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Opera Supports Google Decision To Drop H.264
An anonymous reader follows up to yesterday's Google announcement that they would drop H.264 support from Chrome. "Thomas Ford, Senior Communications Manager, Opera, told Muktware, 'Actually, Opera has never supported H.264. We have always chosen to support open formats like Ogg Theora and WebM. In fact, Opera was the first company to propose the tag, and when we did, we did it with Ogg. Simply put, we welcome Google's decision to rely on open codecs for HTML5 video.'"
It would be very strange indeed if, in year 2020, radio is using this codec and television is using this codec and cable is using this codec and DVRs are using this codec and Blurays are using this codec...... but the internet did not. The web would be the odd man out.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Opera are against everything and everyone, while their actual market share consists only of a hardcore minority. In other words, nobody from the real world actually cares what Opera think, and there is no news here.
Opera's user base is only a hardcore minority? You want to take that outside punk?!? Just kidding, not like I'm ever going AFK
The article ends with, "It will be interesting to see if major browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari will follow the suit and drop support for H.264."
Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264? Google claims no patents at least, so that would in this case be if it's too similar in some regard to MPEG LA patents. But if we are to dismiss codecs on the basis of pessimistic probably's, we won't approve a single modern video codec at all. What matters is that the format has, after scrutiny of the FSF, been endorsed, that Google has irrevocably released all patents of VP8, and that there are signs that On2 made an effort to avoid MPEG LA patents in designing the format. It doesn't really get much better than that. We'll always have the doubters, the pessimists, but we can't base decisions on possibilities, only facts. At least in a world that is moving forward as quickly as the IT world.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
She should stick to getting her TV channel up and running, and not meddle in the technical details of how the video is encoded and viewed.
everyone, get your zencoder instances fired up
- Fun & Work : http://thegearjunkie.com
Naah. At least this way we won't go back to the days when to view a video you needed 10 different plugins from 10 different vendors.
Or we could... use... flash, till someone write a proper codec with no strings attached? You know flash? Its that thing the web's been using for a few years now. Yeah I know its proprietry, but the player is free.
Opera is still the most widely used mobile web browser worldwide, according to Statcounter. But perhaps mobile is irrelevant in the real world.
Funny comment to make after Opera kindly endorses Google and open codecs (= not against this, rather the contrary).
Against everything and everyone? Is h.264 really that big?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
And h.264 is no more proprietary than Flash with the added advantage that the standard isn't controlled by a single company well-known for producing buggy insecure software...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Most 'flash video' you watch now is h.264 in an flv container.
Yup, there is very little evidence other than Google's claims that WebM is really patent-free.
There was a VERY good analysis of WebM from one of the x264 developers (admittedly there could be bias there, but my opinion was that it was high on technical content but low on bias.) - http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
There was at least one component of WebM that the x264 developer felt WAS patent-encumbered. However there is a potential for a prior art challenge on that one.
The WebM/VP8 spec is apparently AWFUL. Almost as bad as, if not worse than, Microsoft's OOXML spec.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
What, all the megacorps and patents behind the h264 licensing aren't to blame? Your logic is impeccable.
That can only be achieved with patent free software, like the move Google just did with Chrome. Proprietary software or patented software will always have lawyers stopping the delivery of products that 'just work'.
The argument remains that for the end user/browser they don't have to pay the h.264 license. Yeah I would prefer it if we get weaned off proprietary stuff, but for now this'll do
Gruber gets to the root and calls BS:
"Regarding Google’s stated explanation for dropping H.264 support in Chrome:
Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give content publishers and developers using HTML an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their sites.
In addition to supporting H.264, Chrome currently bundles an embedded version of Adobe’s closed source and proprietary Flash Player plugin. If H.264 support is being removed to “enable open innovation”, will Flash Player support be dropped as well? If not, why?
Android currently supports H.264. Will this support be removed from Android? If not, why not?
YouTube uses H.264 to encode video. Presumably, YouTube will be re-encoding its entire library using WebM. When this happens, will YouTube’s support for H.264 be dropped, to “enable open innovation”? If not, why not?
Do you expect companies like Netflix, Amazon, Vimeo, Major League Baseball, and anyone else who currently streams H.264 to dual-encode all of their video using WebM? If not, how will Chrome users watch this content other than by resorting to Flash Player’s support for H.264 playback?
Who is happy about this?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Even if WebM is completely "liberated" and free of patents, they'll still get sued by the MPEG lawyers (they said they would). And WebM supporters might still lose depending on the incompetence of the judge, who might think WebM is infringing.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Every time this comes up the meme is that they're waiting for someone with deep pockets to sue. Well, Google has extremely deep pockets. If Google can use it with impunity without getting sued, you can be sure this is nothing but patent FUD. And if Google is sued, well at least there will be a real trial on the validity of the patents. Either way there's no reason for Opera or Mozilla or anyone else not to join in as long as Google leads the flock.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Since Gentoo only provides Chromium, I haven't had built in support for h.264. I don't miss it. 99% of the videos I watch are on Youtube which is obviously owned by Google. If Chrome will only support WebM then so will >90% of the online video market (Youtube alone).
Yes, .264 is that big. It's embedded into just about every consumer electronics device that plays video. All the smartphones have hardware accelerated .264, all the settop boxes have .264, etc. It's not that these things couldn't get WebM support, its that it took 6 years of arguing in committees and standards boards to get everyone to agree on h.264 and then another 3 years or so for a significant number of products to end up on store shelves and then another couple of years before those devices became a major percentage of devices. Basically you're looking at around 10 years to go from codec to ubiquity.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
THANK YOU. I was about to say the same thing. If you're watching Flash, you're watching MPEG4's H264 codec most of the time.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Because then you'd have to pay money to use Firefox in 2014 with h264 support, and Firefox would violate the GPL unless you paid. It would also segregate those that paid and those that did not.
Remember the time when you had to pay money to buy a browser? 15ish years ago?
Citation:
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/h264-royalties-what-you-need-to-know.html
According to the “Summary of AVC/H.264 License Terms,” which you can download from the MPEG LA site (www.mpegla.com/ avc/avc-agreement.cfm), there are no royalties for free internet broadcast (there are, however, royalties for pay-per-view or subscription video) until Dec. 31, 2010 [extended to 2014]. After that, “the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.”This makes royalties payable for “free television” the best predictor of where internet royalties will stand in 2011. Under the terms of the agreement, you have two options: a one-time payment of $2,500 “per AVC transmission encoder” or an annual fee starting at “$2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households, $5,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at least 500,000 but no more than 999,999 television households, and $10,000 per calendar year per Broadcast Market which includes at 1,000,000 or more television households.”
This isn't just free as in beer, it's free as in free of cost.
*This isn't just about free as in beer, it's about free as in free of cost.
Fucking typos.
According to this article IE and Safari, through plugins, eventually.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
...how many desktops use opera as their browser again?
It's bizarre - they all seem to think that decisions like this will simply be followed by the users, when the reality will be a) find a plugin, or b) go get a browser that does it already. Like IE9 :-)
Please add Firefox and Chrome users to the tally. I personally don't care what the codec of choice will be, but from watching the long and miserable existence of Flash as a whole I appreciate having diversity and genuinely free software.
