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80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM
An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has an update on the WebM project from a presentation given by Google's John Luther and Matt Frost at the Streaming Media West conference. OSNews writes, 'Earlier this year, Google finally did what many of us hoped it would do: release the VP8 codec as open source. It became part of the WebM project, which combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container. The product manager for the WebM project, John Luther, gave an update on the status of the project (PDF) — and it's doing great.'"
flash with H.264 has not been working great. It is hell to work with, both as a user and as a developer, and it don't work on mobile phones.
yeay put the problem with buddhism is that it's almost hippies only.
webm is patent free and opensource and we can hope that it will supported by the next android version and every browser soon. i don't see a problem here. you just wait.
H.264's patent licensing fees make it a dealbreaker for law-abiding indies, open source advocates and small hardware makers who don't want to pay.
WebM is free.
It's also a good potential "unifying format" for web video codec-wise the same way Flash has been player-wise because we're still in the same codec hell as far as HTML5 video is concerned due to Mozilla foundation's refusal to use H.264.
H.264 licensing fees look reasonable though if products or services are sold at profit. Not sure how it goes though for free software or products that make marginal profits.
http://www.object404.com
Yes it does for mobile devices that support Flash Player 10.1 like them Android 2.2 ones and the Blackberry Tab.
http://www.object404.com
80% of HTML5 Beta videos are served as WebM. Not 80% of all youtube, duh.
http://www.youtube.com/html5
The standards are almost identical though. Realistically there's no way there are patents out there that cover h264 and not VP8.
I am trolling
"combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container"
Yeah, I ordered that in a bar once and got really wasted.
...and most of what you got two years ago was Flash, until Steve started his war on Flash.
Somebody's just trying to get the 'standard' fixed on a codec that you can write players for without paying through the nose for.
Actually, I can't seem to use Youtube in Chrome or Chromium. Specifically, if I log in, I always get "An error occurred..." If I clear cache and cookies I can use Youtube. Everything works fine in Firefox, except apparently I just lost sound recently. I haven't checked cables though. It didn't work in chrome either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I get h264 content by doing that.
Hundreds of millions of Asians would like to disagree with that characterization, you ignorant hick.
Lucky for you, they're Buddhists who honor the precept of doing no harm to others, or they'd probably kick your ass.
For variable definitions of "works". Flash is not a great performer on low power hardware, especially on the battery.
The question is do any go the other way?
My bet is the VP8 folks must have some from older versions that MPEG-LA infringes on.
If you have opted in to use Html5 and website you visit uses iframe to embed YouTube videos you'll see the video without flashplugin. The codec used depends on the browser you are using: Firefox and Opera will play the WebM version, Safari and IE9 will use h.264. I'm not sure what codec Chrome will prefer, but most likely WebM.
There is no phone but iPhone and no god but Jobs! The luminous one has decreed no Flash and so there is no Flash on the one true mobile phone.
It hardly makes sense to attack Google for using this new system because the old system is popular on phones. Google is *owning* phones right now, and is on target to be behind the leading OS in the next year or so. (They're also going to be pushing their new Chromium OS pretty hard soon, so they'll have an interest there too). And Chrome isn't doing too badly at the mo either.
There are a lot of Buddhists who seem to have forgotten that, just like a lot of Christians seem to have missed thou shalt not kill (it doesn't say murder in my bible ta very much). But yes the GP should stick to playing the banjo and screwing his relatives.
Why can't I have a button called WebM that I press and all my videos are in webm mode only on youtube. I even tried putting &webm=1 on the search parameters as in the wiki but still just got flash.
hermafrodite
noun
a person or animal having both male and female sex organs, plus giant frizzy hair
The problem with H.264 isn't Mozilla. It's patents. The Mozilla guys are just being cautious (remember Unisys' GIF patent?)
Some Nokia phones do also, like the N900.
The only reason the iPhone can't is not technical, it's because Apple controls what software you can run very tightly.
just like a lot of Christians seem to have missed thou shalt not kill (it doesn't say murder in my bible ta very much).
So you acknowledge that your version has at least the one mistranslation, and in spite of that, maybe even specifically because of that, are holding it up as "The True Word".
Your "bible ta" could be interesting though, the new testament ta and the old testament ta make a proper set of ta tas.
Thank you, this sort of informative post is the reason I still read slashdot comments.
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
With Chrome 7.0.517.44 (latest at the time of writing), I get WebM. Looks pretty good at 720p!
Just another proletarian malcontent.
Lucky for you, they're Buddhists who honor the precept of doing no harm to others, or they'd probably kick your ass.
