sample, or you don't ... there's no "accidentally' about it.
I don't know what kind of distorted world you live in, but in mine windows is only used by computer-illiterate people or for games or legacy apps.
an Open-source codec (VP8)
Which is pretty much 95% of the h264 codec and a "coming soon to a Texas court near you" litigation that will mean no one will touch it with a 10 foot bargepole.
NO video code will ever be "open" while certain corporations hold broad patents on "detecting the difference between one frame and the next and transcoding the delta (USING A COMPUTER)" etc.
For your points, anyone is free to fork the source code of firefox and add whatever features they want to add. One could even try to convince an existing fork to do what they want. So no freedom is actually being taken away by firefox at least.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
He was talking about size of mp3 encoded CD. 1:12 so 50*12 = 600 mb.
How do you "accidentally" sample something ?
One writes a song, but it turns out that a long enough stretch of the song is substantially similar to another existing song's hook. Copyright infringement operates on a strict liability basis, not recklessness.
Wait, Techno and Axle F? Are you certain he doesn't mean MIDI? 8I
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Utterly incorrect. RTFA
What's incorrect? That players have to support whatever the server sends to them?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
YouTube doesn't own the videos that you watch - they're owned by their respective creators, who control how those videos are distributed through YouTube. For YouTube Rentals, video owners require us to use secure streaming technology, such as the Flash Platform's RTMPE protocol, to ensure their videos are not redistributed. Without content protection, we would not be able to offer videos like this.
As much as the open source community hates it, content protection really can be done open source systems like Linux and BSD, even with every component being compiled by the end user, without exposing the content. Hint: it involves sealing the description and playback logic in the video card and using an HDCP capable display for full quality (depending on the quality restrictions of the video being played).
Flash Player's ability to combine application code and resources into a secure, efficient package has been instrumental in allowing YouTube videos to be embedded in other web sites. Web site owners need to ensure that embedded content is not able to access private user information on the containing page, and we need to ensure that our video player logic travels with the video (for features like captions, annotations, and advertising). While HTML5 adds sandboxing and message-passing functionality, Flash is the only mechanism most web sites allow for embedded content from other sites.
Just put the advertising inside the video.
We The People need to be sure OUR computers are not abused ... to be sure OUR private data cannot be accessed ... but abusive web sites (or other vermin). That's why we need to be able to full audit everything run on our computers. But see above for a way to do what you want via the sealed display method where an entirely open source system just shuttles a data stream through.
HD video begs to be watched in full screen, but that has not historically been possible with pure HTML. While most browsers have a fullscreen mode, they do not allow javascript to initiate it, nor do they allow a small part of the page (such as a video player) to fill the screen. Flash Player provides robust, secure controls for enabling hardware-accelerated fullscreen displays. While WebKit has recently taken some steps forward on fullscreen support, it's not yet sufficient for video usage (particularly the ability to continue displaying content on top of the video).
MPlayer does this just fine. MPlayer can be launched from a browser. Oh, wait ... you want to automatically launch full screen mode without permission so you can cover up user control of their own computer. See above for a way to do what you want via the sealed display method.
Video is not just a one-way medium. Every day, thousands of users record videos directly to YouTube from within their browser using webcams, which would not be possible without Flash technology. Camera access is also needed for features like video chat and live broadcasting - extremely important on mobile phones which practically all have a built-in camera. Flash Player has provided rich camera and microphone access for several years now, while HTML5 is just getting started.
Again, people should have the right to control their own computer. Every aspect of this can be done via open source. Oh wait, it already has been done.
We're very happy to see such active and enthusiastic discussion about evolving web standards - YouTube is dependent on browser enhancement in order for us to improve the video experience for our users. While HTML5's video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don't support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs. Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube's video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is bu
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
it's cool, he's using an apple and assumes everyone else is stupid enough to do the same.
simple solution for us - ignore him.
simple solution for him - ditch the fisher price machines (you clown) or stop complaining!
No. "Techno" sounded awful with MIDI (We're talking back in the FM Synthesis/Fixed wave-tables time)
Is it poorly implemented in most modern browsers,
Of course the same applies to Flash if you're not on Windows. When asked about this, Adobe usually answers with "Flash isn't designed to be a video delivery platform".