So your solution is that we should go with the 100% patent encumbered codec instead? I fail to see how this solves the problem. With WebM, at least we have the possibility of a free and open solution.
Yeah I know its proprietry, but the player is free
And cross-platform. We just got a big snowstorm here in Illinois, and when I went to look up road conditions, the page informed me that Silverlight is required -- and Silverlight won't run in Linux, nor will it run on any version of Windows prior to XP, or on an old Mac ( just acquired an old Mac a few nights ago).
Free Martian Whores!
While both have an obvious bias in this, I'd rather trust the word of Google with its armada of IP lawyers than one x264 developer. Especially since Google will take the possible courtroom fight.
It bothers me - this isn't some codec that's up'n'coming, it's something that's in use *right now*, and it isn't some buggy app like Flash.
It reminds me of Open Office - 'hey, let's set the default format to something that *no-one uses* - oh, why has our userbase not exploded?'
Now the question is, why in hell should my browser support H264 when it's the OS that should support it? That's the exact reason for a Standard. Support by the OS and keep the many software packages as lean as possible and yet everyone is bitching that Opera and Chrome have dropped support when Firefox included it since it's supported by the OS through a plug-in. Windows Media Player for MS and Quicktime for Apple. What does *nix have? Nothing legal that I'm aware of
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
...companies brag about dropping features or touting ones they never had.
Except that a company distributing a flash plugin wouldn't have to pay Adobe a helluva lot of money, whereas a company that distributes an h.264 decoder has to pay a damn lot of money for a license.
I'm sorry, I must have misheard that; did you just say that Flash works, universally, on all browsers?
Might help with your silverlight-on-linux problem
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Moonlight_(runtime)
Isn't perfect (far from it), but certain things work.
It bothers me - this isn't some codec that's up'n'coming, it's something that's in use *right now*, and it isn't some buggy app like Flash.
It reminds me of Open Office - 'hey, let's set the default format to something that *no-one uses* - oh, why has our userbase not exploded?'
Well, H264 isn't the first codec and won't be the last; I'd prefer everything just working without a hitch, but it's less likely to happen when device makers have to pay license fees to add support for codecs or contrainers. And what, Open Office should've used something outdated or a closed proprietary format?
The problem here is that multiple parties all have valid conflicts of interest, but lack of standardization hurts us all. Here's how:
So, can the big parties come together and create a compromise that will help everyone, or are they more interested in hurting one another than in helping consumers? Here's what I propose. All major browser/OS vendors commit to h264 support for a period of six years, then agree to remove said support; as part of the HTML5 transition. After six years, all browser vendors agree to support WebM. This gives content providers a plan going forward and gives companies that make cell phone chipsets time to integrate hardware support for WebM and for phone makers to incorporate those chips in their designs. People with six year old phones would still have shitty battery life at that point, but I suspect that will be well past the lifespan of a smartphone.
Naah. At least this way we won't go back to the days when to view a video you needed 10 different plugins from 10 different vendors.
Looks to me like Google by doing this is trying to refragment a market that looked like it was going to be ruled by the one codec to bind them all, H264.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Maybe the Linux community will see this as a more important change than most people, due to their software options. (Obviously, Linux users aren't huge Internet Explorer users, nor do they use Safari browser as a rule. They're also more likely than others to use a version of the Opera browser.) But all in all? Apple was just recently pushing H.264 as one of their preferred codecs, so it'd be crazy for them to go along with pulling it from Safari. (Didn't they just recently convince YouTube to convert a whole bunch of former Flash based videos to H.264 format?)
I don't think Google Chrome has exactly taken the world by storm either, so their failure to support a popular codec like H.264 will just serve to further relegate the product to "niche use only". This would have MUCH more impact if FireFox was going to pull support for it, instead of Chrome doing so.
Except that Firefox already said it wasn't going to support it. So that's 30% of the market fragmented already.
I remember the days when computers had these things called codecs, and you could simply add support for just about any format. No one ever removed functionality, it was all about adding support for more and more formats.
This would have MUCH more impact if FireFox was going to pull support for it, instead of Chrome doing so.
Firefox doesn't support it in the first place.
When H.264 was designed, a strong attempt was made to avoid any patent encumbrances. (Or, more precisely, to keep the codec entirely royalty free.) It didn't work, and this is not likely to work for the same reasons.
I wish software developers would stop playing politics with software and just deliver products that work
what part of the word 'politics' didn't you understand?
::sigh:: I write free software, for free. While I try to "just deliver products that work" by ensuring cross platform compilations work, and adding features users request, I am not always CAPABLE of complying due to patents.
I was going to add support for H.264 encoding and decoding to one of my projects, but I simply can't afford the license fees or to charge the users for each copy.
So, I'm faced with -- use external libs which is not exactly "just works" if you don't have the lib installed, eh?
For the video conference feature I chose to write my own codec to avoid all these "politics", sure, it's re-inventing the wheel, but screw it, I want my product to just work...
As it turns out, H.264 and other codecs have patented such obvious solutions that my "clean room, from scratch, never have looked at any other codec source" code infringes upon H.264 patents...
It would be great to just say, "Hey, I wrote all this code myself, it just works, everyone can use it for free", unfortunately, patents prevent me from doing so.
Don't blame the developers. The users aren't willing to foot the legal bills and chance getting sued by Apple, MPEG-LA, etc, neither am I. Software Patent's Suck!
Well, what's the most popular word processor in the world? That might be a good place to start - if you want your alternative to have any sort of chance.
OS, Proprietary...it makes no difference if everyone is *already using it* - Otherwise you may as well bitch about NTFS and the like. Working in the industry, you tend to define 'standard' as what everyone is actually already using, not what someone has decided would be best on your behalf. If it were that simple, I'd have everyone on Amiga's and we'd be getting the same work done with a tenth the memory and storage use. Sure, you can *steer* the likes of MS towards one technology or another, but writing apps that simply ignore them is usually commercial suicide.
Chrome with it's IE-plugin is the right sort of approach - introduce people to something new without insisting they abandon what they're using now.
It's a shame everyone's waited twenty years to start pretending MS/ Windows doesn't exist, and it's hugely ironic that everyone's so FF-friendly when it was their parent company that ensured everyone moved onto IE in the first place by deciding that we all wouldn't mind paying £30 a pop for Netscape.
The reason Mozilla gave for supporting certain video formats in the browser instead of using system implementations is consistency. It avoids cases where one system has a codec installed but another doesn't, leading to hard-to-reproduce problems. It also avoids problems where different platforms' implementations are buggy or implement less than the entire spec.
JPEG, GIF and MP3 all have/had encumbered with licenses yet they are still to this day, web standards. I never hear anyone complain about seeing JPEG's on their web page be it web developer or end user. It's only an issue to people who place ideals over practicality. People are listening to billions of AAC and MP3 files on a daily basis without complaint (and with hardware support).
Which leads me to the next point. What practical reason do I have for wanting h.264 support in a browser? Because I get hardware-based decoding with h.264. It saves my battery time and leaves my CPU free to do other more important tasks. With WebM or Theora I get software decoding and thus a less responsive machine with a shorter battery life.
Perhaps most importantly, the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media. Given Theora's performance compared to WebM and h.264, I certainly hope Ogg isn't responsible for pushing r&d into codecs for the future. Open source is great. I use it every day and can't imagine how much more difficult computing would be without it but the great bulk of its work has been with reproducing free/open versions of existing products and paradigms, not at pushing the boundaries of research and development.
