Microsoft Makes Chrome Play H.264 Video

nk497 writes "Chrome users will be able to play H.264 video — thanks to Microsoft. The software giant today unveiled the Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome, which will let users of the Google browser play H.264 video after it was dropped from Chrome over licensing issues. 'At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web including the ability to enjoy the widest range of content available on the internet in H.264 format,' said Claudio Caldato, Microsoft interoperability program manager."

Comments

And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[eldavojohn]

"At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web"

Ohhh, right, that's why Ogg Theora isn't natively supported in Internet Explorer. Maybe you could concentrate on improving the support, capabilities and experience in your own browser before bothering to extend other browsers?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

"At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web"

Ohhh, right, that's why Ogg Theora isn't natively supported in Internet Explorer. Maybe you could concentrate on improving the support, capabilities and experience in your own browser before bothering to extend other browsers?

Google had the chance to back theora a long time ago. at one point safari was the only browser bothering with h.264

I would wager IE would still be on the fence if google didn't bring in 264 support when it did. The fact that they are now flip flopping on their position now that 264 is prevailing as the common standard to me seems really two faced. If they really cared about using an open codec they should have made as big a deal about it a year ago, not now.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no, they don't support a format no one gives a shit about.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

Adding support for H.264 is actually useful, unlike Theora support. Also, it's largely a game of upsmanship, basically saying, "here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[zn0k]

Anything that increases choice is a good thing.

It's not like there isn't a very well documented interface to IE. Why don't you write an Ogg Theroa plugin for IE, rather than complain that Microsoft wrote something that is both in their interest and useful for users that do want to use h.264 as well as use Chrome?
Or use the VLC media player plugin, which - at least according to the Wikipedia page on Theroa - lets you view that format in IE and Firefox.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[ifiwereasculptor]

I guess Microsoft employs obstetricians as their strategists. "Push! Push! Push!"

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Theora is also quite useful, given that the Wikimedia projects only accept free formats. You're not going to be able to upload your video in H.264 there, and they're a big enough player for this to actually matter.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[grimsnaggle]

But nobody uses Ogg Theora.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[peragrin]

Well that and google made the chrome frame for IE. updateing IEE's poor javascript engine with something a bit more modern.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[alen]

code an activeX plugin and you should be OK

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[shentino]

If they made a stink about it back then they might not have gotten any traction. You don't throw stones when you're in glass houses unless you want to have a rain of glass shards cutting you to smithereens before you have a chance to lay a decent stack of bricks.

Something about not cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[zn0k]

Or it increases user's choice in regard to browsers as users who don't care about the patent background of video formats can now choose to use Chrome without losing the ability to watch h.264 videos.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Beelzebud]

Depends on your definition of "choice" Does the average user care about the choice "to use free software that doesn't have patents", or about the choice to "watch this video I wanted to see"?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore6502]

>>>"here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

This seems awfully familiar. I think I recall reading something similar on wikipedia:

""Embrace" AOL's IM protocol [or Google browser]. "Extend" the standard with proprietary Microsoft addons which added new features but broke compatibility with AOL's [ror Google's] software. Gain dominance since Microsoft had 95% OS share and their MS Messenger was provided for free. And finally, "extinguish" and lockout AOL's IM [or Google's VP8] software, since AOL was unable to use the modified MS-patented protocol."

BTW I wrote this paragraph two years ago. Thank you. :-)

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have an interest in Ogg Theora, then please, provide a plugin for IE that enables it to play that format. This is what Microsoft has done in Chrome. And they've done it just to spite Google!!

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Quarters]

If and when "the best experience of the web" includes needing support for a little known and poorly named video codec than maybe the parent comment would be reasonable. With the small percentage of wanted content on the Web that is encoded with Ogg the post comes off as both trollish and ignorant. Ignorant of the minuscule demand for Ogg Theora and ignorant of the fact that a PR quote can't reasonably be held as factual relative to the opinions of everyone.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[nschubach]

...on Windows machines.

That's really what's it's about (IMHO) Microsoft would rather keep you using pay/patent protected codecs because they can slip them in on a bulk license while keeping other alternative OSes (mainly Linux) from having that support (for legality/monetary reasons.)

If an open codec were popular, anyone could use it and people may not miss Windows support for 'X' codec that isn't available elsewhere.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore6502]

>>>Theora is also quite useful

Yes it is, but I think HE-AAC (plus SBR) is more useful. It can provide CD quality as low as 48k and AM quality as low as 12k. Give it a try: http://www.radiojackie.com/listennowpage.asp

Neither MP3 or Theora can touch it. And yes I have to pay an extra penny or whatever for my AACplus player, but the better sound quality for small files is worth it. (Same reasoning goes for why I prefer MPEG4 video over VP8 or MPEG2.)

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

This isn't embrace, extend, extinguish. H.264 is an open standard, not a proprietary MS modification to an existing standard.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[poetmatt]

adding extensions to chrome is actually horrible, unlike theora support. It's largely a game of making the browser less secure, basically saying "please install this microsoft sanctioned addon into chrome to make your browser more vulnerable".

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[nschubach]

The problem with this approach is that Microsoft pushes the plugin they wrote out to all those chrome users on Windows.

Will they push my ActiveX plugin to allow alternative formats in IE to all their users as well?

There's a definite imbalance of power there. One one side, the users are going to get it (usually in some obscure patch message: "Improve Internet Explorer experience.") and the other; the user has to go out and manually obtain the plugin.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[PenguSven]

Oh yeah, it's the lack of H.264 support that's stopped Linux on the desktop from taking off. Sure. You keep telling yourself that.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore6502]

>>>VLC media player plugin which...lets you view that format in IE and Firefox.

random question - Why does VLC refuse to play Audible files? I thought it was supposed to support that codec. Seems very odd the Windows Media player can play something VLC cannot.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Zelgadiss]

Oh I don't know about that.

We are trying to standardize on a video codec for HTML5 after all.

Maybe they would just set WebM as baseline and give an option to use another codec if the site developer so desires.
Of course that would require MS and Apple to get on board the WebM train...

Whatever.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... the whole reason it's not useful is because it's NOT in IE.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

Theora is also quite useful, given that the Wikimedia projects only accept free formats. You're not going to be able to upload your video in H.264 there, and they're a big enough player for this to actually matter.

Not even close. I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever. I bet most people aren't even aware that there *are* videos on wikipedia.

If they were big enough to matter, people would already be installing Theora plug-ins or switching over to browsers like Firefox in order to view Theora videos. You'd hear iPhone and other smartphone users complaining about lack of Theora support. There would be how-tos on playing Theora content. Etc.

None of this is happening. Wikipedia itself is pretty huge, but their impact on the multimedia market is insignificant.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it that every comment that somehow undermines Microsoft (even when they just did something USEFUL and good) gets modded directly to Insightful?

Oh that's right. Microsoft is always evil.

Mod me down all you want, you know I speak the truth.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore6502]

>>>H.264 is an open standard

Is it? I thought it was a Patented standard like Bluray, DVD, VHS, et cetera. They let you use it for free, but only if you make less than ~1 million dollars, else there's a ~10 cent per unit fee.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

No, the whole reason it's not useful is that nobody uses it. Not being in IE may play a factor in it, but it's not the "whole reason" by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

Yes, I'm sure there will be countless exploits that use maliciously crafted H.264 videos to target Chrome users that have installed MS's H.264 plugin...

I've seen some extremely tenuous FUD before, but wow!

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Nethemas the Great]

I fail to see the relevance when everyone will be running Chrome on Android and OS X.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

"Anything that increases choice is a good thing."
I hear that quite often. It's a generalization. And like many generalizations, it's utter nonsene.
Increased choice can easily have unwanted consequences. In this case for example the move could help tip over browser usage to an IE dominated market again. I'm pretty sure only a limited group of VERY silly people would see that as good.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[westlake]

Ohhh, right, that's why Ogg Theora isn't natively supported in Internet Explorer

Google Shopping returns 76,000 hits for "H.264."

Product in stores now.

41,000 hits for "H.264 camera."

Including tens of thousands of CCTV security cameras, medical and industrial imaging systems you just might want to view through a browser.

28 hits for "Ogg Theora."

Google Video returns 130,000 hits for "H.264 Video."

877 hits for "Ogg Theora Video."

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[nschubach]

That's not the only reason... I never said that.

But it's most likely one reason. I can't count the number of times I had my Mom tell me she couldn't open some video and it turned out to be a codec issue. Otherwise, she liked the system I setup for her to try. In the end it boiled down to: "I couldn't open everything so-and-so sent me" so I had to set her up with a VM for XP.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

Yes, it is an open standard. And yes, it contains patented technology. It is not a free standard.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[TrancePhreak]

Neither is h.264, or any other video codec. They are all handled by WMP. Install a codec and watch it magically work.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

As a game of one-upmanship, I propose a new tag for these types of articles...titfortat.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[zach_the_lizard]

And now you can't make any opensource implementation of it. That's why Theora and the like are useful; everyone is free to implement it.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[adamstew]

Because audible files are DRM'd It may support the codec, but you also need to support the encryption/decryption method as well.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[SuricouRaven]

There is a very good reason Microsoft is supporting h264. It holds a good chunk of the patents needed, and stands to make a great deal of money of licencing fees. The more popular h264 gets, the more money they make. Apple is another major patent-holder. Google is not. They don't make anything off h264. Sometimes, it just comes down to 'follow the money.'

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[SuricouRaven]

Because, although it supports the codec, it does not support the container. Audible's .AA files are propritary, and undocumented. They also use DRM measures, though I don't know how sophisticated these are.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[asvravi]

On Slashdot, only such comments can get modded +5 insightful!

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Omnifarious]

I consider H.264 support in any browser to be of negative utility. It encourages the prevalence of a heavily patent encumbered format on the Internet, which is bad for everybody, except possibly a few large players like Microsoft (though ultimate I don't think it's in their best long-term interests either).

So, in my opinion, they just added a freedom exploit to a previously useful browser.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[h00manist]

>>>"here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

This seems awfully familiar.

Yes, but we users have done nothing about it. We continue to accept "standards" that are not made by neutral, user and usability focused groups. All "standards" have now been abandoned to corporations, which is increasingly meaning less interopability, more expensive and proprietary products, and more dependence on the corporations. As time goes on we will reach a situation with no standards whatsoever where the simplest things become increasingly complex, expensive, and in more and more cases, not doable for economic or practical reasons at all.

Corporate-made "standards" very often have clear, well-known interests behind them, and at the very least the standards bodies can do is denounce those cases and tell everyone to reject them. Some cases, like PCI or USB for example, are well-intended, beneficial for everyone.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[basotl]

I believe it has been used on Wikipedia and even had a push to be the defacto format there. Though yes it is a minor used format.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Thundersnatch]

"At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web"

Ohhh, right, that's why Ogg Theora isn't natively supported in Internet Explorer. Maybe you could concentrate on improving the support, capabilities and experience in your own browser before bothering to extend other browsers?

Because Ogg Theora is a peice of shit, techincally speaking, when compared with H.264 (or even when compared with WebM). There's no point in supporing an obscure, inefficient format which nobody uses or wants.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[icebike]

Adding support for H.264 is actually useful, unlike Theora support. Also, it's largely a game of upsmanship, basically saying, "here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

Upsmanship?