I thought they were the Buddhists that pity those who call them hippies, because it means they are regressing back to lower states of enlightenment, and will probably be reincarnated as a lower animal, plant, or powerless hungry ghost, next cycle.
Meaning... they are hurting themselves more than they hurt the Buddhist.
Does your browser support WebM?
There's no caution involved, Mozilla would have to license the patents. h.264 is only free for streaming, that does not include the encoding or decoding. They just refrain from charging you again to stream the encoded streams.
Chrome won't use h.264, I can pretty much guarantee you that much. No free browser is going to include it unless the party making it free is willing to be on the hook for royalties or they include somebody else's codec for it.
I'd personally be very surprised if Google was willing to pay the licensing fee to use h.264. Remember that h.264 isn't free for use, it's only free to stream the encoded files to somebody who then decodes them. Neither the party encoding nor the party decoding gets to do so for free without infringing upon the MPEG-LA property.
H.264 is the codec, flash is just the wrapper of choice these days. H.264 encoded video should be playable on any machine that can decode it and read the wrapper/container format. What makes H.264 so great is that I can encode the video once and place into whatever container I want and have it read on almost any device these days. It doesn't have to be flash, it could be MOV, M4V, MP4, whatever container. Flash is the current favourite because you can put DRM into the wrapper and make it a bit harder to remove the video from the container. When I create a quicktime movie anymore, I get two files, an .m4v that is the actual video, and the .mov which is a wrapper with a pointer to the movie.
And most video players these days will read a straight m4v encoded file whether it be on mobile phones, windows, mac, linux (provided you have the codec), console, etc..
The problem WebM has right now is that it either has to offer videographers and producers a technical advantage over H.264 and be widely adopted. Currently it's still not AS good bit for bit as H.264 and it's not yet widely adopted. Until those two hurdles are overcome, it's not going to see wide spread adoption.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Have they managed to improve the quality of the VP8 codec? Last time I saw a comparison, VP8 was way behind H.264.
And don't even give me that crap about "it's free, it doesn't have to be as good" or "it's only a web codec so who cares". If there's a number of big companies supporting the project and they plan on making WebM some kind of industry standard, anything less than state of the art is unacceptable. We'll be using this for years to come, so doing it right is in everyone's best interest.
Adobe started the war with Apple by writing shitty code for Flash on the Mac.
Secondly, there's no point in wrapping H.264 video inside a Flash player when the hardware can play H.264 by itself.
Putting H.264 video inside Flash is as stupid as putting a JPEG inside a Microsoft Word document.
Safari supports H.264 and yet it's free.
And if it supports H.264 by using the H.264 decoder of the OS, then Firefox can do it too.
This whole H.264 vs WebM mess is only harming the adoption of the HTML5 video tag, not to mention that Flash is currently used for playing... H.264 files.
CC: an anonymous reader
Subject: 80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM
Body: WTF Does that mean? Is WebM a competing website? Is WebM a DVD Archive? From reading comments it appears to be something related to the way the videos play and may or may not have something to do with HTML5. The first thing that came to my mind was some competing web site that has made 80% of all YouTube videos available as an archive for use when copyright infringement is claimed.
Here is a good link that should have been included for geeks like me who don't know everything: http://www.webmproject.org/
Additionally, how does one make a video available in WebM format? I upload videos occasionally and have never seen the check-box for "use HTML5 with WebM format". Does YouTube decide on it's own how and when to make them available that way?
Adobe started the war with Apple by writing shitty code for Flash on the Mac.
As opposed to shitty code on Windows. Flash is pretty processor intensive on anything.
Secondly, there's no point in wrapping H.264 video inside a Flash player when the hardware can play H.264 by itself.
DRM. Flash is great for DRM. Don't forget that little 'feature'.
Putting H.264 video inside Flash is as stupid as putting a JPEG inside a Microsoft Word document.
Hasn't stopped anybody I work with yet...
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Safari supports H.264 and yet it's free.
But it isn't FREE!
And Mozilla isn't just about making a browser, its about making the web better.
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
HTML5 youtube does not work as good as flash(at least on my 1Mbps connection). It stops for buffering for so many times whereas flash runs smoothly.
Back in actual, as opposed to perceived, reality On2 has been avoiding patent problems for well over a decade. This was made by a company that did nothing but video codecs, if they didn't know what they were doing in regards to patents, they wouldn't have survived.
Here's a better and less ranty writeup if you want to look into the arguments: http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=420
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Fail. Chrome already supports h.264.