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
It's not the developers, it's the corporations that the developers work for that are playing politics.
Free Martian Whores!
Is h.264 really that big?
A search of Google Shopping returns about 67,900 hits for "H.264."
The H.264 camcorder ranges from the $150 "Flip" to the $21,000 Panasonic AG-3DA1 which records 1080/60i 3D to two 32 GB SSDs.
H.264 is supported by your HDTV. Your Blu-Ray player. It is deeply entrenched in theatrical production, home video, broadcast, cable and satellite distribution, medical, industrial and security applications. Towards Diagnostically Robust Medical Ultrasound Video Streaming using H.264
This would have MUCH more impact if FireFox was going to pull support for it, instead of Chrome doing so.
Firefox never had support for H.264 in the first place
I'm curious as to what you base that on. The only thing I can find is that they've promised not to pursue any patent claims against people streaming H.264 video for free, however they will still do it for all others (including encoding for free), so I wouldn't say they've really gone out of their way.
Yea, its not like the money Mozilla makes from google and other advertising that they couldn't spend a little bit of that on a license for the codec or anything.
Don't confuse personal agenda and bullshit about why someone is/isn't doing something with reality.
H.264 is dirt cheap, they most certainly could work out a licensing deal to suit Mozilla.
There is no doubt in my mind that doing so would be about 6 billion orders of magnitude more productive than most of their other retarded projects. Tell the CEO of your fanboy club to cut his bonus this year and you'll pay for h.264 licensing for the next 20 years.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Anything worth keeping is also worth fighting for. The problem is that a large number of people do not actually do anything to protect the things they value. If you want to see a world without patent abuse, you have to actively engage - donate to the EFF, call your Congressman/woman, educate people on the issues, buy some advertisements, etc, etc.
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
At least now we have some what of a chance to have an open web without any plugins. Gif, Jpget and Png are already free and now since over half the web browsers (Chrome have 10%, Firefox have 40%, Opera have 5% [or some what in that region]) won't support H264 the web sites have to use either Ogg or WebM at least as a second option. But since you have to convert your movies either to Ogg or WebM anyway and you don't need to pay license fees with the two, web sites are good to use just Ogg or WebM and just leave H264 in the dust. Hurray for Google. Now if Google would drop Flash for Youtube (after FF and IE support the new video tag) and make WebM the only codec for Youtube we could say bye bye H264 and welcome to open web.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
png: Created because of licenses/patents on Jpeg and GIF
Ogg: Created because of licenses/patents on MP3
The only reason you have hardware-based decoding with h.264 is because Intel/AMD/Nvidia were ask/told/paid to do so.
If someone adds WebM hardware-based decoding, people will flock to it.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
That sounds interesting. Source, please?
That link has been superseded, in that free H.264 on the Internet is free in perpetuity, not until 2014:
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/blogs/mpeg-la-announces-no-royalties-on-free-internet-videos---ever.html
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
Because when Microsoft fragmented the web, they reimplemented open and free standards, threw in a bunch of their on stuff in them an then forbade everyone else from using it unless they were using Microsoft products. When Mozilla and Google are fragmenting the web, it's about taking proprietary, patent encumbered, closed standards and opening them up enabling free innovation. That's why.
Just curious, what is your program and how did you reinvent the wheel ?
Having done some programing in video, encoding is not all that evident. I would be interested in seeing the source code.
Going back to flash good for the web?
Making all sites return to a proprietary solution when there is an open standard already existing ?
BTW H.264 is run by a standards comittee, not just one company. WebM is owned entirely by Google.
Google wants to be the new flash.
The problem with that logic is that it's strategically useful for Google to push WebM even if it does end up requiring a patent license pool.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Strangely enough, Flash manages in a free product.
Mozilla could afford the licensing fees, but they don't wish to. They can't pass on their license to other Mozilla partners like linux distros who build their own packages, and think it's worth either the monetary cost or the cost to the ecosystem.
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2010/01/23/html5-video-and-codecs/
They estimate it would cost $5mil, and they had revenues of $104 mil in 2009. They could afford it if they deemed it necessary.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/annualreport/2009/sustainability.html
BTW, I think Mozilla, opera, and now Google did the right thing for the web ecosystem, as I have the mid-term view in mind. I just think it's worth examining the likely outcome in the short term and long term also..
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
People are really glossing over the IMPORTANT side of this decision - YouTube.
YouTube is by far the largest source of online video on the web, and it is owned by Google. Until now, YouTube's HTML5 version used H.264 encoding. By dropping H.264 from Chrome, Google would in effect be making YouTube incompatible with their own browser. They are not going to do that.
What this points to, is YouTube is very likely to switch to WebM itself for HTML 5 video in the near future. This has HUGE ramifications since IE 9 is not slated to support Web-M - which would mean IE 9 would not work with HTML 5 YouTube, while every other browser did.
This may be the actual whole reason behind this decision - to indirectly force Microsoft's hand in supporting open video in IE.
Basically, a formal statement of the Not Invented Here attitude problem. Never mind the fact that, say, the H.264 codec installed in all modern OSs is probably substantially better (and properly licensed, if needed) than the one included as an afterthought by your browser...
Still waiting for them to start shipping their own printer drivers, too. You know, in case there's an inconsistency. Because at least as many people print from their browser as watch video in it, so I don't see why the same reasoning doesn't apply - other than the fact that the Mozilla Foundation would rather lock everyone into their walled garden of Correctness, that is.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Serious question - why not just use the OS libraries, available on all major platforms, supporting every single codec the users already have installed and not supporting the ones that they don't have installed? Using a subsystem is not quite the same as seeing if a random shared library is on the machine somewhere, after all.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Sadly, only _certain_ things work, and they never are _needed_ things. Anyways, I'd rather boycott this technology alltogether (why in the world, would we need another flash, only from Microsoft, and with a worse cross-platform compatibility?)
png: Created because of licenses/patents on Jpeg and GIF
Ogg: Created because of licenses/patents on MP3
Both wildly successfull, huh ? I guess you see PNG used these days but how long did it take to become moderately popular and today does your camera save PNG's or still those nasty encumbered JPG's ?
The only reason you have hardware-based decoding with h.264 is because Intel/AMD/Nvidia were ask/told/paid to do so.
If someone adds WebM hardware-based decoding, people will flock to it.
Everyone is already buying h.264 hardware. It has been tested, it's cheaper 'cause everybody already buys it and it offers compatibility with already available content. Do you think they'll flock to hardware they'll have to support in addition to existing hardware (for backwards compatibility reasons) with all software development and testing costs that entails ?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
The codec you describe exists. We call it VP8: it's more or less as good as h.264, it's patent-free (MPEG LA denies this, but so far they have refused to provide any evidence) and it's libre.
If my post wasn't clear, I think the short term outcome of not supporting H.264 in HTML5 is bad for the web, in the medium term it is good for the web, and in the long term it is neutral to slightly bad.
I'm mostly trying to have people consider that things can be bad for a time and still be good overall, and perhaps that this is even the most common case in legal matters. Also I wish to help people make their arguments about this topic more clear by naming and focusing on the timeframe they think is important.