More like feathering ones own nest.
After all, Microsoft is a member of the H.264 Licensors. They stand to profit by the continued adoption of H.264.

Actually, I can't even see Google getting all fussed about this, because they will not have to pay a license fee in 2016 because its not part of Chrome proper. Microsoft may not need to pay either, since as members they may get a free pass (just speculation on my part there).

It isn't about Theora, and there are potential third party patent claims against Theora too.

The whole point Google Still, there is no reason to run head long into H.264 believing there will be no end to the free use of this rat's nest of patents. Did we learn nothing during the GIF saga? With the time available, the orderly move away from H.264 is clearly the way to go.

So view this Microsoft offering for what it is, not so much as a shot across Google's bow as it is a way of protecting their own pocketbook, even at the expense of their own browser offering. Its all about the future revenue.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhh, right, that's why Ogg Theora isn't natively supported in Internet Explorer. Maybe you could concentrate on improving the support, capabilities and experience in your own browser before bothering to extend other browsers?

Ask a 5th grader test.

Do you have an OGG player?
Do you have an MP3 player?

Note results.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[yuhong]

Yea, they adopted Ogg quite early, and I think Jimbo was personally involved (see the mailing list archives). I still remember reading the complaints on the media help talk page.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

It is also a play against apple, since chrome in windows will have h264 support, but chrome in osx wont.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Jonner]

Adding support for H.264 is actually useful, unlike Theora support. Also, it's largely a game of upsmanship, basically saying, "here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

It's useful for those wanting MPEG-LA and its member corporations to dominate all media on the web. It's not useful for those who want it to be un-encumbered. While I don't care much that IE doesn't support Ogg Theora, I do care that it doesn't support WebM as the latter is actually starting to be popular and has a much better chance of becoming a useful standard format (even if it's only a de facto standard).

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[jellomizer]

Yes it is an open standard. It is not free. Get over it. And their license model is simple. You can use it for free... But if you make a lot of money off of it then you should pay. It really isn't that evil. GNU freedom is on the hard left. Closed standards for use by anyone who will pay a lot of money up front is to the far right. Why can't we bask in some middle ground.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[icebike]

random question - Why does VLC refuse to play Audible files? I thought it was supposed to support that codec.

Because Audible is a patented format encumbered with DRM.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Kjella]

Ogg Theora was pretty much a repeat of Ogg Vorbis, except that Theora is actually worse than the format it tries to replace and video is a much bigger patent minefield. Same open source fanatics, same arguments, very little corporate support, very little hardware support but somehow everything would be different this time around.

Hell, even the ogg container completely failed to compete with mkv. Just about the only thing coming from that direction I've seen in use is FLAC, which is apparently a quite good lossless format (size and complexity, lossless is of course lossless).

I think even Google will find that dethroning H.264 is a huge undertaking, if they didn't own YouTube I wouldn't think they stood a chance. If they can offer a superior WebM experience there, then maybe. But I'm still not going further than maybe.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they don't. The plug-in needs to be manually located and downloaded by Chrome users. I installed it this morning and it seems to work fine.

The biggest problem I've seen so far is that Google is blocking the HTML5 video player on youtube.com for Chrome users, forcing it to only use Flash or WebM.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[v1]

Its worth noting that there are many many MANY exploits that own windows explorer via PDF, gif, and jpeg. (PDF being the worst offender)

As long as chrome is properly sandboxed it's not a big deal. But when clowns decide to integrate the browser into the OS, sandboxing becomes both difficult and critical, and things tend to go south. (as with IE) So although this does increase exposure, it doesn't have to increase RISK.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[GameboyRMH]

Shouldn't Wikimedia accept WebM as well then?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple holds a grand total of 4 out of more than 1100 patents on H.264. Calling them a major patent holder is hell of a stretch.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

And then make those try to play a Ogg Vorbis files... and surprise a lot of those MP3 players can play it.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[BenoitRen]

Anything that increases choice is a good thing.

Not always. There is something like "too much choice", and there are things we want to standardise on.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[vadim_t]

What need is there for the middle ground?

First, the terms aren't simple at all. Go ahead, read that, and tell me you really know what that says.

Second, when faced with a choice of:

A. Free forever, no matter what
B. Free unless I happen something to infringe on something in 97K of text.

Why would I be crazy enough to go with B? The terms are updated every 5 years, so there's little guarantee that something that isn't a problem now won't be a problem later.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[pizzach]

"At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web"

Ohhh, right, that's why you created ActiveX.

Fixed that for you. Much shorter too.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[A beautiful mind]

Actually, it's not an open standard either, at least as defined by the European Union, the world's biggest IT market by GDP.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

More than likely there is some bulls*** hidden in the Windows Media Player extension for Chrome EULA that lets it legally send your browsing data to Microsoft for analysis. A few days ago I would have thought I was being paranoid to think this, but it is exactly what Microsoft did with its suggested sites 'feature' in Internet Explorer.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[tomhudson]

The standards, because they ARE standards, do NOT specify a video codec. That's implementation-defined. h.264, because it is encumbered, is NOT something that can be considered as part of any truly open standard.

Didn't we learn anything from MS-Office Open XML?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore64_love]

>>>A. Free forever, no matter what

GIF is free forever.
JPEG is free forever.
MPEG1 is free forever.
And MPEG2/4 will be free forever too in just a few years. (Yes I consider a decade to be a "few" years - those decades just fly by when you're old.)

Eventually even patented stuff becomes free, so why choose an inferior Theora or other OSS Codec that sounds like "shit" at 12 kbit/s when I can use the soon-to-be public domain AACplusSBR codec that sounds great?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[damnfuct]

This is impressive! The 32 kbit HE-AAC feed sounds about as good as a 128 kbit mp3 feed. A quick look at the spectral view (32 kbit HE-AAC was about 45 seconds behind the 128 kbit mp3) of the HE-AAC shows nicer high-frequency handling in the 128 kbit mp3 (not nearly as blocky; looks more like a regular recording).

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[LifesABeach]

I'm hoping that with all this open source experience that m$ is discovering, maybe they can apply it their listing flag ship browser with respect to current standards like CSS, XML, HTML, and the list goes on.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

and they're a big enough player for this to actually matter

No, they aren't.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore64_love]

Isn't WinAmp and VLC Player open source? (shrug). Well it's free anyway (zero cost), and it uses HE-AAC so that dismantles your argument that MPEG-produced codec cannot be used by Free players or Free browsers like chrome, firefox, etc.

If WinAmp and VLC can include built-in support for MPEG standards, despite the 1 cent per unit cost, so too can other free software.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[vadim_t]

By the time the patents expire, they won't matter anymore. We'll be using another codec, optimized for 3D, or whatever.

Eventually even patented stuff becomes free, so why choose an inferior Theora or other OSS Codec that sounds like "shit" at 12 kbit/s when I can use the soon-to-be public domain AACplusSBR codec that sounds great?

You don't even know what you're talking about.

First, 12 kbit/s is a tiny bandwidth. Any codec sounds like shit at that bitrate, and it's the sort of thing that gets used maybe for cell phone audio. Nobody's squeezing video into that. The bare minimum for music is about 10X that.

Second, a good codec would be able to obtain good quality in a small bitrate. That is, if Theora could encode watchable video at 12 kbit/s it'd be freaking amazing, on the level of breaching the speed of light. Theora's problem is exactly the reverse, that good quality takes a higher bitrate than H.264 to attain.

Third, WebM has a nearly identical quality to H264. So there's no reason to go with an unnecessarily restricted codec.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I just read they are adding webm support though!

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[KingMotley]

Actually, it is an open standard as defined by the EU. It passes all those tests. It isn't a royalty based fee, and less than $.10 per unit is a "nominal fee".

FYI - The North American GDP is $16.2 Trillion vs the EU at $14.2 Trillion. So it's isn't the largest by market by GDP.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[A beautiful mind]

Actually, it is an open standard as defined by the EU. It passes all those tests. It isn't a royalty based fee, and less than $.10 per unit is a "nominal fee".

No. It fails this one blatantly and therefor it isn't an open standard: The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Arrawa]

The video content will grow quite rapidly, now that several big archives are donating stuff for use in Wikipedia (like he German Bundesarchiv and the Dutch Nationaal Archief). For now, primararly thousands and thousands of photo's, but it is strange to think that video's will follow soon? Also media outlets like Al Jazeera are distributing material with a cc-license. (cc.aljazeera.net). Wikipedia will be a big player with the video-content soon enough.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[dreemernj]

Adding support for H.264 is actually useful, unlike Theora support. Also, it's largely a game of upsmanship, basically saying, "here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

Someone at Microsoft has probably been waiting for an opportunity to do something like this ever since Google Chrome Frame came out.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[KingMotley]

Perhaps you don't understand English. Look up all those words in the dictionary, then come back.

THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF H.264 IS MADE AVAILABLE ON A ROYALTY-FREE BASIS. Does caps help?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[wilsone8]

Upsmanship?

More like feathering ones own nest.
After all, Microsoft is a member of the H.264 Licensors. They stand to profit by the continued adoption of H.264.

Actually, I can't even see Google getting all fussed about this, because they will not have to pay a license fee in 2016 because its not part of Chrome proper. Microsoft may not need to pay either, since as members they may get a free pass (just speculation on my part there).

They don't profit. Microsoft is on record saying they pay more into the patent pool then they get paid. That's why the add-on only works on Windows. The OS already comes with a license for H.264, so you don't need another to run video in any particular application.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[ray_mccrae]

No, Microsoft added a plugin to complement the existing h.264 playing flash plugin that ships with chrome.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[wilsone8]

WebM is probably encumbered as well. Just because Google says, "trust us, we've pretty sure you are safe" does not make you safe from getting sued. Sometimes its better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don't.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[wilsone8]

Microsoft has said publicly that they pay 2x more into the patent pool for licenses then they get out for royalities.

See here: http://mcpmag.com/articles/2010/05/03/microsoft-h264-support-not-about-royalties.aspx

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[horza]

Why is adding support for a dying web format useful? Soon H.264 will be an Apple quirk, much like Quicktime.

Phillip.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[icebike]

They can say they pay more in (which, by the way is not true as fees are minimal but cross-use of pool patents is priceless), but that does not reflect the fact that H.264 is not yet collecting licensing fees. They want to wait until the hook is throughly swallowed before they jerk the rod and set it.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[jellomizer]

What need is there for the middle ground?
Because the Free software model restricts methods of making money. It can be done but you need to find a business model that will work. And often it will consist of making Powerful yet Hard to use products.

I am sure many of you have/want jobs where you can code and play with cool stuff and get paid so you can eat and have a family. Well where is that money going to come from? Donations may work to support a single developer, for a good product. Consulting works for some products. Or you need a big company who is using it just to one up everyone else. But in reality they need to make money to improve their product, and maintain it.

If you want a job doing this type of stuff thank god there are companies out there selling products to give you a job. Restricting revenue options for a company just so a small group of hackers can feel good. If you want the Free standard you better make those free standards really good. But why do these non-free standards make it. Because they have money to back them up and developers who will consistently work on the product.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[ivucica]

Rendering engine. On pages requesting Chrome Frame, they switch the entire rendering engine. Not just the Javascript engine.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[SuricouRaven]

On their own products, yes. You just need to take network effects into account. If Microsoft supporting h264 results in it becoming the dominant codec on the internet (The only one you can be sure the world's most popular browser, IE, supports out the box), then that's a great many commercial sites using h264. It means video editing software that is made to work with it, portable cameras that record it, portable players that play it. All of which pay a royalty, a small part of which goes to Microsoft. A small part of a big pie.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Terrasque]

And God bless them for that. Otherwise the frame would be mostly useless. Now it's easy to "support" old browsers (IE), while still having the modern conveniences.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

Actually, it's not an open standard either, at least as defined by the European Union, the world's biggest IT market by GDP.