Copy paste from google owned youtube:
* Firefox 4 (WebM, Beta available here)
* Google Chrome (WebM and h.264)
* Opera 10.6+ (WebM, Available here)
* Apple Safari (h.264, version 4+)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (h.264, Beta available here)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 with Google Chrome Frame installed (Get Google Chrome Frame)
Double fail even.
Not only can google's chrome browser decode h.264, but google's youtube site already has 100% of all their videos encoded to it as well. So in short, I can guarantee you that many free browswers already include it, and google has already paid the extremely small licensing fee. As has Microsoft and apple. The only significant hold out, Mozilla, and they are holding back progress on the web (as usual lately).
I had to remove flash from my android 2.2
It broke more sits than it fixed (it would stay on top, blocking things I wanted to see ). Additionally, the only thong it reliably ran were the ads.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Funny that I keep finding videos on YouTube that won't work in HTML5. They display "You need to upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video". So even if it's true that all the videos are in H.264, YouTube's doing a really bad job at using them.
As opposed to shitty code on Windows. Flash is pretty processor intensive on anything.
But it's significantly worse on Mac, and always has been. For Linux it's even worse, there Flash is almost unusable.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
It seems Adobe fanboys have mod points today. The truth hurts, I guess.
H.264's patent licensing fees make it a dealbreaker for law-abiding indies, open source advocates and small hardware makers who don't want to pay.
WebM is free
It wasn't a deal breaker for Canonical and its OEM partners.
This is big-league ball:
There are about 30 H.264 licensors and 900 licensees. These include global giants in manufacturing:
Fujitsu. JVC. Mitsubishi. NTT. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Sony. Toshiba... Theatrical production. Home video. Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Mobile. Industrial, security and military video. The list goes on and on and on. The Asian presence is particularly formidable.
I don't know how - much less why - the small hardware maker builds or buys an encoder/decoder that doesn't include H.264 support. The maximum fee is 20 cents a unit - and the first 100,000 units you produce each year are royalty free.
20% of "prime time" Internet traffic is a Netflix stream.
Think about that. 20% of traffic and not a single click for AdSense. Every file a legit subscription download.
That says a lot about the changing face of the Internet.
The Netflix customer only needs a browser to search and select from the online catalog. The player - and the browser - can be built into his HDTV, his video game console, Blu-Ray player or set-top box.
He doesn't need Firefox. He doesn't need FOSS.
If FOSS software is being used in the client, it will be for - all practical purposees - invisible.
Yet even big camera makers pass on a proper license with their products...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
And Mozilla isn't just about making a browser, its about making the web better.
Ahh but if it is about strategic decisions to try to change the shape of the Web, maybe they need better strategists... since all they're doing right now is keeping Flash alive.
How does the sound and image quality of the WebM videos compare to the versions in other formats?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
From the HTML 5 beta page: "Videos with ads are not supported (they will play in the Flash player)"
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Looks that way. My post stating a simple fact about Flash on other platforms got rated "troll". I mad no personal attacks and no platform attacks, only noted the comparative performance of Flash on the 3 major platforms.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Apparently you don't understand that there are/were already 10x as many iPhones on the market before Android started to take off, but also that iPhones sold more units than Android last quarter. So I wouldn't say google is *owning*. They are far far behind, and they are falling even further behind. That said, #2 in smart phones is still a nice place to be.
Android was outselling iPhone worldwide last quarter. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/8125725/Google-Android-becomes-second-most-popular-smartphone-operating-system.html From the article:
That's the main problem (I believe) that webm has right now. The most popular browser "brand" (Mozilla Firefox) that will support it easily out of the virtual box has been mired in an ever-slower beta cycle for quite some time now, at least by internet standards, and will take probably another 3-6 months to finally hit release.
If Android "Gingerbread" really does have support for webm when it comes out, that will help. Until then, it seems only the about 5%-8% of the internet running a current Google Chrome/Chromium or the beta of Firefox 4 can actually use webm on the web.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
For variable definitions of "works". Flash is not a great performer on low power hardware, especially on the battery.
While it doesn't change the existing speed/stability/security/battery-munching problems of most of the Flash content out there, the performance situation should be somewhat better for Flash content that uses h.264 on hardware with h.264 acceleration. (upgrade to current software, if possible, probably required)
The people that say Flash works fine and those that say it's awful can both be right. It's not consistent.
So that definition of "works" needs qualifiers for old versus h.264 Flash content, and whether certain playback platform features are present.
The way I see it, if one has to replace old Flash content with h.264 or another modern codec to get acceleration speed/power improvements, it might as well not be wrapped in a Flash container.