H.264 is an open but not free standard. The patent grant is both costly and non-transitive. WebM is a closed standard, with a libre and transitive license and patent grant and libre reference implementation.
H.264 High Profile is without question technically superior, but WebM should be able to come near to the quality of H.264 Main Profile.
That's a whole lot of trade-offs to consider, and I fully suspect that others will disagree with me on whether this is a good thing or not in any particular time frame. Personally, I think Mozilla, Opera, and now Google are doing the right thing in terms of both programmer and end user freedom for video on the web.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
it's more or less as good as h.264
Nope. A shame, but at least it's better than Theora.
I'd rather have them spend the money on something usefull. Even if they buy the license, they will not be able to transfer it to any other products, that will be based on mozilla.
Ogg Vorbis is pretty common standard for video game audio because you don't have to pay royalties for implementation. So in that way it's pretty damn successful. Speex (their voice chat codec) is also fairly commonly used for VoIP, presumably for the same reason.
Isn't it a bit hypocritical that Google adds Flash support to Chrome and then decides to remove H.264, claiming it wants to support "open formats?" This is crazy. Give users a choice, and support the more popular format.
Firefox would violate the GPL if they provided actual h.264 support in any manner other than a user-addable plugin for it. Simply put, they're going to HAVE to find some other way- because that quote you're referring to is not in perpetuity, places restrictions on the code using it that the GPL doesn't allow, and quite simply can change at any time. Not a good answer to rely upon there.
You mean like installing the codecs already on my machine and exposed by my OS's graphics subsystem? Nah... that'd never work. Next thing you know, they'd be using the OS to print documents, too.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Adobe's Flash player isn't Free in the sense of Free Software. Flash just doesn't cost the end-user anything.
If they included it in their browser, they'd either violate the patent licensing conditions, or the code licensing conditions.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Actually, contrary to what the parent poster claimed, PNG was only designed to replace GIF. It doesn't have lossy compression like JPEG. Which also explains why your camera saves JPEG. You wouldn't get as many PNGs (or GIFs, for that matter) on the chip.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Adobe's Flash player isn't Free in the sense of Free Software. Flash just doesn't cost the end-user anything.
Flash is a free product, just not a Free or libre one. RMS does not define the word free.
If they included it in their browser, they'd either violate the patent licensing conditions, or the code licensing conditions.
Source?
They could have decided to provide it linked in their official downloads, but not in the free version, much like Google did with Chome(included H.264) and Chromium(did not). They just decided that was the wrong thing to do from the perspective of freedom on the web.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
WTF. We need a +-0 totally ignorant mod.
No it wasn't. In fact quite the opposite. Every company at the table tried to get as *many* of their patents into the spec. Hell the spec reads like a stack of patents.
Even if they spend the money it still would not be legal. Since GPL requires that others have redistribution rights, and patent licenses violate that. Its not just the fee, its what you have to sign to pay the fee.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
FUD plain and simple. More users of H.264 have had patent claims leveled against them at the court level than theora and WebM combined.
The list of people that claim they are going to sue Linux this, or webM that is large. Not one after years worth of waiting have done so. Its 100% pure BS.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
You maybe onto something, I too once thought of creating a program to be downloaded free of charge by millions and instead of reinventing the wheel I thought i'd just reverse-engineer and copy-paste someone else's work quite sure that I'd never be sued/billed for infringement/use of copyright, patents or otherwise. OO btw is doing okay... well, by my standards at least.
What is the reason to coddle people who have been stuck using inferior stuff e.g. IE? The chrome plugin is more of a developer quirk and a workaround for people who have to use older IE's, not really a sane solution for anyone else. Let's not pretend that for most users there's something about IE that's missing from everything else and that transferring bookmarks would be that much of a hassle.
Unfortunate for Netscape, they didn't come with a somewhat expensive OS and the internet wasn't the huge marketplace it is now, yet they gave IE a run for their money. Thanks though for SSL and javascript, one I love and the other I somewhat loathe.
JPEG has always had a royalty free version. Always. Pretty much the *only* version of the spec that is used.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
I always said they should've specified a baseline codec in the HTML5 standard that had to be supported for the video tag. At least then there would be ONE thing that people had to support or be called out as breaking the standard.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Mozilla cannot legally include h.264. Its the law. How can that be their fault?
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Its only free in the sense that you don't pay to stream it to someone under specific conditions. You still have to pay for encoders and decoders.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Honestly, if they can change the time back to when someone would have to pay even if it never comes, they probably would backpedal and charge say right now if there's billions of dollars worth of money they are missing out on. I wouldn't put it past anyone simply because of human nature.
And what is the strategically useful position of encumber h.264 folk? To claim patent infringement regardless of a real legal case, or any intent to have a legal case.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Okay, so they buy a license for 'web browser plugin to support h264' instead of firefox.
Its just another plugin, its own separate product that other browsers are welcome to use as well.
This isn't rocket science really, its not even new. Hell, on my systems all it has to do is allow the use of any native video codec and it'll work. I already HAVE NATIVE h.264 encoders with my OS or as products I bought on the side.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
[citation needed]
Mozilla could certainly license H.264 and distribute Mozilla binaries with H.264 if they chose too, they just couldn't do it under their current tri-license stream.
Currently, Chrome ships with H.264, but the open source Chromium does not.
Mozilla could do a similar thing, they just don't think it fits their project goals, and would harm projects like Wikipedia and downstreams like Linux distributions who would like to rebuild from source themselves.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
"You still have to pay for encoders and decoders."
True, which costs me ~$0.10 per device that I purchase. That is nothing to pay for best video codec available to me.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
How is that? Isn't the flash plugin also an h.264 decoder which would be required to pay license fees?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Why would it "probably" be as patent encumbered as h.264?
Dark Shikari, a developer of x264, made an extensive analysis of WebM / VP8. Here is his summary regarding patents and VP8 (for details read the blog):
Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. It’s quite possible that VP8 has no patent issues, but until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem. Most importantly, Google has not released any justifications for why the various parts of VP8 do not violate patents, as Sun did with their OMS standard: such information would certainly cut down on speculation and make it more clear what their position actually is.
...or on an old Mac ( just acquired an old Mac a few nights ago).
I have yet to be able to install Silverlight on my 27" iMac (latest iteration from this summer), the installer just crashes. So as far as I'm concerned Silverlight is pretty much not cross-platform at all, it runs on Windows and that's it.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Any browser can support both through plugins.
Rethinking email
Agreed, pity Apple decided to pull their little political stunt with the W3C last year rather than just deliver a working Theora codec (or just bundle the Free one) and calling it a day, we could've avoided this whole mess from the start.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
You do know Theora was part of the official HTML5 standard until Apple raised a bitchfest of epic proportions to usurp it for their own gain, right?
It's not Mozilla and Google who are getting a 'free pass' here, they're just trying to fix the mess Apple created.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
One advantage of WebM over H.264 native support in the largest browser share. With Videos in that format from the largest video provider on the net...I think that also covers the rest of the rant too. I'm a little confused by your comments regarding cults Google, Mozilla and Opera are companies who have made these choices based on whether they get to roll around on piles of money...or Steve Jobs does.