That's not how language works. It is still an open standard, even if it's not an open standard somewhere or under one of many definitions. Besides, as noted to you by KingMotley, your assertion that it fails to qualify as an open standard under the EU definition is not as certain as you claim it is.

Anyway, your word play is like saying that a dining room chair isn't a chair because it's not:
Chair n. 2. the person in charge of a meeting or organization.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[ivucica]

Amen, brother!

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[rtfa-troll]

Ozer: It sounds like you’ll be coming out and basically saying that to use Ogg, you need to license it from MPEG LA. Is that correct?

Horn: That is not what we said. We said no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free. Whether MPEG LA would offer a license for such rights is a different matter and has not been determined. If the market would find convenience in a single license to address these intellectual property needs, then MPEG LA would be interested in providing one as it has for other codecs.

1. He explicitly says that he's not saying that you need a patent license for Ogg.
2. we already know that theora and WebMD have patents against them for which there are absolutely free licenses

This is basically an admission from the MPEG LA that there are no patents to worry about in those standards whilst they try to pretend it is the opposite.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[vadim_t]

Because the Free software model restricts methods of making money. It can be done but you need to find a business model that will work. And often it will consist of making Powerful yet Hard to use products.

This doesn't apply in this case. I wasn't speaking of the world in general, but this specific case we're discussing. Why is there any need for some middle ground when there is such a favourable choice?

WebM and Theora don't need to be paid for, they're already done. And why would anybody but the makers want there to be some sort of payment? The terms certainly don't stop you from encoding anything you want and selling it, or including the encoder or decoder anywhere you want.

Your "middle ground" basically amounts to paying money where there's absolutely no need to. That's just bad capitalism.

I am sure many of you have/want jobs where you can code and play with cool stuff and get paid so you can eat and have a family. Well where is that money going to come from? Donations may work to support a single developer, for a good product. Consulting works for some products. Or you need a big company who is using it just to one up everyone else. But in reality they need to make money to improve their product, and maintain it.

I'm sorry, but I actually earn my money writing GPL licensed code. No donations, commercial product.

Not a one time fluke even, I've done it before.

Though none of that has anything to do with the question of WebM vs H.264.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they push my ActiveX plugin to allow alternative formats in IE to all their users as well?

There is not need for an ActiveX plugin to play a video in Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer 9 is designed to be able to use any Media Foundation codec installed on the system.

And legacy Direct Show codecs appear to work fine as well although their use is discouraged since Media Foundation is designed to replace Direct Show.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

Its worth noting that there are many many MANY exploits that own windows explorer via PDF, gif, and jpeg. (PDF being the worst offender)

Yes, there are exploits that target Internet Explorer's handling of images, and that target Adobe Reader. Not generically "PDF, gif and jpeg". The reason I am highlighting this distinction is that IE and Adobe Reader (and Adobe Flash and Oracle Java) are all so ubiquitous that they are worth targeting. Chrome users with a plug in from Microsoft is going to be a very small target set. You don't target a format in general (unless the format itself is fundamentally flawed, or only available from a single source, like the macro viruses in MS Office), you target a specific implementation.

As long as chrome is properly sandboxed it's not a big deal. But when clowns decide to integrate the browser into the OS, sandboxing becomes both difficult and critical, and things tend to go south. (as with IE) So although this does increase exposure, it doesn't have to increase RISK.

It only increases exposure very, very slightly. Also, I fail to see how the logic that says H.264 support is a security risk (not that you are saying this, just pointing it out in general), but somehow Theora (or WebM) support isn't.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[icebike]

We said no one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free.

The statement was pretty clear all by itself.

But that statement is only HALF of what he said. He later said that there are a lot of patents which might be found to apply to Theora (and OGG) which no one has sought to enforce (yet), but which could be found to apply as soon as those patents are acquired by some patent troll. (paraphrasing).

Its just another example of the mine field that software patents cause.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[azbot]

Anything that increases choice is a good thing.

I'm not entirely convinced

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

The video content will grow quite rapidly, now that several big archives are donating stuff for use in Wikipedia (like he German Bundesarchiv and the Dutch Nationaal Archief). For now, primararly thousands and thousands of photo's, but it is strange to think that video's will follow soon?

No, but it is strange to think that this will drive demand for Theora sufficient to make it commonplace on people's computers. They will just view the media from a site (like YouTube) that they can already use, and already know about.

Also media outlets like Al Jazeera are distributing material with a cc-license. (cc.aljazeera.net).

What's that got to do with promoting Theora? If it's CC licensed, and it's sufficiently desirable, someone will simply transcode it to a common format, like H.264. By the time something is popular enough that it would get a lot of people to install a plugin, it will have long ago already been popular enough for just one person to have transcoded it.

Wikipedia will be a big player with the video-content soon enough.

Yeah, because it's just so easy to do that. All you need to do is put a bunch of obscure video out in a format that no one uses, and people will go out their way to use your site. /sarcasm

People don't even use sites that they *don't* have to jump through hoops to use. It takes more than a good idea to make something successful, and deliberately hobbling a good idea with a bad idea is not going to help.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[huzur79]

What kind of idiot would want to use Ogg Theora in the first place. Its crappy quality at the best of times. I convert all my DVDs to h.264 and I try to download my movies in h.264 or xvid. I ignore the few and thank god its only a few Ogg Theora rips. Maybe in 15 years Ogg Theora will catch up to current codecs just like it took that long for Linux to catch up to Windows as a usable operating system. In the meantime im using what works best until that happens.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for making sense.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[LordLimecat]

You mean like how Google added chromeframe to IE? Turnabout is fair play...

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[LordLimecat]

Well, at least until IE regains control of the market, and they stop updating / developing said chrome plugin. This isnt "at the expense" of anything.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Pentium100]

Faced with a choice

A. Is currently used almost everywhere (broadcast TV, streaming sites, anime fansubs, hdtv rips etc), supported by a lot of stand-alone devices and free unless I make a lot of money using it (and live in a country that recognizes software patents).
B. Supported only on PCs (and few other devices), not used anywhere else but would allow me to see the source code of the encoder/decoder.

Who would be crazy enough to go with B? Especially when A also has a encoder/decoder that is open source. Why would anyone want to transcode to a yet another codec that has no advantages (like smaller file size for the same quality)?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[ChunderDownunder]

damned if you do, damned if you don't.
the US sinks further into the abyss of insolvency caused by the GFC and a decade of war. it's time the rest of the world declared its independence from America, the land of patent trolls.
Ship international versions with included codecs and let Obama question why hyperlinks from the 'free world' won't play in firefox or his motorola smartphone. :-)

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore64_love]

>>>By the time the patents expire, they won't matter anymore.

GIF, JPEG, and MPEG1 expired and we still use them.

>>>12k is the sort of thing that gets used maybe for cell phone audio

I listen to music at 12 kbit/s. Sounds a bit like AM Radio, but that is fine with me. If you want CD quality you can get it at 48k using MPEG's AACplus format.

NO open source can do that because open source (codecs) are almost always a generation behind what the pros are doing. So why the hell would I choose an inferior codec??? I'm not a zealot or religious.

>>>WebM has a nearly identical quality to H264

Not even close. WebM is almost as bad as MPEG2, both video and audio.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[linuxrocks123]

Well, you know, there IS H.264 support out there for Linux. MPlayer supports basically every codec ever made. You could have installed it for her ... Ubuntu even has a "click to install this oh btw it might be illegal but who gives an arse" thing for codecs with patent issues.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Patch86]

You could see it as being a win-win-win situation.

MS wins, in their guise as a backer of h.264, by extending support for their pet format. As you say, they also get some (in their case much needed) kudos too.

Google wins, because their browser gets h.264 support without them having to support a single line of code, or pay a penny in licensing fees (as and when they get implemented; MS will have to pick up that bill as it would be their "product" that implements support),

User wins, as they get support for more things in more browsers. With all of the big developers "extending" each other's browsers to support their pet projects, the net affect is everything being supported on all reasonably extensible platforms.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[lennier]

Not even close. I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever. I bet most people aren't even aware that there *are* videos on wikipedia

Maybe Wikipedia could popularise its videos as 'W-Tube'?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[vadim_t]

People who care about legality and not getting sued?

Royalties may be owed for distributing encoders, decoders, and videos. If you do end up owing the MPEG LA something, it seems to have a lower bound of USD $25,000.

It seems for instance Mozilla would definitely have to pay a license. Now Mozilla probably has the funding for it, but does that cover customized versions shipped by Linux distributions? I have no clue, and with enough downloads the price gets in the millions of USD.

They do promise not to charge for internet video, but ad supported video probably doesn't count. So if you try to earn a bit of cash from your cat video with 100001 impressions, you'll be looking at ~$100 from your advertiser, and a $25K bill from MPEG LA.

Overall if the MPEG LA does want something from you, the absolute smallest amount they could want is a huge deal for a normal person or a small organization.

That seems like an unwise thing to ignore.

Besides, the costs for switching to WebM are small. Software is easy to update, and nearly all players are upgradeable as well, but there the problem is much lesser because you're already paying for the player and the content.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a couple of things wrong in your post. Being part of the patent pool doesn't mean you don't have to pay licensing fees. Depending on how much fees are collected in total and how the money is split up Microsoft may pay more than they receive, even if I find it implausible. H.264 fees are being collected and have been collected ever since it was standardized. You can look the licensing fees up on the MPEG LA website. The fees are renegotiated every 6 (IIRC, maybe 4) years and can't change by more than 10% from one licensing period to the next. The last time the fees themselves weren't changed, only the maximum cap has been increased.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[dfghjk]

You don't really mean negative utility, you mean it works against an agenda you support. It's quite clear that H.264 support would be of great utility, especially to those who aren't interested in your battle.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[sexconker]

And now you can't make any opensource implementation of it. That's why Theora and the like are useful; everyone is free to implement it.

Here's the thing about that - No one gives a shit.
Inferior shit is free and open.
Superior shit is essentially free to consumers. All hardware sold supports the closed formats, and any hardware project supporting only the open formats would never be able to compete on price to the extent where the user saw a difference because of the lack of licensing costs. All software to encode is either not needed by users (because they aren't creating their own content), or comes bundled with something they have anyway (iTunes, WMP, Nero), or is pirated (Nero AAC encoder that everyone uses despite only 8 people on the planet actually paying for Nero and its add-on plugins), or is a free, but hacked and illegal implementation based off of a closed source implementation.
Superior shit is better than free for producers - it makes money. People selling content have to foot the bandwidth bill, they have to make their shit look and sound good, etc. Paying for the proper licensing to do this is a drop in the bucket compared to what you get out of it. And all the big boys get free licenses forever anyway because they're part of the patent pool.

Bottom line is that the open source shit in this case is simply inferior. Blindly supporting only the open source codecs is detrimental to whatever you're doing, and exhibits toddler levels of stubbornness and whining.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[vadim_t]

GIF, JPEG, and MPEG1 expired and we still use them.