On VP8:
The question I have is can existing hardware that supports h.264 acceleration do the same for WebM VP8 video, and if not, can that functionality be added fairly easily to future devices?
Support for hardware acceleration is probably a bigger deal, at least on mobile devices, than whatever performance differences otherwise remain.
Reincarnation as you've described it—that one being lives a cycle of lives along a hierarchy of beings, some better positioned to achieve enlightenment—isn't necessarily Buddhist (though it may be found among some Buddhists, as that conception is found in Hinduism, from which Buddhism originally derived). The Buddhist concept of rebirth (which varies between traditions, and even between individuals) is a bit more subtle, suggesting that when a given consciousness passes from life to death, it will become part of a broader set of influences which contribute to the beginning of new consciousnesses. Which is to say that in Buddhism, a life which exists now may not be the same as some previously-existing life, and that a consciousness existing now may not remain intact or unaltered as its existence carries on in other forms. In this conception, an ego is a lot like karma (deed or action), in that in a strict sense it goes on existing, but it becomes a part of the broader world and is subject to all of the same influences that affect and disperse the rest of these phenomena.
As far as your last sentence, I think it's a rare Buddhist (and probably one who has come to their belief as a matter of tradition rather than direct interest) who sees their peers harming themselves and isn't moved by compassion to try to help them cease it. Recognizing that self and ego are impermanent, a Bodhisattva takes responsibility to help to bring all other beings along for the ride, so to speak, toward enlightenment.
Your statistics imply that Apple is losing on some metric, and they are therefore invalid. Any facts contradicting the ultimate supremacy of Apple in all things are obviously and unquestionably flawed... the deranged lies of pathetic astroturfers.
Now if you would be so kind as to report to the nearest Apple Store and Re-Education Center, such unworthy ideas can be swiftly removed.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
What about Linux? Flash on Linux sucks and this is entirely Adobe's fault.
$ make available
Yes, 2nd isn't bad, but they'll overtake RIM soon I'm sure. Currently Apple are nowhere in terms of sales this (last etc) month. Yeah, there are more iPhones out there at the mo, but that's going away soon. Apple can't hope to compete in the medium-long term against the tens of companies releasing Android phones/tablets.
Then they should put the ads in a separate Flash and let the browser play the video file.
The "problem" is the great hammer of the Troll God also known as MPEG-LA and H.264. Have you looked at their patents? There are something like 2000 plus patents tied to H.264, and it would probably be pretty fair to say there isn't ANY way to make a codec that doesn't infringe on a dozen or so. Now add to this the fact that just about every device released in the last 4 years supports hardware H.264 and NOT WebM, and if it can be made to easily support WebM without changing hardware I'm sure that would be argued as evidence on how closely it is to H.264 then things don't look bright for WebM, even though I 100% support having WebM replace H.264 in HTML V5 so EVERYONE will have a hardware accelerated web.
If you think MPEG-LA, which includes such heavyweights as Apple, MSFT, and IIRC IBM, is just gonna sulk in the corner while you snatch marketshare away from them you got another thing coming. I'm sure if WebM gets any real traction outside of Google properties then MPEG-LA will break out their mighty Troll God hammer and lay the lawsuits of doom upon thee. Even if Google manages to win it'll be tied up in a court for a fricking decade or more and by then nobody will care because the patents to MP3 and most of H.264 will have expired and WebM won't be needed.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
People always say this. But I can easily watch Flash video in full screen on Linux, and I often do. Just testing a (non-fullscreen) video now, it took up some 35% of one core (Pentium 5300: not exactly top of the range). I don't have a problem with it.
For comparison, an HTML5 test video at the same resolution in WebM (Firefox 4) took over half of a core.
Sure thing. Oh wait, Microsoft already paid it for anyone running a Windows OS. Too bad, so sad... for you.
you'd never see it on the app store, so how can you know it's 10x power use?
the Lord Steve Jobs said, did he?
google are going to pwn oracle on patents, and could probably pwn the MPEG-LA if it came to that.
MPEG-LA wont touch web-m because they would like to keep their patents... challenging google on them will just lead to free video for everyone and they don't want that at all.
What a generalized statement derived from ignorance. This was marked insightful?
H.264 does work great under Flash -- it has for over 3 years now -- given the following. The developer isn't clueless and someone that thinks programing is drag and dropping components and timeline scripting. The video has to be encoded/sized properly, so that it supports GPU decoding and that its bit-rate also matches the target audience -- which is actually quite easy using Adobe's media encoder. And no, the same videos that works great on a desktop will not necessarily work the same on a mobile device. This is just as true for Android as it is for iOS, where as mobile devices need a video encoded at a different(lower) bit-rate in order to achieve smooth playback. In iOS's case, videos that aren't encoded properly don't play at all.