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
We complained about Microsoft because they were using their browser development and bundling to make the Web as proprietary as possible - specifically, they were trying to make it hard for web designers to build services for anything that wasn't Internet Explorer and ActiveX. Complaints about H.264 are consistent with, not contrary to, the gripes many of us had with Microsoft when they were trashing the Web. Google, Opera and Mozilla are doing the right thing here because H.264, unlike XML and JavaScript, is proprietary. The Web always gets better when open standards gain wider acceptance (think RSS, Ajax, and RSA encryption). Video will be no different.
MP3 is seriously showing its age at lower bitrates. 96kbps AAC+ and Ogg both sound MUCH better than 128kbps MP3 in my opinion. They have an analog falloff for the information that couldn't make the bitrate, so they sound much more natural to our ears. I can pick out the harsh harmonics from low bitrate 128kbps MP3 streams from shoutcast and icecast very easily.
I was always happy with MP3, and am for >192kbps, but the alternatives sound much better below this.
We need everyone to agree on one codec :(
Unfortunately that is simply not likely to happen
Mozilla can't implement h.264 without both paying quite a lot of money and more importantly violating the core principles of being an opensource project and they refuse to use OS level implementations because they believe in consistency across platforms.
Apple and nokia refused to implment theora claiming submarine patent risks. Whether that was the real reason or whether the real reason was a vested interest in pushing h.264 remains unclear.
IIRC MS has been sitting on the h.264 side as well though i'm not sure of their reasons.
Google has brought VP8 along as a third option but so far they don't seem to be doing a very good job of bringing the likes of apple arround to it.
I think the only way this will truely be solved is when the patents on h.264 expire :(
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
If "Freedom" means surfing to 15 different websites to download and install yet another plugin then that is an enormous step backwards. The web should just work without these hassels - go to an address and get your content. The plug-in installing is also a big step backwards as far as the security of the net is - you have more and more users using outdated and insecure software, installing stuff they don't necessarily understand except to see something and I think we can see that this is just a disaster ready to blow up.
What this is doing is simply fragmenting the video codec space for absolutely no positive gain. No developer is going to waste time coding for another codec when flash already supports all their needs and it is more ubiquitous than WebM will ever be. So in the end everyone just codes it in flash like before as getting another tool to make video just isn't worth the effort, especially since it is technically inferior.
Also WebM is a completely closed standard which means you depend entirely on the good will of Google. They could very well decide tomorrow that your video streams now have to support an advertisement stream or be prepadded with extraneous "enhancements for the user experience" like we have seen happen with flash.
Plus the odds of hardware support for a closed standard is pretty close to nil. This is why we don't see video cards with hardware support for flash, but plenty with hardware h264 decoding. This means that thanks to this your computer will now be dog-slow like with flash.
"should come near to the quality" is fundamentally a step backward as it is not superior.
The only thing this has done for me is to remove Chrome from my computer. The information gathering tactics of Google and now this shows that they only have the intention of dominating the internet, firstly by data mining and now by controlling even the codec video is placed in.
Completely nasty move on their part. They claim they want freedom - but only if it is theirs.
A more reasonable approach would simply open the video tag api to allow for the OS to render the video portions, and then the whole licence problems would devolve to the OS and not to the browser itself. All major OS's have support for h264 out of the box - even Linux via x264.
I agree that you shouldn't become a dipshit. My primary reason is that you seem taken by the notion that the smart phone will replace the PC, which informed people know will never happen.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I didn't say it was the only reason why they might sue. I said that was a very common explanation for why they don't sue, even though they claim to have patents that apply. Google has very clearly and loudly claimed WebM is patent free, if the patents have any credibility at all now is the time to use them. Google has gone all in, and it's time to either call or fold and there's really no other way to interpret folding than that your bluff has been called.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
H.264 is an open but not free standard. The patent grant is both costly and non-transitive. WebM is a closed standard, with a libre and transitive license and patent grant and libre reference implementation.
Also, remember Theora is still available in multiple browsers, and other codecs will appear in the future. A vote against H.264 is not necessarily a vote for WebM, though it is probably the best choice at the moment.
No hardware support you say? Hardware rendering of WebM in soon to be shipped hardware was shown at CES:
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/01/availability-of-webm-vp8-video-hardware.html
http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/12/chips-delivers-vp8-hd-video-hardware.html
I know of no linux that has x264 out of the box. In many countries, it's illegal to use x264 without paying licensing fees, as all encoders and decoders require licenses. Today there are 3 legal ways to play H.264 on Ubuntu in the USA: the Flash player, and http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/complete-set-of-playback-plugins/ and Google Chrome.
Freedom is freedom for innovation. You want to build a new video software application or hardware device with H.264? Time to pay the piper. And the piper doesn't sell 10 packs of licenses.
You want to charge for video on the web? You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes.
With most video cameras that support H.264, you're breaking the law if you use them for commercial purposes. http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA
We need a free format for video to be widely supported. What would have happened to the web if you had to buy a patent license to create commercial content, servers, or browsers? It would have a few thousand users probably.
Innovation matters. Don't burden the future with what might make sense today.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Let me clarify, as my statement isn't clear:
I think in the short term this will push many sites back to flash video, in the medium term it will be good for the web, and in the long term patents don't matter, so H.264 is probably a better choice *from that perspective*.
I support dropping H.264 as a good move, as innovation matters, and patented H.264 will stifle innovation. Pushing everyone to support non-patented WebM/theora/Dirac/etc as an option at least is the best move.. Unfortunately the only way to make that a viable option is to drop support for H.264. Otherwise MS and Apple are unlikely to ever support non-H.264 codecs.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
"You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes."
This simply isn't true. People make h264 movies (your phone uses this format) and upload them to youtube and have been doing so for at least 6 years.
You only need a license fee if you are produce content to sell, and usually it only concerns units of 10,000 or more.
In any case the idea that WebM is free of patents is also questionable.
It's not innovation because it isn't doing anything better, nor improving anything in any measurable way. Rather it is destroying what progress had been made in unifying video formats.
As is the case with specialists. We spend time thinking about these issues. We analyze. We influence. It is only a win win for everyone that doesn't. They rely on us. The problem is with those specialists that won't take the time. They won't influence. This change will matter. And greatly, given enough time.
It is best to get off a proprietary product controlled by a company that threatens to sue everyone over patents with most being questionable.
We need to be off one codec and to spread it around. Imagine the market if Intel had remained the only processor supplier.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media
Best but illegal. Illegal is not a starter for a universal standard. Why are we even having this conversation?
When the MPEG-LA patents expire, then and not before will H.264 be in the running for a standard. Till then, there's "open" and there's "illegal", and MPEG-LA have decided to make implementing their algorithm in GPL code illegal. So sad, thank you for playing, next. End of line.
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving MPEG-LA a free pass when, however shiny their beads and blankets are, they are trying to do the same thing?
Fixed that for you.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Read the whole thing again:
You want to charge for video on the web? You can't use H.264 without paying licensing fees, and they don't talk to small potatoes.
Yes, you have noise about threat of patent for Theora for over 6 years(still no action), and WebM for 7 months (no action).. What we have is FUD against 2 probably open standards vs 1 definitely patented one.
And once again:
Also, remember Theora is still available in multiple browsers, and other codecs will appear in the future. A vote against H.264 is not necessarily a vote for WebM, though it is probably the best choice at the moment.