GIF isn't used all that much. Its compression is inferior to PNG, and it only supports 8 bit color, which looks very unimpressive. Also animations are a lot less common these days.

JPEG I'll grant you that. But with still images it's easy to afford being suboptimal. Bandwidth increased, but there's not that much need in adding more images to a website. With video, the much increased resolution means that a better algorithm makes a most noticeable difference.

MPEG1 remains pretty much exclusively for legacy use. Nobody sane is streaming that from their website, because a better codec can save so much bandwidth.

I listen to music at 12 kbit/s. Sounds a bit like AM Radio, but that is fine with me. If you want CD quality you can get it at 48k using MPEG's AACplus format.

48k is not CD quality in any case because it's lossy compression that will always miss something from the CD. Sure it can be good, but it's not original.

NO open source can do that because open source (codecs) are almost always a generation behind what the pros are doing. So why the hell would I choose an inferior codec??? I'm not a zealot or religious.

WebM isn't something made by a couple guys in a garage. It's based on VP8, a commercial product made by a company Google acquired, which was later relicensed. It's just as "pro" as any other codec, unless you're going to argue a license change somehow magically affects the quality.

And the quality is quite good

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break it to you, but your whole scenario happened years ago.
H.264 is the dominant codec on the internet and has been for about two years. If you view a video on Youtube, Vimeo, Hulu or any of the other video sites it will be either a MP4 or a FLV file containing H.264 video and AAC audio. Same goes for videos on Facebook. Commercial sites are using it and you can hardly buy a multimedia player that doesn't support it. If you buy a video camera it will record in H.264 (AVC-HD; AVC is H.264), same thing if you record a video on your cellphone. It's used in broadcast, on Blu Rays and on HD and Anime "scene releases". Any professional video editing software you can buy supports it and so do many noncommercial projects either directly or via plugins.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[keeperofdakeys]

From memory, the licensing fee for h264 is about 5 million dollars, I think that was just for the year too. This is a significant fraction of firefox's income, which would mean a lot of cuts in other areas. The way VLC uses MPEG standards is technically illegal, and don't think MPEG-LA won't move if something like Mozilla uses h264 without paying.

It is also doubtful whether a USER distributing h264 material will be able to get away with no fee. The MPEG-LA has 'promised' this to be free till 2015 at least, but it is always possible they can charge people to distribute not just the codec, but video in the codec.

Also, I highly double HE-AAC or high-profile h264 will ever get onto the web. Portable devices can't play these, not even your iPad or iPod.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Carewolf]

As far as I know IE9 supports ANY codec and video format. Just install the codec... IE9 doesn't DEPEND on the codec and will not force an install when it is installed, but that doesn't mean it can not play the codec, unlike firefox and chrome which refuse to play H.264 even if a windows codec is present.

I am WebM fan myself, but you can not compare the two situations or blame Microsoft for making a open and flexible codec support.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Theora is NOT a sound/audio codex, it is therefore pointless and borderline inane to compare is as such.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Pentium100]

It seems for instance Mozilla would definitely have to pay a license.

Mozilla can avoid that by using system codecs and they know it. They do not do it because of political reasons. I hope that Microsoft (or someone else) makes a h264 plugin for Firefox.

Software is easy to update,

Sure

nd nearly all players are upgradeable as well

Well, as long as someone releases a pin-compatible WebM decoder that I can just solder in the place of the h264 decoder chip.

there the problem is much lesser because you're already paying for the player and the content.

I don't get this part. The fact that I paid for the player does not mean that I like doing so and am just waiting for the opportunity to pay for another player as well.

As for ad-supported video - you should ask MPEG LA whether it is considered "free to end users" or not, though it should be, since the end user does not pay money for the right to watch the video (neither subscription nor title-by-title), the advertiser pays.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

If you can find any significant quantity of ogg only content on the internet, i'm sure that someone will find a reason to support it.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[poetmatt]

it's also a legal issue. If MS is going to go after google to make people afraid to use VP8, by saying that chrome has patent threats attached (via H264) is exactly how it is done.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore64_love]

>>>"here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

This seems awfully familiar. I think I recall reading something similar on wikipedia: ""Embrace" AOL's IM protocol [or Google browser]. "Extend" the standard with proprietary Microsoft addons which added new features but broke compatibility with AOL's [or Google's] software. Gain dominance since Microsoft had 95% OS share and their MS Messenger was provided for free. And finally, "extinguish" and lockout AOL's IM [or Google's VP8] software, since AOL was unable to use the modified MS-patented protocol."

BTW I wrote this paragraph two years ago. Thank you. :-)

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

Unfortunately, the above is 100% true. NO ONE CARES beyond a fringe monitority that the codec they are viewing or encoding their stuff in legally (via their camera, etc) is patent encumbered or not. "Free" (as in freedom) is not good enough to make 99.9% of people care, if the superior alternative is free as in beer. And doubly so if it means they need to re-encode all their content, and lose the ability to play patent encumbered media in their browser.

The free alternatives will need to be BETTER as well to get the majority to give a shit enough to switch. A browser that can't play huge amounts of content will be considred BROKEN by end users, whether or not it is patent free or not is irrelevant to them.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

And it will be handled, as it always has been, by a free plug-in for the 1% of ogg video out there. If people even care enough to bother. The alternative, of not being able to play 90%+ of online video with no h.264 support is far less palatable.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

Source to pro-level tools/hardware that generates VP8 content without rooting around wasting time/cpu re-encoding my h.264 plz

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

And more to the point - I'd much PREFER the browser(s) to use system codecs. Why? Because it reduces vulnerability exposure. If there's a bug found in codec X, replacing the system codec fixes the problem for everything, rather than having to replace the system codec, and each and every other app on the system that uses their own native bugged copy of it.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

And refusing to use OS provided codecs, instead shipping your own copy in your app, makes the system less secure as now you have multiple copies of the SAME DAMN CODEC to patch, if a vulnerability is found.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

I'm sure you and the other 1% of the browser using population who think that way are outraged.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Jason Earl]

You'd be surprised. The folks at Google obviously feel strongly enough about the issue that they paid piles and piles of good money so that they could buy the WebM developers and then give the source (and patent licenses) away. Of course, you would likely feel differently too if you owned Youtube.com or a similar service and the alternative was to pay licensing fees to your competitors for the privilege of using software that you had written yourself.

Not to mention the fact that to some people being able to hack the code is important enough that they are willing to make sacrifices. This might seem crazy to you, but it is a singularly effective tactic. You might tend to agree more with Linus Torvald's pragmatic "open source" view of the world, but even he recognizes that Linux would not exist if the folks writing GNU had not built a ton of Free Software tools first.

Get enough crazy people (that happen to like writing code) together, and you can shift the world a bit.

Besides. With Google backing WebM in a two years WebM is going to be ubiquitous on devices, and then your stated problems with the format disappear. At that point the content people will be falling all over themselves to stop paying MPEG LA licensing fees.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Jason Earl]

Mozilla can avoid that by using system codecs and they know it. They do not do it because of political reasons. I hope that Microsoft (or someone else) makes a h264 plugin for Firefox.

Mozilla can use the system codec on "some" systems. It can ship WebM codecs on all platforms.

Well, as long as someone releases a pin-compatible WebM decoder that I can just solder in the place of the h264 decoder chip.

It just so happens that about the time you start actually caring about WebM compatibility that Google will have a device to sell you that will decode WebM in hardware. Which is going to be handy, because by then the Youtube videos that you want to watch won't be available in H.264. Until then, you are right, H.264 makes more sense if you don't have a political ax to grind (an you aren't trying to stream video yourself).

Here's the bottom line. A year from now WebM support will be everywhere and the problems you have with it will go away. Sure, the device you happen to own now won't play WebM well, but that's what you get for being an early adopter.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Pentium100]

Mozilla can use the system codec on "some" systems. It can ship WebM codecs on all platforms.

Windows have DirectShow.
Linux has GStreamer
MAC OS has QuickTime.

What other platforms are there that do not have a system codec infrastructure?

It just so happens that about the time you start actually caring about WebM compatibility that Google will have a device to sell you that will decode WebM in hardware.

Well, it just so happens that when I pay a lot of money for a device I am not very happy when I need to pay money again to get another device just so some Linux user can have his freedom of modifying the source code of the decoder.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Pentium100]

With Google backing WebM in a two years WebM is going to be ubiquitous on devices, and then your stated problems with the format disappear.

We'll see. DVB-T will still use h.264 (or MPEG2, depending on the country) though. Old devices still won't be able to play the new codec. Anime fansubbers and TV show rippers will still most likely use h264 since it is better.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

it's also a legal issue. If MS is going to go after google to make people afraid to use VP8, by saying that chrome has patent threats attached (via H264) is exactly how it is done.

That makes absolutely no sense. MS is the one distributing the plugin, not Google. Further, Google has absolutely no legal responsibility for the IP of third party plugins.

MS wouldn't be the ones to sue Google, it would be MPEG-LA. And whether WebM infringes on their patents has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not users also have a separate plugin.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[theArtificial]

Yes, I'm sure there will be countless exploits that use maliciously crafted H.264 videos to target Chrome users that have installed MS's H.264 plugin...

I think the OP is switching the tables. From your post it appears you've missed the claims made in the past regarding a toolbar made by Google for use in Internet Explorer which Microsoft stated something along these lines.

I've seen some extremely tenuous FUD before, but wow!

While I can see how you may have this opinion, I'd like to understand your reasoning. How does adding more features (via plugins) mean less vulnerability? Feel free to use Flash as an example.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Lanteran]

Sorry if this is a rhetorical question, but how can an "open standard" not be free to implement? I completely disagree. IMO, open standards are ones for which specifications are freely available implementations cost nothing. What is the "actual" definition?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[westlake]

I consider H.264 support in any browser to be of negative utility. It encourages the prevalence of a heavily patent encumbered format on the Internet, which is bad for everybody, except possibly a few large players like Microsoft (though ultimate I don't think it's in their best long-term interests either).

20% of peak hour download traffic in the states was a Netflix stream before Netflix offered a content protected streaming-only service at $9/month. The Netflix client - the Netflix "app - is installed on every HDTV, video player, video game console, mobile device and set top box you could name.

Typically along with Pandora and anywhere from five to thirty or so other media services, social networking and gaming applications. There will be more - much more - to come and the audio and video quality is only going to get better.

That takes the relatively open PC platform and the "standards compliant" browser out of the equation.

Mitsubishi wants to sell you a big screen stereographic HDTV. It would like a slice of the home audio market. It would like a slice of the video gaming market. Netflix, Pandora, Rhapsody and OnLive! can deliver all that for the price of a codec or two.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[sixsixtysix]

are the bricks made of glass?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Draek]

Not even close. I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever. I bet most people aren't even aware that there *are* videos on wikipedia.

I've never, ever received a link to a HTML5/h.264 video either, and I doubt many people are even aware you can watch online videos without Flash.

So yeah, not supporting Theora can hardly be called a deal-breaker, but dropping h.264 support can't be honestly called "useful" either.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Draek]

It encourages the prevalence of a heavily patent encumbered format on the Internet, which is bad for everybody, except possibly a few large players like Microsoft (though ultimate I don't think it's in their best long-term interests either).