There's way more to this, which you'll only understand if you have real experience working with this stuff -- which I do.
youtube.com/html5
That's the reason why I allow youtube to store cookies on my machine.
flash with H.264 has not been working great.
Rubbish. Flash with H.264 is fucking fantastic. That's because H.264 is fantastic. Flash is just a set players (just like VLC or QuickTime), which can suck or not depending on the specific player, just like with any media player.
It is hell to work with, both as a user and as a developer
How so? The only way it seems to be "hell to work with" is if you let ideology get in the way.
and it don't work on mobile phones.
The Flash H.264 players don't work on most phones (and the ones it does work on, tends to not work very well), but that's why they come with their own players. H.264 on iOS is the most seamless, easy-to-use, high-quality combo of media format and player out there.
But your post begs one ENORMOUS question: what format is better than H.264? WebM? WebM is poorer quality and far less widely supported.
As a technical curiosity, WebM is interesting, but as a consumer media format it's rather pathetic. Geek tribalism and anti-patent sentiment may get you modded Insightful, but that doesn't change the reality that H.264 mops the floor with WebM (and Theora). Good luck trying to convince consumers that they should choose an inferior solution for theoretical, hypothetical, and ideological reasons. In fact, anyone who thinks WebM should supplant H.264 ought to ponder their motives. Geeks like to pretend they are above fanboyism and that they objectively choose the best tool for the job, entirely unswayed by emotion or marketing. Yeah, right...
The problem with H.264 isn't Mozilla.
No, it's entirely Mozilla. They could support H.264 with absolutely no problem whatsoever, but they won't because they mistook the reason they are so popular in the first place. Firefox gained market share because it was better than IE, not because it was patent-free (I was going to write "Free Software", but it's actually not. Hence Iceweasel).
H.264 is superior to WebM and Theora. By not supporting the best solution, Mozilla is giving up the very thing that made them great. Isn't one of the ideas behind Open Source is that it tends towards technical superiority? Apparently not.
H.264's patent licensing fees make it a dealbreaker for law-abiding indies, open source advocates and small hardware makers who don't want to pay.
Every single one of those groups can pay. As a web distribution format, H.264 is 100% free if you are non-commercial. If you are commercial, the licensing fees are low enough that you should have no problem recovering the costs. You might as well say something like, "having to pay to run a web site makes it a dealbreaker for ...".
As for hardware, the licensing fees must not be that much because pretty much every single video-playing device out there supports H.264.
WebM is free.
Is claimed to be free. The MPEG-LA seems to think otherwise. But regardless, H.264 is pretty much universally supported and technologically superior to WebM. Supporting WebM simply because it's (claimed to be) free strikes me as a rather odd thing to do. It's like saying, "let's choose the shittier option, because the superior one offends my ideology, even though it does so in a way that is absolutely negligible in terms of actual impact upon my life".
Isn't one of the ideas behind Open Source is that it tends towards technical superiority?
Free software (sometimes called open source software) tends toward technical superiority in the absence of government interference. In its presence, on the other hand, free software routes around it even if the route is suboptimal.
If you think MPEG-LA, which includes such heavyweights as Apple, MSFT, and IIRC IBM, is just gonna sulk in the corner while you snatch marketshare away from them you got another thing coming.
What do you think MPEG-LA is? They aren't primarily a profit source for it's members. For them, it's a way to get a legal codec out there for everyone to use. Companies like Apple and Microsoft have patents licensed to MPEG-LA, and in return they get a codec they can license that would otherwise be far too legally impractical (the exact sort of problem both WebM and Theora face, actually).
I'm sure if WebM gets any real traction outside of Google properties then MPEG-LA will break out their mighty Troll God hammer and lay the lawsuits of doom upon thee.
Probably, but that first requires the improbable event of WebM gaining sufficient traction.
It plays in IE9 and Safari if you install the codec on your system.
You can't install the Matroska, Vorbis, and VP8 components if you aren't root. You aren't root if you're using the PC in the break room. You aren't root if you're using a handheld media player. You aren't root if you're using a mobile phone (unless it's an N900 or an Android phone with CyanogenMod, but neither is mainstream in the United States).
open-source advocates [...] Every single one of those groups can pay.
From the GNU General Public License:
In other words, the GPL requires that the patent be licensed for freely redistributable software. If you were to ask MPEG LA for a price quote on a patent license allowing free redistribution of an AVC encoder and decoder, I highly doubt that MPEG LA would be willing to take your money. Otherwise, the x264 developers would already have asked for such a quote and started a donation drive. How much would it cost to license six billion copies, one for each potential user on this planet?