Seriously, as a Mac user I can't see how <video> can in any way be worse than Flash apart from the codec issue. Unless all browser vendors manage to implement the codec(s) in a way that uses an absurd amount of CPU time but is unable to play video stutter-free even if it doesn't stress the CPU much. Given that Flash fails at video delivery, even straight download links can give Flash a run for its money.
I'd happily use Flash if Flash actually worked properly. Given that it doesn't and that it comes from a company known for mediocre software who are in no rush to fix it I just want it to be relegated to those niches the HTML5 multimedia delivery tags can't reach - like webcam support. I just hope you don't want to use that webcam on Linux or OS X...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
> Which is pretty much 95% of the h264 codec and a "coming soon
> to a Texas court near you" litigation that will mean no one will
> touch it with a 10 foot bargepole.
No one other than Google , AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, Logitech, Marbell, MIPS, Nvidia, Qualcomm, TI, Sorenson, Firefox, Opera, Oracle, Skype, etc. ad naseum
http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/
YouTube has DRMed content that HTML5 cannot at this time support. RTFA
Firefox can easily fallback to a plug-in. There are many examples of how to gracefully fallback to a plug-in if a browser doesn't support or the codec used. Firefox are being prima donnas. Theora sucked and they "got lucky" as Google open sourced VP8.
Unfortunately VP8 is so close to H.264 ffmpeg could reuse much of it's existing code to implement VP8 and the patent encumbered question is far, far from settled. VP8 is poorly documented. It lacks support by content creation tools. It lacks hardware supported of H.264 and is even more potentially poisonous. Only OSS fanatics—increasingly depending on corporations to open sources tech after spending R&D money to develop—would embrace VP8 right now. Prudence demands caution.
What will Firefox do with the NEXT standard if it is licensed tech like H.264? Will it whine about fees? Become irrelevant? Their policy isn't sustainable going forward.
Actually the current version of Ogg supports an optional index
I was confused. Apparently XiphWiki says Ogg Index is highly not final.
Logic, reason, a well thought out argument.
This is slashdot good sir, immediately rephrase that to be a scathing attack on the authors sexual orientation for insulting open source.
In all seriousness, the author had a good point. HTML5 is a draft, it's not finished yet and Flash is finished and working. I kind of fear for the future of HTML5, for all the potential pitfalls I'd like to see HTML5 succede and take over from flash (although I cannot see that happening for at least five years) but we risk having the same thing happen to HTML5 as happened to web standards in the mid 90's.
Apple seems to have very specific ideas as to what HTML5 should be. This reeks of the same kind of standards manipulation that MS used with IE in the 90's in order to force sites to write for IE rendering engines rather then an actual web standard. I think we need to take the specification of HTML5 away from interests like Apple and MS (perhaps even Google) and put it back in the hands of the IEEE or another group that will allow input from the likes of Apple, MS and Google without permitting them to co-opt the standard.
What is the point of an open standard if it dictated to us by a closed source?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Your playback routines must have sucked then. FC were doing 8 channel digital playback (S3Ms, superset of .MOD) on 386DXs plus running demo effects (Second reality, unreal, etc). I even had simple games that I wrote in Pascal plus a bit of assembly for direct mode 0x13 video access running just fine while playing mods on my 486dx33. Saw someone else lamenting the lack of an FPU ... FYI - .mod playback never used the FPU... because back in the day 99.99% of people never had them until the 486DX became well entrenched.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
For those not quite on the "flash sucks" bandwagon and are wondering what Jobs is crying about: try using it on a Mac. Its fucked. A core2 duo can't even play full screen HD video without skipping and audio breaking up (slightly, but its there).
If you think its bad on PC, but haven't used it on a mac - its even worse.
Given that the iPhone runs a cut down copy of OS X, then I can see how
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Try the same on a 3 year old mac, and see how shit it is. My Core2 1.8 mac mini struggles to play the content on the diablo 3 site. Why?