But of course it is, look at how much a tiny little project like Mozilla has hurt them, raising the barrier of entry to the browser market is clearly in their best interest even if it costs them some cash. Of course, the downside is that they can't keep copying innovations off Opera as they'd go under too, but hey! with complete dominance over the browser market they don't even need to innovate.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Draek]

An open standard must be freely available for implementation, otherwise the 'open' adjective would be superfluous as disclosure is already a requirement for it to be a standard in the first place.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Draek]

GNU freedom is on the hard left. Closed standards for use by anyone who will pay a lot of money up front is to the far right. Why can't we bask in some middle ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[bonch]

You know, sometimes Slashdot feels like a bubble. Nobody cares about Ogg Theora. Yes, I'm aware that Wikipedia uses it, but that doesn't mean the public cares. If there was enough demand for it, Microsoft would support it.

You are free to use a plug-in if you actually have Ogg Theora videos you'd like to play in IE. I'm not exactly sure what you're complaining about.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

The standard was created in a public manner, is openly available to anyone who wants to implement it, and the patents are fairly licensed to anyone who wishes to license them. That's what an open standard means. The idea that the standard has to be completely free is parochial.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Draek]

Everything over 200 lines is probably patent-encumbered, which of course doesn't mean that something *under* 200 lines is not. The US patent system is completely fucked up, "probably encumbered" is the best you can hope since the only other option is "certain to be encumbered", ala h.264.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[bonch]

Yes, but a post on Slashdot said it was significant, so sorry, you're clearly wrong. Take that common sense and shove it.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Qubit]

Shouldn't Wikimedia accept WebM as well then?

According to the Commons:Video page, "WebM support will likely be added in the future. See this bug report for its current status."

The bug report described is #23888, and was last updated on 2010-08-24 -- over 5 months ago. It appears that there needs to just be some hacking done on MediaWiki to support it.

I think that this bug report is a perfect example of what needs to be done to give WebM the traction to take the upper hand in web video. Do you want support for WebM video in Gallery2 or Gallery3? Do you want support for WebM video in MediaWiki? How about Drupal, Plone, or Joomla? Or how about just plain-old mime-type support for WebM in Ubuntu?

Yes, there are projects underway to support WebM in these FOSS projects, but nearly all of them aren't ready for daily use yet. If we want to see WebM deployed as the video format of choice for the web, we really need to step up and make sure that WebM is as supported as a video format as PNG and JPEG are supported as image formats.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[bonch]

It's still an open standard (WebM isn't even recognized by a standards body). H.264 is liberally licensed like MP3 was. Remember all the old Vorbis versus MP3 arguments? The world didn't end when MP3 became the de facto standard. H.264 is practically already the standard for HTML5 video content delivery, and with Microsoft and Apple backing it, the war is already over.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[bonch]

You can thank Google for removing H.264 support from Chrome, then.

Be sure to ask them why, if they're such a proponent of "openness," Chrome still ships the Adobe Flash plug-in along with MP3 and AAC audio playback.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

An open standard must be freely available for implementation, otherwise the 'open' adjective would be superfluous as disclosure is already a requirement for it to be a standard in the first place.

Why does "open" imply "free"? Although not applied to a standard, the open source Firefox project is actually less free in some ways than H.264. Look into Iceweasel to see what I'm referring to. Also, x264 is a valid and legal open source project, even in the US where software patents are valid. What it's not, however, is truly and completely free. That's because the copyright (which is open) is properly licensed. The ability to actually use the source code is limited by patents.

Open, in the case of H.264, also refers to the standard's creation, which was done out in the open. Also, everyone is allowed to license it. And finally, the source code for it is open source.

It is not, however, completely free, although it is completely free in some contexts, so in those contexts, it is also a free standard. But no one calls it that because you can't really do so without qualification. It is a fair point to consider, however.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Jason Earl]

Linux might have a codec system, but that doesn't mean Linux users have access to H.264.

Heck, for that matter, *you* might have access to H.264, but that doesn't mean that Google and Mozilla have to support it. On the bright side, if you really care about this issue you can always build your own Chrome or Firefox browser with H.264 support. You have the source, after all.

Well, it just so happens that when I pay a lot of money for a device I am not very happy when I need to pay money again to get another device just so some Linux user can have his freedom of modifying the source code of the decoder.

Complain to the folks at MPEG-LA. They are the ones that set the terms for H.264. If it makes you feel better Google's decision probably has way more to do with not wanting to pay royalties to MPEG-LA than any sort of affection for Linux users. Google is happy to use Linux users (and other Free Software types) to help market WebM, but the *real* reason that Google is pushing WebM is because it has to pay to license H.264 for Youtube, and, as the creator of Android it also needs a patent free way to play video on Linux devices.

Personally, I think that the folks at both Microsoft and Apple are stupid. Both of these companies are hoping that they can lure Google into streaming its piles of video in a format that they can implement without having to pay fees, and that Google can not. Heck, Apple in particular has made billions selling devices that support H.264, and now, thanks to their heavy-handedness Google is going to yank the content right out from under them. An iPod is considerably less useful if it doesn't work with Youtube.

You can't blame Google though, even though it probably is going to work in Android's favor.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anthony Mouse]

Here's the thing about that - No one gives a shit.

No, you're wrong. Most people don't care. Some people do. The people who do can discuss the problem and try to come up with solutions.

Like searching for and purchasing a strong patent not in the MPEG-LA pool that reads on H.264 and then demanding a high license fee for that patent for any use of H.264, so that suddenly the price difference is material and people start using the free WebM instead.

Or whatever else people can come up with.

Just because most people don't care, doesn't mean you shouldn't care. Most people are lemmings and I, for one, don't intend to follow them over the cliff.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Soukosa]

After all, Microsoft is a member of the H.264 Licensors. They stand to profit by the continued adoption of H.264.

Microsoft may not need to pay either, since as members they may get a free pass (just speculation on my part there).

Microsoft only gets a free pass on paying for their own patents in the pool. They still have to pay fees to every other company with a patent in the pool. They even spend more money paying such fees just to license for its use in Windows 7. So they aren't gaining much in doing this, money wise at least.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Jason Earl]

As for H.264 being better, well, that's probably true, but the difference is slight, at best. It's certainly well within the realm of being fixable by marketing. Twenty years from now most people will probably think WebM won because it was better.

As for old devices, well, people don't expect to be able to stream Youtube from their old devices, and if they do, well then they'd better hope that they can upgrade the software.

Anime fansubbers can do whatever at it isn't going to matter. TV show rippers are as likely to follow Google's lead as anything else. Heck, most of these people use Free Software tools as it is, and there is no question which way the Free Software people are going to break. As soon as their is hardware support for WebM, it is likely to get the nod.

The real reason that people are going to end up using WebM though, is because that is what Google is going to do, and Google does the lion's share of video streaming.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Draek]

Why does "open" imply "free"?

Because the other definition of "open" is already covered by the word "standard".

Although not applied to a standard, the open source Firefox project is actually less free in some ways than H.264. Look into Iceweasel to see what I'm referring to.

That's an issue of trademarks, not copyright or patents. But, in case you're wondering, yes I would not call a standard whose trademarks are not freely available "open" either, though in that case the solution would be so simple as to be trivial.

Also, x264 is a valid and legal open source project, even in the US where software patents are valid. What it's not, however, is truly and completely free. That's because the copyright (which is open) is properly licensed. The ability to actually use the source code is limited by patents.

Only due to a particular reading of the GPL2 that allows for a legal loophole in it.

Open, in the case of H.264, also refers to the standard's creation, which was done out in the open. Also, everyone is allowed to license it. And finally, the source code for it is open source.

The first is "by commitee", the second is also covered by "standard", and the third is irrelevant, the status of a standard is not and should not be determined by the status of the existing implementations.

It is not, however, completely free, although it is completely free in some contexts, so in those contexts, it is also a free standard. But no one calls it that because you can't really do so without qualification. It is a fair point to consider, however.

Now you're just fucking with me. Seriously, that's not even a coherent argument, that's just school-level wordplay.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[WorBlux]

Adobe PDF, not pdf/a which is a standard that doesn't have any sort of executable code or widgets in it.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Pentium100]

On the bright side, if you really care about this issue you can always build your own Chrome or Firefox browser with H.264 support. You have the source, after all.

I don't need it. I can modify software written in C/C++ by using a hex editor on the binary just as well, though I think it would be actually easier, since FF needs so much crap installed just to open/modify the source, not to mention that it is not compatible with Windows XP SP3, wtf?

An iPod is considerably less useful if it doesn't work with Youtube.

And Youtube is considerably less useful if it does not work on iPod. If/when Google drops h264 support from Youtube, we'll see if it's the iPod or the Youtube that suffers. Since a lot of people paid money for their iPods (and similar devices), also some of them would not buy a non-Apple phone, I think that they will move to another video site rather than buying another very expensive device.

Now, if they didn't have the devices already, then they would choose a device that (probably) works with Youtube, but as they have the devices now, it's going to be different. For example, in 2006, I paid ~720EUR for my cell phone, new phones (that I would want - that is, a phone must have a keypad with not-too-small buttons, preferably made by Nokia) cost about the same. 700EUR is a lot of money, the other phone must be that much better to convince me to part with another 700 Euros, since I already have a phone.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Pentium100]

As for H.264 being better, well, that's probably true, but the difference is slight, at best.

Anime fansubbers can do whatever at it isn't going to matter. TV show rippers are as likely to follow Google's lead as anything else.

AFAIK, it is very hard to do a good encode. The encoders (people) know how to make x264 do what they want and if they move to a different format, they will have to learn it again, just like they did when they moved from DivX to h264. However, h264 haas advantages over DivX, that it, it has better video quality for the same file size (or smaller file size for the same quality). WebM is "the same" at best, so, no point in switching.

As soon as their is hardware support for WebM, it is likely to get the nod.

Again, unlikely. Fansubers still release videos in divx (not all of them though) for those with crappy PCs or with hardware players that do not support h264. If they start using WebM, they will have to do 3 encodes - DivX (for those with crappy PCs and old players), h264 (for those with newer players also iPods and such) and WebM (for ... those who do not like h264).
So, web video will use one codec, downloadable video will use another. Old devices will not support the newer codec. And I thought that I won't need to do transcoding anymore.

Of course, the funniest thing that could happen is, after WebM is accepted almost everywhere, some patent holder finds out that the codec infringes on one (or more) of his patents and sues everybody (including end users) to get some cash. Now THAT would be fun.

See, the thing is, I do not care is some standard is abandoned and a new, better one is used. h264 is better than divx, because it allows for smaller file sizes and that is very important for HD. And everyone benefits from smaller files. However, WebM has no advantage for the vast majority of people, but it has disadvantages - the need to transcode online video (if your current library is in h264), the fact that older devices will not support it (and will need another transcode).

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[GPLHost-Thomas]

"Those who aren't interested in [his] battle" most of the time don't understand what the issues are. Google seemed to understand, yet you seem not. H.264 needs to go away, together with all the DRM and such. No, no no no, thanks, I'm ok with things being OPEN, so I have my FREEDOMs to both read AND right content on the internet, without someone's patent. This isn't one own's agenda, this is for the benefits of the masses. Please don't pretend that H.264 is of "great utility" when we have the same kind of result with a fully open format (WebM / VP8). Having support for H.264 everywhere is only adding the issue that some sites might one day use it, which we don't want, which is the very reason why Google removed it from Chrome.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you talking about? A web site doesn't need to "support" WebM or any other format to use it. You just embed the video in the page and the client's browser either plays it or not.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[A beautiful mind]

Perhaps you don't understand what's written there. The key word is "irrevocably". MPEG-LA hasn't even made a temporary license available publicly, they only made press statements. Even the press statements include phrases like "extended until 2015". Does that seem like irrevocable to you?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[rtfa-troll]

Its just another example of the mine field that software patents cause.