It is crucial that video creation and video editing for webm be delivered at the same time, if you want it to be adopted.
Theora video-editing/encoding/Firefox-playing is currently supported in ubuntu 9 and 10 in the standard ubuntu repositories.
CURRENTLY webm vp8 video-editing/encoding/firefox-playing is not in the ubuntu 9 and 10 standard ubuntu repos.
As it stands, theora has better support. I can even run theora videos I created on Android using the Rockplayer.
Until then no vp8 for me.
I think it's important to mention that the so-called "Flash codec" that so many people are complaining about is nearly always On2's VP6, an ancestor of WebM.
Kriston
It's Mozilla who is choosing not to support H.264 even though they can do so 100% legally and can do it without changing the terms under which they distribute Firefox.
"[T]he terms under which they distribute Firefox" include permitting redistribution to any third party. So yes, adding an AVC decoder would involve "changing the terms under which they distribute Firefox". Mozilla chooses not to make this change because its leaders feel that this change would not make the web better. You're right that this is Mozilla's choice; feel free to buy an AVC license and distribute your customized iceweasel.
Perhaps the specific word can mean both "kill" and "murder", but only the "murder" interpretation avoids obvious contradictions with other passages in which individuals are specifically directed to kill others (e.g. to enforce the law itself, since many offenses require the death penalty).
Given two possible interpretations, one of which leads to a contradiction, the rule-of-thumb is always to pick the non-contradictory version. I'll leave the question of whether that is a reasonable interpretation of the original authors' meaning or simply a way of papering over real internal contradiction to the Bible apologists.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Flash on all platforms sucks, IMO.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
As seems to, you've forgotten opera. If I recall correctly, it had WebM support before chrome (well, chrome had it in the nightlies then).
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I always thought it was Matroska.
I have IBM T42 thinkpad 1.6Ghz and I do have problem watching flash in a full screen under linux with their proprietary binary crap. The CPU power is simply not enough. Other players work fine.
Yes, it's extremely clear that I don't understand the web. In fact, I understand it so poorly that the H.264 codec that I suggest as being superior to WebM is not the most widely supported format on the Internet...
Oh wait, H.264 *is* more widely supported than WebM and Theora combined? Maybe I *do* understand things...
Makes me wonder, oh master of all things Internet, what open video format is the one that "drives the web forward"? Please enlighten me, AC.
That has not been my experience. I work at a large-ish video sharing website, and I've not noticed the problems you are claiming. Maybe on Linux h.264 video doesn't work very well in Flash, but on Windows (even 64-bit) & OS X it's pretty much flawless. As for mobile phones without flash, simply offering up HTTP or RT(S)P links solves all those problems. The only reason to move to WebM is an ideological one, and comes at a distinct price - WebM is not as good as h.264 (quality/bitrate-wise), and is nowhere near as well-supported in hardware or software. Flahs, if a user has it and wants to use it, is still the best way to stream video to browsers. HTML5 looks promising, but features such as RTMP & dynamic stream-switching are missing, and those are absolutely fantastic features to have available, both as a user and as a developer.
And Flash does work on some mobile phones.
If that's the case it sucks double-hard on Ubuntu. I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu, as apparently it was all kinds of awesomeness and made Windows 7 look like shit. Flash is an absolute shit-ball, and I'm not surprised there is such animosity towards it in the linux community if my experience is in any way common. As it is, I'm waiting to get my hands on a Windows 7 DVD, then I'll re-install that and at least be able to watch Flash without stuttering, tearing, crashes, and without the CPU melting. I don't think I've ever been as disappointed as when I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on my notebook. I've been pushing for Linux at work, as we use it exclusively on our servers (as I switched our W2k3 server over to Ubuntu 3 months ago), but it looks like I'll hold off. Ouch.
Did you even read your link? You only have to pay for content if you are charging your subscribers, or have over 100,000 subscribers per year. If you have that many subscribers, either you can easily afford to pay for the license, or your business model sucks. If you release software that has an h.264 encoder, again, if you ship more than 100,000 units per year, you have to pay. Oh, and streaming video is entirely royalty-free until December 2015, regardless of the number of subscribers.
FUD is not cool.
WebM is free, but WebM is shit. It's not as good as h.264, and isn't as widely supported in hardware or software. The only reason to choose WebM over h.264 is ideological. By the time you have to worry about license fees, your business model should be getting you enough money to cover the license. That's the whole point. WebM will end up like Theora, which was the h.264-killer-du-jour before WebM turned up on the scene.