This is MUCH broader than just H.264 VS WebM. I can legally do whatever I want with WebM, Theora, and Dirac today. If I break the H.264 patent agreement I get willful infringement charges, with WebM it would be much lower normal infringement charges *if* patents ever are asserted.
Formats will come and go, but we have one chance to push for open vs closed ecosystem.. The Internet is a great argument for open, remember AOL and compuserve was once better also..
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
You do know Theora was part of the official HTML5 standard until Apple raised a bitchfest of epic proportions to usurp it for their own gain, right?
It was a proposed part of the standard. Apple was one major company to step in though, but they had some pretty good reasons. Apple makes iPhones and they are trying to sell them partly on the fact that they use less battery. Part of that is using dedicated hardware for playing video. They have millions of existing devices out there they cannot retrofit to do the same with WebM. So it sounds like what Apple did was because it benefited Apple, but because in turn it benefits Apple's customers and making them happy makes Apple more money.
This is not an insolvable problem though. WebM support can be built into hardware. A few companies have proposals for chips and they say they will do it if the format takes off. Apple could convince them to start finishing those proposals and adding support right now. They just need a reason to push their vendors and eat a small cost for more expensive hardware going forward. So why isn't Google trying to make a compromise deal that they support h264 in Android and Chrome for a set number of years in exchange for Apple promising to add WebM support to Safari, OS X, and iPhones as soon as they can get hardware support added?
If Google is really serious, this should be their proposal. If, however, they're more interested in trying to gain smartphone market share at the expense of open standards and consumers, then they should continue on as they are, complaining about Apple, while secretly enjoying Flash's gain in market share which helps them accomplish that.
You don't need to be an open source zealot to appreciate a big problem: Not included in open source products means for example "not included in Firefox" (which is what, around 30% of all browsers out there?).
>>>This change will matter. And greatly, given enough time.
In time, H264/MPEG4 will be as open and free as WebM. This is a bit like a pyrrhic victory: Given enough time, say ten years, you may succeed in making "open source codec" the internet standard..... but by that point, H264 will be open source too. You could have won the battle by simply sitting on your ass and waiting a decade.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Temporary measures seldom are, and for anyone that wants h.264 that badly there's always Flash anyways, it's just Apple refuses to implement *that* one due to their personal vendetta against Adobe.
The obvious solution would be to adopt WebM as the official standard, work on putting both software and hardware in place over the next couple years, and implement Flash/h.264 as an interim solution while HTML5 is finished, to take advantage of any pre-existing h.264 acceleration. Which was exactly what we had before Apple's bitchfest except with Theora rather than WebM, what Google seems to be going for, and what Apple would be going for if they were really interested in furthering open standards on the web, rather than abusing their position on standard bodies to further their own personal wars against Adobe and Google.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Do yourself a favor. Don't link to an eight-month-old article on a codec that is seeing constant development in both Google's libvpx and FFmpeg's ffvp8. The results don't mean anything anymore.
Put identity in the browser.
The spec doesn't matter much because there's a BSD-licensed reference implementation. The Internet was founded on such things.
Put identity in the browser.
Temporary measures seldom are, and for anyone that wants h.264 that badly there's always Flash anyways...
Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.
The obvious solution would be to adopt WebM as the official standard, work on putting both software and hardware in place over the next couple years, and implement Flash/h.264...
Why Flash at all? Anyway, Google is not willing to do that since they say they're pulling support for h.264. If Google actually cared about the users, they'd commit to supporting h.264 until a specific date in order to benefit end users so those users aren't stuck with Flash.
...their own personal wars against Adobe and Google
They don't really care about either. They care about profits and they're fighting that battle the right way this time, by trying to make a better product. It just so happens that h264 is the only codec that works best for their customers NOW. And you expect them to agree to a standard that has worse battery life or is closed and under the control of a company that has been ignoring the need for security and stability and performance forever? Sorry, but you're completely blinded by partisanship on this one.
Google can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting Flash and using Flash support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.
MP3 is used by more than alpha geeks. Most people that aren't bound by the ipod seem to listen to mp3 (with .ogg being a very distant competitor). Also, amongst online streaming radio, mp3 is very popular. To call it a dead codec, or one that is only sustained due to 'alpha geeks', is simply not true.
MP3 is still so popular due to it's legacy. Those of us that have been collecting digital music since the late '90's are loathe to give it up, despite technical and intellectual property advantages of other formats.
And how much for a license for unlimited copies and redistribution?
JPEG has NEVER, EVER, been encumbered.
GIF was believed to be free, it was only just before the patent expired that Unisys decided they could extract some money from the unsuspecting.
MP3 is a popular format, but it has never been a web standard. And people started using it because, like GIFs, there was no sign anyone would try to collect royalties at the time. Not to mention all those in countries where software patents can't even be legally enforced... and today, you'll mod definitely get irate geeks if you post MP3 files, screaming about this Ogg Vorbis thing. Which I always though was odd, since Musepack has been around longer, and is undenyably the best high quality lossy audio codec around, as all frequency domain codecs have unavoidable artifacts, and Musepack and MP2 are the only time domain codecs you've ever heard of. Why MP2 isn't more popular is beyond me.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
> Mozilla were the first ones to take a stand,
1) Not quite. Opera actually took their no-H.264 stand first.
2) Apple took a no-Theora stand at the same time as Mozilla took a no-H.264 stand, iirc. That discussion took course over just a few days over email, so the timing of who was "first" is more related to when people checked their inbox than anything else.
Of course Apple's no-WebM stand postdates all of the above, since WebM wasn't around at the time.
No they can't. There is no price that MPEG-LA will permit redistribution. Period (if they did then that would be the only license fee they would collect as anyone who wanted the codec could just download FF etc). Thus any patent license they can get is a violation of the GPL and Mozilla license. This is well known. You can't be legally compliant of both patents and the GPL on this one.
Mozilla and FF cannot have a closed source version (aka a binary version thats different) without a total rewrite, as this would violate the copyright of many contributors.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
And how much for a license for unlimited copies and redistribution?
QFT
Its not just the fee. Its the licenses conditions you have to agree to pay the fee.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
>>>100% patent encumbered codec instead?
I couldn't give a shit if it's patented. VHS was patented. Ditto CD and DVD and LaserDisc and 3.5" floppies, but I made out just fine. They didn't stop me from enjoying entertainment, and neither will the use of MPEG4 in radio,TVs,blurays,et cetera.
Besides: MPEG4 won't be patented forever. It's only 10 years away from being public domain (like webM). All it requires is some fucking patience. And finally: WebM is inferior. MPEG4 can create VHS-quality video at dialup speeds, and FM-quality at just 14 kbit/s. WebM doesn't even come close..... switching from H264/mpeg4 to WebM is like dropping down from 1080p to 720p.
I think it's a bad move.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
You don't *have* to copy & paste code just to get something to save in a format - plenty of non-MS apps already save stuff in .doc format.
And with browsers, there's no pretending - if you run Exchange (which a huge number of sites do), and you users want to use Outlook Web Acces (which they always do), it's IE-only if you want all the features to work. Instantly, any other browser is pointless.
After that, you're then trying to justify supporting two browsers, two sets of patches, two sets of Internet/ Intranet 'zones', two sets of GPO's (which FF sort of supports, but the others don't - so no corporate control, another deal-breaker). Home users can switch between these apps in an instant, whereas corps are more like a huge truck - it takes ages to turn, to the point where it *really* has to be worth turning...and usually it isn't.