I agree 100%; definitely patents for software are a bad idea.

But that statement is only HALF of what he said. He later said that there are a lot of patents which might be found to apply to Theora (and OGG) which no one has sought to enforce (yet), but which could be found to apply as soon as those patents are acquired by some patent troll. (paraphrasing).

The thing is that he explicitly states that those patents are the same ones as "might" apply to other MPEG-LA standards. However, the implication is that he or someone knows what patent is being infringed but won't tell. The patent owner has admitted that they know about the use of their patent but are keeping it secret. That becomes something which, if it came out in a patent lawsuit, would probably damage the case and might lead to effective claims of patent misuse.

This makes it pretty clear that use of Theora and WebMD is not a likely target of a lawsuit. Instead the chosen strategy is FUD. The correct way to deal with that is to go ahead and use the standard and ignore the spreaders of FUD. In the very worst case, because it is a published standard and because they have made no published statement about which patents are infringed and, especially, because they have refused to answer explicit questions about it, the maximum damages for the patent use are likely to be extremely limited.

In summary; the MPEG-LA is making statements about the other standards for a reason. That reason is to damage those standards. They get their money from licensing, so, following the money, the likely reason that they want to damage those standards is that they won't get license fees. The very fact that the MPEG-LA says that these "might" be subject to license fees without actually charging them is pretty strong evidence that these standards are not in fact subject to license fees.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[A beautiful mind]

It's not an open standard in spirit because it's encumbered by patents. To be more verbose on it, it's not an open standard if interested parties cannot use it without licensing it from someone for money. Here, interested parties consist of the whole fucking internet.

Now, the legal definition as defined by the EU says it's not an open standard because it doesn't grant an irrevocable patent license. So there you have it.

Besides, to blow a whole in your argument: this is like a mathematical theorem: I only need to find a case where what you claim to be an open standard isn't accepted as such, while you need to show that it's a generally well accepted open standard. Now of course in law things aren't as absolute, but I'd say if something is not accepted as an open standard on a whole populated continent, then it isn't.

It is certainly misleading to call H.264 an open standard and it isn't wordplay to point that out.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[vadim_t]

I'm not familiar with encoding hardware for any codec. All the encoding I've ever done was with mencoder, in software. It seems there should be one soon, though.

For decoding, Broadcom has a chip for instance.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

The plugin uses Windows Media Player, so presumably a regular WMP attack will work just fine. For those who installed Chrome because it's way more secure than IE, having WMP attacks work just as well in Chrome as they do in IE will be a huge risk.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[ajs]

I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever.

First off, I'm glad I could help.

Second, what your friends send you a link to is kind of irrelevant. The Wikimedia family of sites exist to preserve knowledge and to provide a place for communities of contributors to build repositories of useful information from books to news to dictionaries to special-interest Wikis. Their scope and relevance is substantial, and because they're also extremely heavily trafficked, they are an important benchmark for any browser that wants to claim to support the Web.

H.264 is also a part of the Web, and Google is choosing not to support it. That's no different from a lack of support for ogg. What is different is that Google isn't supporting H.264 because it's a patent nightmare for which a consortium of rights holders had to be formed, just to make the collection of licensing fees practical. Not supporting that is actually doing the Web a favor.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[SuricouRaven]

This is true. H264 has basically won, due both to it's big-player support and it's technical merit. Patents and politics aside, it remains simply the best general-purpose lossy video codec there is. Still, MS would like to make sure it stays winning, particually with HTML5 coming and the resulting mass of websites abandoning the old flash-based video and possibly scared away from h264 by fees or the threat of fees in future.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Enigma23]

Not even close. I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever. I bet most people aren't even aware that there *are* videos on wikipedia.

If they were big enough to matter, people would already be installing Theora plug-ins or switching over to browsers like Firefox in order to view Theora videos. You'd hear iPhone and other smartphone users complaining about lack of Theora support. There would be how-tos on playing Theora content. Etc.

Hmmm... I don't need any of these "plugin" thingamywhatits to view Theora videos. Oh yes, now I see why - it's natively supported in Opera already. :)

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[AmiMoJo]

But then there would be nothing to differentiate their browser from all the others!

Back in the IE4/5/6 days both MS and Netscape were actively trying to create extensions to HTML and Javascript that make sites render poorly in the other's browser. Remember all those stupid "Looks best in IE4/Netscape" buttons? I'm not suggesting that is their policy now, just that standards compliance probably still isn't high on their agenda.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore64_love]

>>>GIF isn't used all that much.

It's used on most of the sites I visit. Like the homepage I've used for 5+ years and is almost nothing but GIFs - http://isp.netscape.com./ There are a lot of GIFs in other locations as well, all free of patent restrictions and just as open as PNG codec.
.

>>>48k is not CD quality in any case because it's lossy

That's true, but listener tests show people can't hear the difference between 48k AACplus and ~1400k lossless CD. Hence the term "CD quality". Perhaps I should have added the word 'perceived' to clarify? In any case, neither MP3 or Theora can match it. They sound like ___ compared to a 48k AACplus stream.
.

>>>VP8 is as "pro" as any other codec

That's true but it looks almost as crappy as MPEG2. I simply don't want to use an inferior codec, okay? Am I allowed to make my OWN fucking choice??? (Apparently not, and thus I got modded "idiiot".)

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore64_love]

>>>you can't make any opensource implementation of AAC

Isn't WinAmp and VLC Player open source? (shrug). Well they're free anyway (zero cost), and they both use HE-AAC so that dismantles your argument that particular MPEG-produced codec cannot be used by Free players or Free browsers like chrome, firefox, etc.

If WinAmp and VLC can include built-in support for MPEG standards, despite the 1 cent per unit cost, so too can other free software.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Saint Gerbil]

So since MS are now offering this as a plug in for chrome would MS have the patent nightmare or has it put it back on google?

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[vadim_t]

It's used on most of the sites I visit. Like the homepage I've used for 5+ years and is almost nothing but GIFs - http://isp.netscape.com./ There are a lot of GIFs in other locations as well, all free of patent restrictions and just as open as PNG codec.

At the time of GIF the whole thing with patents was a fairly new problem, which appeared quite late. And most Linux distros worked around by simply making uncompressed GIFs. It's not exactly comparable to video.

Also I guess the stats vary, but for me it's PNG everywhere.

That's true, but listener tests show people can't hear the difference between 48k AACplus and ~1400k lossless CD. Hence the term "CD quality". Perhaps I should have added the word 'perceived' to clarify? In any case, neither MP3 or Theora can match it. They sound like ___ compared to a 48k AACplus stream.

Got some test results? I found an AAC+ stream at 48k and wasn't that impressed. Sure it sounds decent, but there still seems to be something missing.

Also, of course Theora can't match it. Theora is a video codec, audio is encoded in Vorbis.

That's true but it looks almost as crappy as MPEG2.

I've seen it on youtube for instance, and I can't really tell the difference. If you know of a good comparison site, do tell. I linked to one, and it seems to win in some cases and lose in others. Overall to me it averages to about the same.

I simply don't want to use an inferior codec, okay? Am I allowed to make my OWN fucking choice??? (Apparently not, and thus I got modded "idiiot".)

I don't see how your "OWN fucking choice" involves telling other people what they ought to use. Nobody is saying it should be illegal for you to download an H.264 player or anything like that.

The web should standarize on WebM so that absolutely everybody who wants to can implement it without dealing with royalty payments, and if somebody especially likes paying licensing fees, they can go download a player/encoder for that. There's your choice.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Qubit]

What the fuck are you talking about? A web site doesn't need to "support" WebM or any other format to use it. You just embed the video in the page and the client's browser either plays it or not.

Transcoding? Thumbnailing particular frames of video for embedding in a particular web page? Adding support for the MIME type? Support for playback through the <video> tag?

You can't just wave your hands and make all of this happen. If it worked that way then I wouldn't have to talk about lack of support for WebM in FOSS applications, I'd just wave my hands and then sit down and have a beer.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[commodore6502]

>>>"here Google, we fixed your browser for you".

This seems awfully familiar. I think I recall reading something similar on wikipedia:

"Embrace" AOL's IM protocol [or Google browser]. "Extend" the standard with proprietary Microsoft addons which added new features but broke compatibility with AOL's [or Google's] software. Gain dominance since Microsoft had 95% OS share and their MS Messenger was provided for free. And finally, "extinguish" and lockout AOL's IM [or Google's VP8] software, since AOL was unable to use the modified MS-patented protocol.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Omnifarious]

I do, in fact, mean negative utility. When something is a trap that forces some part of the ecosystem around it to pay money to a single entity, that has negative value for the entire ecosystem. It makes it more fragile, it reduces variability, and it enriches one member at the expense of all the others. It is bad from the perspective of everybody except for the beneficiary company, and I would argue that its even bad for them, in the long run.

So, if you think that an ecosystem being more adaptable and robust is an important value, then the logical conclusion is that things that reduce these qualities is of negative value. I value these things, and I think most people do. Most just don't think things through from the long term perspective and don't reach the logical conclusion.

If we didn't have a patent system that was of negative utility, then the organization that owns the H.264 patents wouldn't be able to leverage it to themselves create negative utility.

If you desire stagnation and death, and think that attempts to be robust and innovative should be quelled, then I assume that you would reach an opposite conclusion. I suspect you do not desire these things, and so your agenda actually aligns with mine, no matter how much you protest against it. You have deluded yourself.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[after.fallout.34t98e]

MS is a part of the consortium. While yes they would still have to pay for 264, it is cheaper for them to do so on a per-browser installation basis (they are already paying on a per unit basis for windows, so supporting it in Chrome in windows costs them nothing extra). Since Google will not be supporting it with their own implementation, they wouldn't be liable for any of the costs.

If Google/Mozilla were to include H.264 then they would have to pay the consortium the fee of 1 cent per download (or 5 million, whichever is cheaper)*. Mozilla simply cannot afford this, and Google has no incentive for it.

Remember that Google's goal with Chrome is to make browsers better so that Google can provide an experience in their services which users will readily accept and interact with advertizing. Supporting 264 would do nothing toward that goal which WebM cannot do at least as well (without funding MS or Apple).

Chrome, Mozilla and Opera also have to deal with supporting more than just one platform. Not only would they need an H.264 implementation, but they would need one optimized for each platform they support. This extra implementation cost also adds up. In contrast, MS relies on their system codecs library and Apple relies on Quicktime for support of 264. Neither of these are readily available for Linux, let alone the PS3, Wii, Android phones, Nokia phones, etc.

* I haven't read the actual requirements for implementing H.264, I've only read about them on various websites and this is the general idea I get of the cost for implementers.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Jason Earl]

And Youtube is considerably less useful if it does not work on iPod.

Youtube is considerably less useful *to you* if it does not work on an iPod.

If/when Google drops h264 support from Youtube, we'll see if it's the iPod or the Youtube that suffers.