I run linux on all my desktops, and in my experience, the 32 bit systems seem to handle it rather well; full screen flash at 720p somewhere around 30 fps on a non-hardware accelerated browser and pentium mobile processor. Hopefully gnash will be mature enough for most purposes soon.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Sorry, what does that have to do with the parent's post? Oh, right, nothing. Awesome job, Sparky. You just played into his hands.
That's cool, and restores some of my hope, but why not 64-bit? Windows 64-bit works perfectly, looks fantastic, and plays all the media I want (including Flash) without shitting the bed like Ubuntu 64-bit does. This honestly isn't a troll, but I'm so disheartened by my current Ubuntu experience (still using it, suffering greatly). I heard so much, from all over the internet, but I installed it and it's like being back in 1999 or something. Shit's well archaic. I thought FOSS had made some decent progress? I'd love to run a free OS, so very very much. God damn it.
WebKit is Open Source, including the right to redistribute binaries and source, and *it* supports H.264.
How does WebKit support H.264? Is the decoder in the source tree of WebKit itself (not necessarily Safari or Chrome), or does it rely on operating system components? According to this page, it relies on QuickTime on Mac and Windows, and the Linux version relies on gstreamer. Ubuntu does not ship the H.264 decoder for gstreamer in the default install, and it presents a scary legal notice (to the effect "if you live in the USA click Cancel") when installing it from the repository.
But you're forgetting that it's buggy as hell. It crashes all the time for me when I go to sites like The Daily Show. Also if I move my browser window to my second monitor and then fullscreen, it goes fullscreen on my primary monitor. Uber sucks since I have a 24" monitor plugged in to my 15" laptop and I can only watch flash full screen on laptop. Given these issues, do you think I'm more likely to watch the legal versions through flash player on the content owner's site, or download it through bittorrent? Flash in general is a problem.
I have a modern quad core machine, and fullscreen flash videos take up a whole core still with occasional stutter or tearing.
Also I have had the npviewer.bin process (flash) use up to 40% of my systems memory (6 gig total, so 2.4gig in use) that, is just crazy, there is no justification for it.
Easy solution is to just download the flv's automatically from firefox (things like DownloadHeler will do this) and then use mplayer or some other decent media player to play it back.
Windows 64-bit works perfectly, looks fantastic, and plays all the media I want (including Flash) without shitting the bed like Ubuntu 64-bit does.
Does anything else besides flash bugger up for you? if so what. I find general media playback far better on linux than to windows. But flash is nasty.
I find most tiny distro installs like ubuntu severely wanting in many ways, but usually they are ok for people who just want to watch movies and use firefox.
Rubbish. Flash with H.264 is fucking fantastic.
Bullshit flash has severe overhead it can't get around by default. Playing videos in a regular program is far more efficient.
As for h264 itself, most of the animosity to it would be gone the moment software patents are deemed invalid in the US (that whole, you shouldn't be able to patent math business).
Like the CPU issue, I don't really see the bugs that I always hear about. At least on the sites I visit, it's reliable enough for regular use. I don't know what I do differently to everyone complaining: I'm using the stock versions of Firefox and Flash installed from Ubuntu repos.
To be honest, I've been plagued by issues. VLC's video tears all the time, alt-tabbing takes seconds, FireFox freezes for seconds (sometimes never recovering, requiring killing from the command line), the desktop environment is poorly-designed and sometimes incredibly unresponsive (menus don't appear immediately, requiring mouse-out before mousing over again before they will show). VLC plays everything I can throw at it, but then I'm used to that as I use it exclusively on Windows, but it just does so while looking like crap on Ubuntu. It really is breaking my heart. I've decided to stick with Ubuntu to see if I can get past these issues, but I'm now over 1 week into it, and I'm remembering Windows 7 very fondly indeed. The ability to install software so easily, using the Ubuntu Software Center, is a joy, however.
So out of your example, I can't watch movies properly, and Firefox is a nasty, nasty web-browsing experience. Changing tabs lags soo much, and for some reason "backspace" isn't bound to navigating back in the history, which is just weird.
Thanks for not dismissing me as a troll, too - I really appreciate that. I wish more open discussion on the flaws of various FOSS projects was encouraged more.
No I'm not you dumbass. I have no time for badly translated fairy stories.
That would be easy to block, so I don't think it's likely. However I do hope they solve the problem somehow, it's still beta after all.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Rubbish. Flash with H.264 is fucking fantastic.
Bullshit flash has severe overhead it can't get around by default. Playing videos in a regular program is far more efficient.