Or how about the chairman trick? Show your chairman how the FF his son loaded for him allows you to show all the passwords in English with two clicks. *By default*. Queue lots of spluttering from the chairman - now image in IE was that exposed out of the box...Gates would have been stoned to death.
As for open office, last year I read their CEO claiming a userbase based on the *number of downloads*, "which means lots of people must be using it" (Ri-ight). And for any serious-size company, the amount of integration with Access (as a front end), Outlook (because of Exchange) and Word (forms, etc.), OneNote, not to mention training people means that OO has never really been a serious contender. MS Office has been king for twenty years because there just isn't anything else as good or as integrated.
And you'll need to define 'somewhat expensive OS' - compare Windows 95 to Windows 7, and look at a) how much software now comes free (AV, Antispam, defrag etc.) then look at home much 95 used to cost compared to Win7 x64 costing £100 - I don't call that expensive. I do wish that the linux crowd had spent more time coming up with working alternatives instead of (for instance) bleating about how AD was just LDAP with bells on.
For the video conference feature I chose to write my own codec to avoid all these "politics", sure, it's re-inventing the wheel, but screw it, I want my product to just work...
You're joking, right? Please tell me you are joking and not insane!
"While both have an obvious bias in this, I'd rather trust the word of Microsoft with its armada of IP lawyers than one x264 developer. Especially since Microsoft will take the possible courtroom fight."
See, I just replaced one company with another in your post. Microsoft made the SAME promises as Google did with VC-1 ("It's patent-free! Use it!")
Six months later a bunch of patent holders crawled out of the woodwork and asserted them against Microsoft and there is now a VC-1 patent pool. (Note: Microsoft is NOT the holder of any of these patents. In this case VC-1 remaining patent-free was in Microsoft's business interests.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Flash player is free to download and free to develop for. Adobe charges for its own flash development software but anyone can make software for it. Adobe has published the file spec. Thus distributing a browser with the built in flash plugin, as far as I know, does not require payment to Adobe.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think that not everything in the office doc-formats is inherently free - MS will have patents to implementations and I doubt they've waived all of them. We come back to using outdated/restricted stuff vs. truly opensource and free.
Corporations using exchange and having to go 100% Windows because of it, meh, why not. Should this force everyone else to do the same? No.
FF passwords; yeah, it's better to lie to users that their passwords are absolutely safe in the registry where no one can find them or that autocomplete equals secure because you can't see the password. Default settings are rarely safe, they're mostly expedient. I don't use FF, don't know if there's a way to set password protect them?
On the OS comment; IE has MS, MS has Windows, Windows means revenue and control which were lacking from Netscape.
This is what's odd - everyone's keen to jump on/ fine MS for ther likes of IE and WMP, but .doc format? No one even whispers. NTFS file system? Not a peep. Which is mad - to me these things are far more in the realm of 'should be accessible by all'.
You're right - everyone else *shouldn't* have to use what corps do, but it's nearly always corps that drive this sort of thing, and as a result most non-tech people are keen to use what will get them a job, not what the 'standard' is.
FF passwords - most users don't even know what the registry *is*. Alternatively, *any* user can find their way to the password list. And a properly set up Windows domain won't let you see the autocomplete files and won't save *any* passwords - but that's IE's fault; they made it open assuming everyone would lock it down, when the only people who actually do that are corp-employed domain admins. Then everyone jumps around shouting about how unsafe IE is - why don't they do the same with FF? Why does no-one point out that allowing updates *every time you start the browser* might not be for the best? I'll certainly knock MS when they deserve it, but it grates that other co's do the same and no-one says squat. Don't even get me started on Apple.
As an aside - I love Slashdot! Most of my comments are usually based in reality and experience - the way things are, as opposed to the way I wish they were. It's usually the only way to find a workable way forward.
As a result, I've never had a comment with a score higher than 1. Which made me move to reddit, where at least you can press people to *justify* the downvote.
Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.
Adobe's Flash implementation, there's nothing stopping Apple et al from writing their own. Vector graphics and animation are more complex of course, but as far as online video is concerned FLV is nothing but a thin container over the same old h.264 they're trying to promote.
Why Flash at all? Anyway, Google is not willing to do that since they say they're pulling support for h.264. If Google actually cared about the users, they'd commit to supporting h.264 until a specific date in order to benefit end users so those users aren't stuck with Flash.
Because Flash is already here and in place on all major platforms. The real problem here isn't Flash, it's h.264 so continuing support for HTML5 h.264 would not only do nothing to solve the major problem here, it'd divert resources and focus from the true solution: WebM. Well, or Theora, but WebM is technically superior without any of the legal disadvantages of other "solutions".
They don't really care about either. They care about profits and they're fighting that battle the right way this time, by trying to make a better product. It just so happens that h264 is the only codec that works best for their customers NOW. And you expect them to agree to a standard that has worse battery life or is closed and under the control of a company that has been ignoring the need for security and stability and performance forever? Sorry, but you're completely blinded by partisanship on this one.
They care about increasing their profits at the expense of enterpreneurs and the free market itself. You really expect Google to agree to a so-called "standard" that forces anyone making tools even remotely related to internet video to pay a fee to an oligopoly or risk bankrupcy in a patent lawsuit?
You're so focused on your illogical hatred for Flash that you're willing to hand over the free market to an oligopoly just to see it dissapear a couple years sooner.
Apple can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting h.264 and using HTML5 h.264 support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.
Fixed that for you.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
constant development
Unfortunately not. As the article mentions, those are finalised specs: any changes would result in VP8 decoders no longer working with newer VP8 files.
Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.
Adobe's Flash implementation, there's nothing stopping Apple et al from writing their own.
That's your solution? No one has managed to write a compatible Flash implementation with Adobe's. It's a huge monster of spaghetti code that is bloated far beyond anything needed for a video playing codec. Moreover, it's a closed standard with more patent issues that h264. What problem, exactly, are you trying to solve here? This is about Google supporting Flash and not supporting h264, thus pushing the closed Flash over the open h264.
Why Flash at all?
Because Flash is already here and in place on all major platforms.
So is h264! Except H264 is already here and has good performance and stability on mobile devices, while Flash is a turd on mobile platforms. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
The real problem here isn't Flash...
Yes it is. Google would like you to think it isn't, but Flash is still the dominant video player and Google is supporting it by building it into Chrome and promoting it on Android as a differentiator. Buy an Android mobile device and you can have "all the Web" including Flash (even though it will suck). Google makes money by Flash being dominant because it sells their mobile OS which gets them more advertising bucks. If Google was honest about wanting to support open standards, they'd drop Flash way faster than h264.
You really expect Google to agree to a so-called "standard" that forces anyone making tools even remotely related to internet video to pay a fee to an oligopoly or risk bankrupcy in a patent lawsuit?
No, I expect them to agree to support multiple codecs in their browser, until there is proper hardware support for WebM. Instead they're forcing everyone to use Flash, which is a closed standard run by a single vendor with a history of security and stability problems. Gee, that sure is better. Entrepreneurs don't have to pay to play or encode things with h264 because the codecs are built into Windows, OS X, and Linux (nor Android nor iOS) and exposed via APIs. It's already paid for by the OS makers
You're so focused on your illogical hatred for Flash that you're willing to hand over the free market to an oligopoly just to see it dissapear a couple years sooner.