I think that it is safe to say that Youtube will probably lose some customers when it turns off H.264. But, realistically, where are these customers going to go? Heck, Google can even market the move as a move towards openness, and make it look (and quite credibly as well) that Apple is to blame for the interoperability. After all, it is not like iPhones *couldn't* support WebM. They just don't.

Since a lot of people paid money for their iPods (and similar devices), also some of them would not buy a non-Apple phone, I think that they will move to another video site rather than buying another very expensive device.

I suppose that it is possible that some other video site might use this as an opportunity to usurp Youtube's position, but I see that as a long shot. Besides, unless the video site is run by an MPEG-LA member the new site is also going to be inclined to follow Google's lead on WebM. If you are streaming video, and you aren't Apple or Microsoft, then you almost certainly want WebM to win out.

Besides, why should Google care about customers that aren't likely to buy Android devices?

Now, if they didn't have the devices already, then they would choose a device that (probably) works with Youtube, but as they have the devices now, it's going to be different.

That's essentially the reason that I think that Google's move to WebM is so genius. Apple (and Microsoft) really want H.264 to become the de-facto standard for web video, and Apple, in particular, seems willing to sacrifice its customers experience in order to drive the market in the direction it likes. It's refusal to allow flash is a prime example of this. I think that it is quite likely that Apple will drag its heels on WebM long enough that Google will be able to use this as a definite competitive advantage. As you say, given the choice between two similar devices, one that plays Youtube videos, and one that doesn't most people are going to buy the one that plays Youtube videos.

Neither Google or Apple really care about people that already have purchased devices. Obviously Apple wants to keep you happy enough so that you would consider buying from them again, but Google is actively trying to change the game so that you don't buy from Apple again. Google wants to do to Apple on the phone what Microsoft did to Apple on the PC. Making the iPhone feel like a special island of incompatibility is part of that strategy.

Of course, in this particular case, if Apple refuses to support WebM it is hard to blame anyone but Apple. Google has gone out of their way to make it easy to support WebM.

For example, in 2006, I paid ~720EUR for my cell phone, new phones (that I would want - that is, a phone must have a keypad with not-too-small buttons, preferably made by Nokia) cost about the same. 700EUR is a lot of money, the other phone must be that much better to convince me to part with another 700 Euros, since I already have a phone.

I certainly agree that 720EUR is a lot of money. I can see why you are upset. I am sure that, when you bought it, you did not envision that it would become less useful with time either.

If anything, however, that just goes to show why a truly open codec for web video is so important. No one worries that HTML, HTTP, or any of the other web standards are going to disappear any time soon. The reason for this is simple. These standards, and many of them are just de-facto standards, are both open and not patent encumbered. Anyone can implement these standards without having to pay money, and so they are widely supported.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Pentium100]

After all, it is not like iPhones *couldn't* support WebM.

Current ones probably can't support it because video decoding is done in hardware and AFAIK there is no hardware decoder for WebM yet.

But, realistically, where are these customers going to go?

Some other site - blip or something else.

I suppose that it is possible that some other video site might use this as an opportunity to usurp Youtube's position, but I see that as a long shot. Besides, unless the video site is run by an MPEG-LA member the new site is also going to be inclined to follow Google's lead on WebM.

Not necessarily - if the site adopts WebM as fast as Youtube does, they will always be smaller than Youtube (well, they couldn't overtake Youtube before WebM, they probably won't do it later too), however, using a codec that Apple products support would increase their user count after Youtube makes itself incompatible.

Obviously Apple wants to keep you happy enough so that you would consider buying from them again, but Google is actively trying to change the game so that you don't buy from Apple again. Google wants to do to Apple on the phone what Microsoft did to Apple on the PC. Making the iPhone feel like a special island of incompatibility is part of that strategy.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out - after all, Apple's products are too expensive even now, yet people are buying them, especially the iPods/Pads/Phones.

I certainly agree that 720EUR is a lot of money. I can see why you are upset. I am sure that, when you bought it, you did not envision that it would become less useful with time either.

Well, when I bought it, I understood that it will be less useful than newer phones (that were not yet released), however, I still can watch Youtube videos because my phone has a h264 (and DivX) decoders (it needs .mp4 container though, but is otherwise compatible with the iPod video format (older version, well, my phone was made in 2006). Now that Youtube (and others) want to change he codec to some other one that is not that different (and is the same to me - no software patents in my country) for some reason that only a few end users would care about, it kinda bugs me.

If anything, however, that just goes to show why a truly open codec for web video is so important. No one worries that HTML, HTTP, or any of the other web standards are going to disappear any time soon.

I also do not worry that h264 or mp3 are going to disappear soon. Even though there are better codecs than mp3 (higher quality for the same bitrate), mp3 is still extremely popular. h264 is part of a lot of devices, digital TV and Bluray, so it won't disappear any time soon too.

OTOH, I hope that CoreCodec releases a CoreWebM decoder, I use CoreAVC to play 1080p files because CoreAVC manages to use my CPUs (2 sockets with dual core CPUs) better.

The reason for this is simple. These standards, and many of them are just de-facto standards, are both open and not patent encumbered. Anyone can implement these standards without having to pay money, and so they are widely supported.

MP3, DivX, MPEG2 are also widely supported.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[node 3]

That's an issue of trademarks, not copyright or patents. But, in case you're wondering, yes I would not call a standard whose trademarks are not freely available "open" either, though in that case the solution would be so simple as to be trivial.

I never said it was patents, nor did I say it was a standard. What I said is that it's something that's called "open", yet not universally legally implementable by others. In fact, with H.264, anyone can buy a license. With Firefox, you can't use their trademark and you can't even use all of their graphics, and it's not openly licensable.

You say the solution is trivial with Firefox (i.e., just relabel it and replace some graphics). The solution is similarly trivial with H.264, just pay the license.

Only due to a particular reading of the GPL2 that allows for a legal loophole in it.

FSF does not define "open". There are multitudes of other open source licenses which allow the very same thing.

The first is "by commitee", the second is also covered by "standard", and the third is irrelevant, the status of a standard is not and should not be determined by the status of the existing implementations.

Basically, what you are saying is that "open" only means what you say it means, and you will pick what it means based on whether or not it applies to H.264. This is a lame ideological argument. H.264 is OPEN, and it's a STANDARD. That's why I'm calling it an open standard. I'm not saying that Open Standard is some specific term. It just means it's a standard and it's open. If you want to call the word "open" superfluous, be my guest, but what you have not been able to do is demonstrate that it's not a valid adjective.

In fact, by calling it superfluous, you've pretty much granted that it is valid.

It is not, however, completely free, although it is completely free in some contexts, so in those contexts, it is also a free standard. But no one calls it that because you can't really do so without qualification. It is a fair point to consider, however.

Now you're just fucking with me. Seriously, that's not even a coherent argument, that's just school-level wordplay.

No, I'm just telling you that you are confusing "open" with "free" because to you, open means it has to be freely implementable by anyone who wants to, no licensing required. That's not what open means, that's what free means. By "fucking with you" and "school-level wordplay", what you mean is I'm using the actual meanings of words as they stand and not using ideology to reinvent their meanings. Sorry that that fucks with you, but I prefer reality to ideology.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

No, it is not an open standard. At least not in the context of the web, which is what's relevant here. It fails to meet the W3C requirements for an open web standard, as open web standards must be royalty-free. H264 can never become an open web standard (unless the royalty requirement is removed).

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

When it comes to the web, being royalty-free is more important than having slightly higher quality. Free and open access to standards is the cornerstone of the web. It would not exist without it.

Quality doesn't really matter. People don't care. VHS vs BetaMax, Wii vs. PS3, etc. Lower quality almost always wins. Because quality simply isn't that important, so those who focus on quality will frequently fail.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

Anyone who cares about an open web should care that a closed codec is threatening the web.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

Google removed H264 from Chrome because there's more in it for them if the web is free and open, and not closed by a closed codec like H264.

Google is bundling Flash because they still want to be able to play videos on the web, and 99.9999% of that uses Flash. It's a pragmatic choice, and not at all at odds with an open web (the HTML specification explicitly allows for plugins).

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

No, H264 is not an open standard. At least not in the context of the web, as it violates the W3C Patent Policy. And that's what matters.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

As I said, it fails the W3C's patent requirement. Therefore, it can never be or be part of an open web standard.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

Nope. H264 is not an open standard. At least not in the context of the web, as it violates the W3C Patent Policy. And that's what matters.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

Again, H264 is not an open standard. At least not in the context of the web, as it violates the W3C Patent Policy. And that's what matters.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

The W3C defines open web standards. H264 does not match the web defiition. And this is about video on the web.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Jason Earl]

First of all I want to thank you for the discussion, it has been interesting. I will readily admit that I mostly am rooting for WebM on political grounds. I think that a truly open format, that anyone can use without royalties, is going to open up a world of possibilities. It has been educational to discuss this issue with someone who sees the issue in more practical terms.

For the most part I even agree with you. It is annoying that Google has to come out with another incompatible format. It would be much better if all of us lived in countries were software patents were not valid. Then we could all just use H.264 and be happy.

I also agree that MP3, DivX, and MPEG2 are all widely supported, and Ogg and WebM are not hardly supported by hardware at all. I know, I have had to search far and wide (and pay extra) for devices with even mediocre support for Ogg Vorbis. So I am mostly thrilled because I see this as precisely the sort of thing that is likely to break MPEG-LA's grip on media codecs. On the bright side, once we have a viable royalty-free set of codecs with an implementation available as Free Software then we can basically stop worrying about compatibility forever.

So I suppose you could say that I am sympathetic to your plight, but you can't hardly blame Google for doing what is best for their business. You also can not hardly blame me for being excited that a truly free video codec is far more likely to actually win out in the end than I ever anticipated.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

And if anyone here was suggesting that mandating support H.264 should be written into W3C's standards, that would mean something. But they aren't.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Lanteran]

Ah, I see. Openly available to implement to those who will pay them their fees and obey their licensing schemes. Sorry, but that still doesn't exactly sound free to me. Kinda like how the Tivo is "open source".

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[smash]

They're fully contained within that 0.1% of the general internet using public not covered in my above post.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Transcoding?

Handled by an external application, not by the web site.

Thumbnailing particular frames of video for embedding in a particular web page?

Handled by an external application, not by the web site.

Adding support for the MIME type?

Handled by the web server, not the web site.

Support for playback through the tag?

Handled by the client's browser, not the web site.

You can't just wave your hands and make all of this happen. If it worked that way then I wouldn't have to talk about lack of support for WebM in FOSS applications, I'd just wave my hands and then sit down and have a beer.

You talked about it because you quite clearly don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Qubit]

I hope you enjoy your magical web applications that build themselves, know how to transcode media transparently once it hits the web server, and know how to serve up certain types of media in a <video> tag by writing HTML on the fly. I'm sure that with your talents you would be snapped up by Microsoft, Google, Apache, or any one of a number of companies or organizations in a minute.

What a lame AC troll...

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[Anonymous Coward]

As I said, you haven't got a clue. Next time try knowing the subject matter before you speak.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

The public should indeed care about an open web, because it's the very foundation of what they are enjoying today.

Re:And Yet, No Ogg Theora in IE

[hkmwbz]

But that's the point. H264 is incompatible with an open web.

Priorities

[ironicsky]

Microsoft has interesting priorities... "Lets release a plug-in for a third party browser to fix a perceived short coming..." as opposed to "Lets fix the problems and short comings in our products". Slow clap for Microsoft.