I'm pretty sure I never said it was as efficient as a native player. In fact, I outlined an example to the contrary in the part of my post that you conveniently omitted.
As for h264 itself, most of the animosity to it would be gone the moment software patents are deemed invalid in the US (that whole, you shouldn't be able to patent math business).
True, but the patents are sanely licensed in this case, so it's not an actual problem, just a theoretical one. Pretty much all animosity towards H.264 is ideologically based, and not based on how things actually are.
Adobe's just now released 64-bit flash for linux again- they had cancelled it and removed the download link for months. Give it a little time, or test gnash or something. I have no idea what you're talking about when you're saying that ubuntu's archaic though. Have you tried compiz fusion yet? Used the new software center? KDE? If flash is your only issue, ubuntu should still amaze.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Have you installed graphics drivers or tried running a 32-bit version on your 64-bit comp (sorry if that's not an issue)? You might also try firefox 4 minefield or beta 7, the speed is pretty awesome. There's also always chrome or opera. From the description though, I'd guess your problem is a weak graphics card, a graphics card without drivers installed, or a graphics card with very crappy linux drivers (generally only the older ATI cards). Assuming you installed vanilla ubuntu, it should be system>adminisitration>Hardware drivers (or restricted drivers or something along those lines). Tell me if it works.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I meant in the first sentence 'sorry if that's not an option' e.g. if you have more than 3GB RAM. Last resort. Look into it on Ubuntu Forums, its a great help forum.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
and for some reason "backspace" isn't bound to navigating back in the history, which is just weird.
Backspace to go back pages seems odd to me, alt-left or right goes back and forward pages respectively, makes a lot more sense.
Thanks for not dismissing me as a troll, too - I really appreciate that. I wish more open discussion on the flaws of various FOSS projects was encouraged more.
Something is likely deeply wrong with your setup, nobody I've ever set linux up for has had any of the problems you describe, even a decade ago let alone in modern times. Unfortunately this is one of those things far easier resolved if I could actually see the symptoms.
The oss world does not like to leave itself open to attack, the projects are thinking of their own futures by not using h264. They do not want another GIF scenario again but with codecs. Even if it is not a problem now it could be in the future. oss does not think short term.
So instead of supporting a codec that is openly and cheaply licensable, and which has a significant level of confidence in not being vulnerable to submarine patents, they are rallying around two codecs which infringe upon the very organization's patents which they are avoiding?
In other words, instead of licensing H.264 from the MPEG-LA, or even just infringing upon their patents but still using H.264 (like VLC does), they are choosing alternative codecs which use those patents, but haven't licensed them?
Yeah, you're right, OSS folks do think long term... /s
Avoiding all patents is nearly impossible but only avoiding the ones you don't know about is slightly better.
MPEG-LA has every financial incentive under the sun to sue implementers of WebM if they can, squashing the competition nice and cleanly. Yet.. they haven't? This time you're talking about a potential patent threat that has not appeared.
MPEG-LA are known to be sue happy and wanting money for licenses, regardless of any current good deals, is it not better to avoid them if possible?
Avoiding all patents is nearly impossible but only avoiding the ones you don't know about is slightly better.
Right. So the patent situation with WebM and Theora is worse than with H.264. If this is truly about patents, it's strange to go with something that is even more risky.
MPEG-LA has every financial incentive under the sun to sue implementers of WebM if they can, squashing the competition nice and cleanly. Yet.. they haven't? This time you're talking about a potential patent threat that has not appeared.
And so did you. In your very next sentence:
MPEG-LA are known to be sue happy and wanting money for licenses, regardless of any current good deals, is it not better to avoid them if possible?
Citations would help. Being "known" for something and actually doing something are two different things.
H.264 is technologically superior, is legally safer, and is fairly licensable to anyone. The only aspect in which H.264 is inferior to either Theora or WebM is in terms of ideology.
H.264 is technologically superior, is legally safer,
You honestly don't think mozilla have lawyers to help determine what technology they should or should not include?
And you think those lawyers don't perhaps know the situation better than you or I?
If WebM was more of a real patent risk, h264 would have already been adopted.
If WebM was more of a real patent risk, h264 would have already been adopted.
H.264 isn't a patent risk at all. All they have to do is license it! If they don't want to license it, they can use the user's codec, and/or allow for means of installing one from a third party.
This is exactly what happens with browsers based on the open source WebKit. Firefox even does this to a very minimal extent by having a means for something like the Flash player to play H.264 video. Unfortunately, they are too bull-headed to allow for a native HTML5-based method for playing H.264.