Because flash on mac sucks, real hard.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
So why don't we fix HTTP once, rather than kludge a fix into every data format that requires streaming?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Youtube exists to make money. You go to work to make money. Making money allows one to eat, allows companies to hire employees and pay them so they can eat, and yes, so the owners can buy really big yachts (which I don't begrudge them)... etc etc etc. In order to do that, Youtube needs to deliver their product. That means putting their product in a form that CONSUMERS can consume it. If the consumers can't consume it, they won't go to Youtube and then they won't make money since their ad revenue will drop. The majority of people out their don't have a problem viewing flash content on Youtube; in pretty much every browser and O/S. I would be all for an open source solution, if one could be created AND implemented as many places as mpeg is now. The same goes for MP3. You won't make any money if no-one can listen to your stuff. So if you want to make money, and aren't a moron, you give the CONSUMER what they want in a way they can CONSUME it.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The only mentioning of John Harding that can be found on Google that is not a link to this blog entry or some repost of it, is:
http://code.google.com/events/poweredbyyoutube/speakers.html
John Harding
John Harding is an engineering manager at YouTube, focused on bringing the YouTube experience to the rest of the web, as well as other devices like mobile phones and televisions. Before joining Google, John was a lead in the Xbox Advanced Technology Group, helping developers make great games for the Xbox and Xbox 360.
O RLY? A blog entry by a former Microsoft technology promoter, containing massive misrepresentation of HTML5. With discussion threads peppered with Microsoft astroturfers making "witty" comments about open source, that is not even involved in the supposed problem in the first place.
Yes, this is an ad hominem attack -- because there is nothing else to attack here. Tere is no point and no argument other than "I don't like HTML5, and I will just spew random crap about web browsers not being good enough, pretending that I do not work for a company that makes a browser in the first place".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Oops... s/'as mpeg is now'/as flash is now/
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I use a mac because i want a unix with some sort of actual commercial software availability. I want software with an aesthetically pleasing UI. Sure, open source is good but it doesn't always have what I want (e.g., Garageband, development tools for iDevices, etc). I don't have to give up open source on the mac either (I can download/compile pretty much most things from source if I want), so I get a broader selection of software available (open source PLUS plenty of commercial stuff). But, I guess if you have no clue about open source OR have a clue but are too cheap to stump up the cash for something that generally "just works" I can see how it would not be attractive.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Lol. thats like saying it works on 100% of cars, if you exclude those wit more than 3 wheels.
Given that Mac is the fastest growing computer segment and the iphone is one of, if not THE best selling smartphone on the market right now, thats a pretty big market that is missing.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Wait... is google evil this week or not? Did i miss the memo?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It doesn't scale to the number of files. It doesn't "care" whether you have 5 or 5 million.
$ make available
Some of that is flash sucking, but a lot of it is just the fact that flash runs interpreted code, it's one of those trade off things. You let people do what they want to do and sometimes they do it wrong and kill your browser. That said, even if Flash was 100% stable it'd be better to have plugins in their own processes.
The fundamental issue with HTML5(aside from all the political, ideological BS), is that it only allows for streaming of content, not control of content, which will mean that it will never really take off for people who need control of their content.
Personally my prediction is that Apple will do a deal with Microsoft to allow silverlight onto the phone to handle that particular market space.
This is misleading.
Basic infringement: (P is plaintiff, D is defendant)
1) P must allege and prove ownership of a valid copyright.
2) P must prove that D violated one of the exclusive rights reserved to copyright owners. One can only violate if there is copying-in-fact (or probative copying). This means that you are meeting the prima facie hurdle, rather than coincidentally coming up with the same thing. As such, P must prove that D obtained the protected expression and used that expression in their work (this is key with respect to your statement: there's a balance between access and similarity for proving copying-in-fact.). The analysis moves to the 106 rights only after copying in fact is proved. For example: "D copied from P's copyrighted work and the copying went so far as to constitute improper appropriation."
There's an example online that uses zero JS or flash but has all the fallthrus necessary to play in most environments:
http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Then you have 12 different video files for each upload on YouTube, or you need to convert on the fly. You run in to issues with either processing power or storage space at that point.
You'll forgive me if I take this with a grain of salt.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I still remember playing back a small little file with a .MP2 extension on a Dell 486 running Windows 3.1 and going WOW - thats amazing!
You probably don't remember .mod files from before that time. A few KB and an amazing mimic of the original track.