My hatred of Flash is very logical. They've been screwing us all over for years and are still dominant in the market. I'm more than willing to put up with an open standard that might be patent encumbered for a few years, especially with a scheduled transition to a non-patent encumbered open standard. In fact, that's a much better solution than an immediate switch to WebM, because a switch today would leave everyone with an existing mobile device stuck with shitty battery performance. I don't really see the drawback to eliminating Flash NOW and scheduling the elimination of h264 in 2 or 4 or 6 years when enough phones have moved through the market to make hardware support fairly standard.
Apple can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting h.264 and using HTML5 h.264 support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.
Umm, great and all, except it doesn't make sense. Apple isn't using h264 support as a differentiator because almost everyone already supports it including YouTube and Chrome and Android. Rather, Google is pulling support for it to create a differentiator. What Apple isn't doing is supporting a single vendor locked in system called "Flash" and despite your rampant Google fanboyism you haven't been able to justify a good reason why Google who claims they're acting for the good of the people with open standards is pushing Flash other than to make money.
That's your solution? No one has managed to write a compatible Flash implementation with Adobe's. It's a huge monster of spaghetti code that is bloated far beyond anything needed for a video playing codec. Moreover, it's a closed standard with more patent issues that h264. What problem, exactly, are you trying to solve here? This is about Google supporting Flash and not supporting h264, thus pushing the closed Flash over the open h264.
Step one: download video FLV from a website. Step two: drag&drop it to VLC. Step three: enjoy your video. Flash video (ie, the only problem HTML5/h.264 attempts to solve) has already been solved ages ago.
So is h264! Except H264 is already here and has good performance and stability on mobile devices, while Flash is a turd on mobile platforms. Are you being intentionally obtuse?
HTML5/h.264 is barely used outside of a few clips on Youtube, Flash is everywhere. Within the context of online video HTML5/h.264 is barely bigger than HTML5/WebM, don't bring up camcorders or any of that irrelevant trash here, you ain't gonna be watching the movie you just recorded on a freakin' web browser unless you're a tech-obsessed nerd.
Yes it is.
No it isn't. Flash is free to use and redistribute, (other) h.264 encoders and decoders are not. HTML5/h.264 is a much larger threat to the future of the internet than Flash, regardless of what your Google conspiracy theories may tell you.
Umm, great and all, except it doesn't make sense. Apple isn't using h264 support as a differentiator because almost everyone already supports it including YouTube and Chrome and Android. Rather, Google is pulling support for it to create a differentiator. What Apple isn't doing is supporting a single vendor locked in system called "Flash" and despite your rampant Google fanboyism you haven't been able to justify a good reason why Google who claims they're acting for the good of the people with open standards is pushing Flash other than to make money.
Everyone *but* Apple already supports Flash, so by the same argument Google can't be using it as a differentiator either. And the simple reason they support it, which you can't admit due to your hatred of it, is that Flash is everywhere, with over 99% of users having it installed and multiple websites taking advantage of that. HTML5/h.264 however is not, therefore they can kill it off right now rather than having to wait a few years until WebM is mature enough to replace it.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Flash video (ie, the only problem HTML5/h.264 attempts to solve) has already been solved ages ago.
And you don't think a "lite" Flash player that only does video and breaks for other sites would be a problem for anyone? Sure.
HTML5/h.264 is barely used outside of a few clips on Youtube
You mean except for all the movies rented via iTunes and a dozen other, smaller online rental places, oh and all the natively recorded video from everyone's phones, like the ones people automatically upload to social networking sites. h246 is quite popular and huge number of sites have to it from flash in just the last year, momentum that was good for all of us since they were moving away from Flash and in a smaller number of cases away from WMV.
...you ain't gonna be watching the movie you just recorded on a freakin' web browser unless you're a tech-obsessed nerd.
Yeah, because no one uses a camcorder that is also a phone and which automatically uploads to web sites. Absolutely no one.
No it isn't. Flash is free to use and redistribute, (other) h.264 encoders and decoders are not. . HTML5/h.264 is a much larger threat to the future of the internet than Flash...
Seriously, that's your belief? You haven't seen any of the dozens of major security vulnerabilities resulting from Flash, nor the sites locked into using tools from a single vendor, nor Adobe's refusal to support Linux or other OS's, nor the huge number of browser and even OS crashes directly resulting from their crappy coding, nor the abysmal performance of Flash on many platforms including mobile? None of that is a problem for you and being locked into a single vendor product is better than being locked into an open standard where tools can be made by anyone? You are so hopelessly biased it is pathetic.
Everyone *but* Apple already supports Flash...
If by "supports" you mean it runs on some phones and runs a limited version on other phones and all of them end up having really, really lousy performance and drain your battery. Flash is a pile of crap on mobile devices and it's a pile of crap because it's locked down by a single vendor, so until they lose market share on the Web, they don't care that is sucks for users.
...so by the same argument Google can't be using it as a differentiator either.
Put down the crack pipe and pick up a dictionary. A differentiator is a feature you have and a competitor does not that you use in marketing to try to convince consumers. Google has absolutely been using Flash support (support for a closed standard) as a differentiator. I provided an example of their marketing already. Really, are you so absurdly biased in favor of Google that you truly believe they never do anything shady? Pull your head out of the sand. Google does a lot of good things. They're a fairly respectable company. I have friends that work there, good people dedicated to open standards. That doesn't mean Google doesn't occasionally do something greedy or harmful in the name of profit. It helps when the tech community points this out and calls on them to reverse their decision. It gives those people at Google who want a better choice on behalf of the community leverage to make changes. Your blind support for a harmful decision just makes things worse.
HTML5/h.264 however is not, therefore they can kill it off right now rather than having to wait a few years until WebM is mature enough to replace it.
And in the process they make all those Websites that were switching away from Flash switch BACK to Flash with no reason to ever move to WebM because it has the same performance penalties as Flash (which they will evaluate now, not in a few years). I don't know if Chrome will be enough to make a difference, but it's just another thing pushing people to Flash and that hurts us all.
>>>100% patent encumbered codec instead?
I couldn't give a shit if it's patented. VHS was patented. Ditto CD and DVD and LaserDisc and 3.5" floppies, but I made out just fine. They didn't stop me from enjoying entertainment, and neither will the use of MPEG4 in radio,TVs,blurays,et cetera.
Besides: WebM is inferior. MPEG4 can create VHS-quality video at cellphone speeds, and FM-quality at 90s dialup speeds (14 kbit/s). WebM doesn't even come close..... like dropping down from 1080p to 720p. I think it's a bad move.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I don't really see the drawback to eliminating Flash NOW and scheduling the elimination of h264 in 2 or 4 or 6 years when enough phones have moved through the market to make hardware support fairly standard.
I see one: Flash is so "open" that currently there are no fully-usable alternatives; the guys at GNash, Lightspark and SWFDec are working on it, but it'll take a while to replace it. However, there is an alternative to h264 that is good enough, and that works now. Again, there will be a few drawbacks for WebM on mobile devices until the upcoming hardware with full VP8 support starts to replace current devices, but unless MPEG-LA manages to eat everybody's brains and force h264 as a standard, it's just a matter of time.