Using HTTP is a kludge! What we need is a standard non-proprietary streaming protocol. We don't use HTTP for VoIP and we certainly shouldn't use it for streaming.
no. all (most) cars have 4 wheels whereas only 15% smartphones are iphones. so your analogy is incorrect. and if mac is fastest growing segment that does not make it a big market. its still ~10%. iphone is FAR from the bestselling smartphone. it maybe making apple loads of money, but thats because it is overpriced not because it is largest selling. 44% smartphones sold in q1 2010 were symbian, 19% blackberry, 15% iphone, 10% android.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Except that:
1) the Flash spec is open, and there are OSS implementations
2) in practice, HTML 5 video is like to rely on a closed, patented, codec.
please note that nowhere i said windows is better or anything. what i said is that if something works on 90% of the world's computers but is crappy on the rest, it means the rest 10% are at fault.
also, i think your view is distorted. i dislike windows and like linux but linux is not usable as a basic day-to-day maintenance free system. windows is much more stable, and has much more uptime if the user does not care too much about the computer.
and i won't buy a shitty apple pc, i won't pay twice as much to get an incompatible, slow specced and locked down computer.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
How do you "accidentally" sample something ?
One writes a song, but it turns out that a long enough stretch of the song is substantially similar to another existing song's hook. Copyright infringement operates on a strict liability basis, not recklessness.
That's not what he's asking. You're describing copyright infringement of a music's composition, i.e., its sheet music. The original authors of "Rum and Coca-Cola" (1940s) lost a copyright lawsuit because they (allegedly) stole a calypso melody. Obviously there was no sampling then. If the music itself (i.e., the sheet music) is sufficiently similar, you've violated someone's copyright.
The parent was talking about sampling. Sampling is always a violation if you don't get permission. It's possible to accidentally infringe someone's copyright if you hear a song while walking through an airport and later use the melody as a basis of your own song. Then it's somewhat of a judgment call and how similar, how long, etc. play a role. But if you take a sample from recorded music and use it in your song, it's incontestably infringing, even if it's only a half second (contrary to internet myth, there is no magic "three seconds or less").
Difference between copying "source" (sheet music) and compiled form (ripping someone's CD and using the mp3 in your own music).
Advice: on VPS providers
You seem to be missing the point that people don't want it to be trivial to save the h264 file to disk and then redistribute it. If someone in the right zone can just download the link to the file, those that feel they need DRM/content control won't be using it. Heck, even Youtube makes it non-trivial(to most users) to download the actual FLV to preserve it, even without Youtube using DRM on that particular file.
Not saying that is good or bad, just pointing out why your argument about IP doesn't address the desire for a 'secure' client.
http://blog.slaingod.com
The problem is that something that's open might eventually work, whereas something that isn't probably won't unless it's on a blessed platform.
LOL Guess I can start selling flying cars then, since apparently everybody in the future will be using them. Oh, the car won't actually fly, but you should get one because eventually there might be upgrades that will allow it to fly.
Good. It is better that nothing at all is available rather than dealing with the pain of DRM.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
It doesn't matter who is supporting it ... the plain fact is it's an (almost) identical copy of the encoding system used by h264.
It's only because of the fact that the internals are so similar, that many of the names you listed can set this codec into firmware relatively cheaply ... as they're already got 95% of the code in their existing h264 firmware. I just hope they include a line on the chip to short out VP8 so they've got their asses covered when the shit starts hitting the fan.
Just because they have the money and the gonads to fight expensive litigation doesn't mean they are right.
You're describing copyright infringement of a music's composition, i.e., its sheet music.
Then I misused "to sample". What verb should I use instead when I mean "to inadvertently copy from a music's composition"?
It's possible to accidentally infringe someone's copyright if you hear a song while walking through an airport and later use the melody as a basis of your own song.
I understand this. How do I keep it from happening, or how do I limit the damages should it happen?
But if you take a sample from recorded music and use it in your song, it's incontestably infringing, even if it's only a half second
Does this mean if I buy a Casio sampling keyboard and use it in a recorded song, Casio can sue?
As such, P must prove that D obtained the protected expression and used that expression in their work
As I understand it, "striking similarity" is circumstantial evidence of access, and it takes an expensive lawyer and expensive expert witnesses to demonstrate that a similarity is not "striking". So is the plaintiff's song having reached the top 100 on a widely recognized radio play chart.
If it was so identical it wouldn't be much more efficient which it is. h.264 is 7 years old ! And its development started more than 10 years ago. VP8 is like a freaking Newborn compared to this.
On a Side Note I wait for this court rule that will make VP8 unusable... The Texas court crap will take several years on its own, enough time for Youtube (Google owned) to turn to full HTML5+VP8 and once that's done there is not turning back.
So Even on the brute strengh I highly doubt that the MPEG-LA and Apple can kick Google and all those behind VP8 or WebM.
But let's be even crazier, let's dream about a world where justice works as it is supposed to be : the kind of patents the MPEG-LA hold are totally abusive and counter productive, they ruined the Video codec competition for too long and might get overturned in a court.
I mean if this legal battle ever happens it is going to be big. Like Supreme court.
Last but not least, these patents are not going to last forever.
Of course, what they haven't explained is why we should particularly care whether someone else can watch the content, rather than everyone being blocked like we've been.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I wonder what kind of processor you have?
In chrome/youtube, Task manager was reporting 2-6% CPU for the highest chrome process.. total CPU use was around 16%.
That was while it was playing & downloading at the same time. Plus winamp running, azureus, etc etc etc
That has nothing to do with the discussion. Which you seem to be having great difficulty understanding.
Sounds more like your problem than theirs.
How is it his problem? he is get the goods he wants. Doesn't look like his problem.
But people like you simply can't grasp the concept of providing an actual good service. And that is why you need the government to hold the guns for you.
If you fail to see the point of the grandparents post in this discussion, then you are a either willfully ignorant or a moron. From your other posts on slashdot, I see that it is most likely the former.
But who can implement flash properly? Adobe isn't? Unfortunately, gnash and swfdec don't implement patented codecs (h264, vp6, etc), so it's kinda pointless, and Adobe doesn't care for platforms other than Windows and barely MacOSX; so getting rid of flash altogether is the best option, at least as video playing is concerned.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Not true. I was able to successfully playback 128kbps mp3 stereo files in a 486dx-100 with an mpg123 compile optimized for 486 (rather than 386), which meant it was better than FhG's windows player of the time. The other common lossy formats of the day were mp2, ra, and embedded in devices: ac-3 (DolbyDigital) and atrac (Minidisc) which needed more bitrate for similar quality, but less cpu.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Well i think its better that way. Its an all or nothing thing anyway, thinking you can stream content and have any control about it is doomed to failure. But if you like to like in a DRMed (annoyances) world, have it, while the rest of us get decent releases from people who always know their way bypassing restrictions of any kind whatsoever in spite of witch hunts and such.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
There are a few misconceptions here. WebM isn't Matroska, it's a Matroska subset with a few (important) differences. See http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/ for details.
Which of the differences listed at http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/ do you claim is important?
Ogg has an index which (similarly to Matroska) is optional.
The page from xiph.org does not contain the word "index", and the page I found with Google states: "It is at best incomplete and at worst completely broken."
There are two kinds of circumstantial evidence that are useful for figuring out if D copied P. (1) Evidence suggesting D had access. (2) Evidence showing the degree of similarity between two works.
Evidence of access requires a reasonable opportunity (more than a bare possibility) to view or copy P's work. It cannot be inferred through mere speculation or conjecture. To do this, you might establish a particular chain of events between P's work and D's access to that work (i.e. tell a story). You might also establish that P's work is widely disseminated. For music, look at record sales, radio performances, sheet music sales. Additionally, subconscious copying has been accepted since it was first embraced in 1924 (memory as a trick is not an excuse). But this is more a feature of saying, "you had to have access because it was so popular, even if you don't realize you don't remember." I think this is something we can all buy. I know I say things all the time that are trademarked catchphrases because they've simply seeped into my thoughts...damn talented marketers.
Second, striking similarity can be so great that proof of access is presumed and need not be proven. The better the story you tell about access, the less you have to show striking similarity. Likewise, the more strikingly similar, the less you have to tell an access story. How this is handled varies by circuit, which I can get into if you'd really like. But generally, it’s not similarity, per se, that establishes access; rather, similarity of two works tends to prove access in light of the nature of the works, like the particular musical genre involved, or other circumstantial evidence of access. Here you might look for unexpected departures from the norm, or error. And like you said, lots of expert testimony is useful here - but why shouldn't it be? If I'm comparing two songs, I want an expert to tell me whether the two's notes are so similar that there had to be copying.
I mostly understand this. But how do I either A. avoid such copying in the first place, or B. not get the book thrown at me for my mistake?
Hardly. I just seem able to separate different arguments from one big assumption, something you seem to be having difficulty with. If people can't protect their movies online with DRM, the default position (and the most-used, as we can see by the studio's uptake), they simply won't make their content available for rental/streaming. It has nothing to do with other websites, it has nothing to do with their bricks-and-mortar agents. It is simply a very obvious fact.
I meant encoding mp3s...
After all, I am strangely colored.