Re:Priorities

[mangu]

Slow clap for Microsoft.

With one hand

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has interesting priorities... "Lets release a plug-in for a third party browser to fix a perceived short coming..." as opposed to "Lets fix the problems and short comings in our products". Slow clap for Microsoft.

Yeah, it's almost as if Microsoft were a large company with a lot of developers assigned to a diverse range of products and tasks, where some developer's responsibilities don't overlap with the projects you seem to think they should be fixing bugs on.

Re:Priorities

[shentino]

How much does MS stand to gain from continued support of h264 by a competing browser?

I'd wonder if MS was involved in licensing the codec somehow. Are they a member of MPEG-LA?

Re:Priorities

[MHolmesIV]

Yes. Microsoft is a patent holder in the H.264 patent pool.

Re:Priorities

[arose]

Yes, but their royalties don't seem to cover their own licensing fees. Then again, Microsoft benefits from the status quo of big companies controlling and dividing the market among themselves.

Re:Priorities

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

With one hand

Well I know what you're watching with your new plug-in...

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously they're trolling Google.

Re:Priorities

[DragonWriter]

Microsoft has interesting priorities... "Lets release a plug-in for a third party browser to fix a perceived short coming..." as opposed to "Lets fix the problems and short comings in our products". Slow clap for Microsoft.

To be fair, Google has done that (in a much bigger way) for IE.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not just that ... its that there is always an agenda and you can't take a thing they say at face value. They are doing this because they have a potential financial stake in a competing format. MS has embraced institutionalized lying like we haven't seen since the Nixon days.

Re:Priorities

[nschubach]

If majority Internet video requires H.264 and Windows supports it while the alternatives cannot legally/monetarily pay to support it... who wins?

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

There might be more than one group of engineers at Microsoft ...

Re:Priorities

[PenguSven]

It costs both Microsoft and Apple more to USE the H.264 patents than they get back from owning some of them - neither is doing this for financial reasons, apart from perhaps, wanting to sell devices that work with the video form every man and his dog is creating and consuming.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

it is most likely to make sure that googles codec does not gain a lot of market.
in a response to google making IE able to play VP8 and droppingh264

Re:Priorities

[marcosdumay]

Microsoft is clearly doing that to push H264 on the internet, with the intent of hurting free software, and creating a competitive edge for them. The fact that they'll pay for that doesn't make it less of a finantial incentive.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

> How much does MS stand to gain from continued support of h264 by a competing browser?

A lot, if the browsers in Linux *don't* support h264.

Re:Priorities

[Jonner]

Yes, their priority is clear in this case: to keep Google, Mozilla, Opera, and anyone else supporting WebM from gaining influence over web video. It's bad enough for MS that they've conceded their attempts to control it with their own formats are failing and they've backed MPEG-4. This is part of the same strategy that motivated them to make DotNet and MPEG-4 AVC add-ons for Firefox.

Re:Priorities

[wagnerrp]

Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Opera are all publicly traded companies. They all follow the same rules, and they all exist to make money for their shareholders. Microsoft can compete on even footing.

Mozilla is a non-profit organization, and as such, follows different rules and different motives. Think of h.264 like high property taxes. They are a means to create a monetary barrier to entry, to make it too costly for the open source 'riff-raff' to compete.

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't say "fap", he said "clap"!

Re:Priorities

[Richard_at_work]

Yup, they are most certainly not working on IE9 at the moment, and they have most certainly not released several promising betas...

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Microsoft is also providing WebM support. They just want people to use Windows and don't seem to give a damn about which video codec they use. Besides, when you pay for Windows license you are already paying for the codecs. Make sense to be able to use what you've paid for, doesn't it?
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/02/html5-and-web-video-questions-for-the-industry-from-the-community.aspx

Re:Priorities

[drzhivago]

That might be misconstrued as tinfoil, if, you know, H.264 wasn't an already popular video encoding format.

Oh wait, it is already popular.

Re:Priorities

[Jonner]

If Google provided an add-on for IE9 to support WebM as MS has done for MPEG-4 and other browsers, would that mean MS is providing support for WebM? Now that I think about it, Google is quite likely to do this, probably as part of its existing Google Toolbar. BTW, thanks for making the link easy to follow. From the linked blog article:

2. We will provide support for IE9 users who install third-party WebM video support on Windows and they will be able to play WebM video in IE9.

This means absolutely nothing. Of course IE9 should be able to play video objects in any format that DirectShow can. Any DirectShow program can currently play Ogg Theora and a wide variety of other formats if someone installs ffdshow on their Windows machine. That doesn't mean Microsoft supports Ogg Theora.

Also, you conveniently ignore the next line:

3. Many parties have raised legitimate questions about liability, risks, and support for WebM and the proponents of WebM should answer them.

This clearly means "We have no intention of supporting WebM."

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

The IE team have stated that they won't be natively supporting any video aside from H.264 and WebM in IE9 for security reasons. It doesn't have access to the full range of options DirectShow can handle.

Re:Priorities

[Jonner]

It sounds like you mean that MS will actively disallow most codecs for video elements. Even if WebM is on this blessed list of allowed codecs, I challenge you to point to anything indicating that MS will support WebM. Supporting means making it work with IE out of the box, not simply allowing it.

Re:Priorities

[Raenex]

Oh wait, it is already popular.

And Microsoft wants to keep it that way. There's a big push right now to get away from it for a truly open standard.

Re:Priorities

[westlake]

Yes. Microsoft is a patent holder in the H.264 patent pool.

Along with global giants in manufacturing like Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.

Who - along with the 950 or so H.264 licensees - control every link in the hardware chain of video production and distribution from the studio camera to the HDTV.

Re:Priorities

[vidnet]

Microsoft is clearly doing that to push H264 on the internet, with the intent of hurting free software

Yes, and it's really very clever. They've already done this for firefox.

They have made a way of developing video web sites that work in ~all browsers: MSIE, Firefox and Chrome. This is basically the gold standard for freedom of choice on interoperable web sites -- but now you have to pay the Microsoft tax!

This is the most brilliant licensing trick I've seen since Qt went GPL.

Re:Priorities

[ajs]

Microsoft has interesting priorities... "Lets release a plug-in for a third party browser to fix a perceived short coming..." as opposed to "Lets fix the problems and short comings in our products". Slow clap for Microsoft.

To be fair, Google has done that (in a much bigger way) for IE.

To be fair, as you say, Google wrote the world's most secure browser and then offered you a way to insert it into the world's least secure browser. If Microsoft had made IE a paragon of customer satisfaction and choice and then written a plugin for Chrome that gave you some new toy, then I'd agree with you. They didn't. They just wrote a plugin that allows the perpetuation of the single most patent-encumbered "standard" I've ever seen. Bravo?

Re:Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I only skimmed your previous post and got completely the wrong idea as to what you were saying. I just see everywhere people saying that IE9 will play anything which has a codec installed and had gotten sufficiently annoyed to say something about it in this instance - despite that you were saying it was something it could do, not something it is doing, and you were using it to demonstrate a completely different point.

It is indeed true as far as I'm aware that at the current time a WebM codec will not be supplied with IE9, so it won't work out of the box if the user doesn't already have one.

Holy!

[Anonymous Coward]

No WONDER the Midwest is in the middle of Snowpocolypse 2011. Someone knit Satan a sweater! Hell froze over!

Poetic Justice

[Anonymous Coward]

For when Chrome did the same for Internet Explorer

Re:Poetic Justice

[larry bagina]

Soes this work with Chrome Frame running in IE running in IE Frame running in Firefox running in WINE running in Linux running in Virtual Box running on Windows?

Re:Poetic Justice

[WhiteDragon]

Soes this work with Chrome Frame running in IE running in IE Frame running in Firefox running in WINE running in Linux running in Virtual Box running on Windows?

no, because the firefox extension is called IE Tab (or IE Tab Plus), not IEFrame. Still, it would be interesting if someone tries it.

Re:Poetic Justice

[SuricouRaven]

Sure, but you might take a few seconds per frame.

Re:Poetic Justice

[juasko]

Yeah, and the Windows is loaded on a iMac :p

Finally!

[Wamoc]

I can actually watch internet video in Chrome now!

Re:Finally!

[arose]

You could before.

Re:Finally!

[Ash-Fox]

I can actually watch internet video in Chrome now!

Actually, you need flash for that, sorry.

Now if only they would negotiate with the H.264...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only they would negotiate with the H.264 patent holders to grant a F/OSS friendly license to that patent pool, it might be interesting.

Until then, it's just another example of embrace/extend/extinguish.

Memory Leak

[Utopia]

Microsoft's H.264 addon for Firefox has a bad memory leak.
See http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/971988-memory-leak-in-html5-extension-for-windows-media-player-firefox-add-on/

So this might be bad for Chrome.

Re:Memory Leak

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's Native Implementation for IE may also have a memory leak so no surprise there.

Re:Memory Leak

[alvinrod]

Well there's that, the intensive CPU usage, kernel panics, and it giving you cancer.

But it's still better than Flash.

Re:Memory Leak

[larry bagina]

When in Rome...

Re:Memory Leak

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Microsoft's H.264 addon for Firefox has a bad memory leak... So this might be bad for Chrome.

Sounds like Flash; poor performance and buggy, reflects poorly on the browser despite not being the browser's fault. How did Google handle that problem again? Oh yeah, they rolled support for it into the browser itself with code they maintain. Gee if only they would do something similar for h.264.

Re:Memory Leak

[lennier1]

I'm surprised someone even noticed it next to all the other memory leaks in Firefox.

Re:Memory Leak

[phizi0n]

It also causes Firefox to ask if you want to save tabs every time you close a window (like popups) which is incredibly annoying.

http://support.mozilla.com/ak/questions/669132

Re:Memory Leak

[dudpixel]

I know SJ doesn't like flash, but really, who goes on youtube and sits their complaining about flash? No one. Who even notices half the time when flash is used? again, no one.

Its only flash advertising and poorly written/designed websites using flash that cause people to blame flash for all of the world's problems.

It does have its fair share of problems and flaws, but no more than Windows itself, for example, or any other equivalent plugin. And to be fair, most of the time (youtube etc) flash "just works".

I haven't noticed chrome become any less stable since flash was added in, and I haven't noticed any flash-based sites crashing the browser either.

I find that most of the time I have trouble with flash is when I'm using firefox (on linux). Now that could be a fault of the plugin or the browser or a bit of both...but in any case, Chrome doesn't seem to have suffered because of flash.

Re:Memory Leak

[dudpixel]

hmmm, how can flash cause firefox to do things but not other browsers?

maybe its FIREFOX doing it, and not flash? I'm not sure - its just a suggestion.

does flash need to support firefox? or does firefox need to support flash?

Re:Memory Leak

[phizi0n]

We're talking about Microsoft's plugins that enable h.264 in HTML5 video tags for other browsers. It has nothing to do with Flash.

Re:Memory Leak

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I know SJ doesn't like flash[sic], but really, who goes on youtube[sic] and sits their[sic] complaining about flash[sic]? No one. Who even notices half the time when flash[sic] is used? again, no one.

What the fuck does any of this have to do with Steve Jobs? This is Google we're talking about.

I haven't noticed chrome[sic] become any less stable since flash[sic] was added in, and I haven't noticed any flash-based[sic] sites crashing the browser either.

That's the point. Google solved the Flash issue by adding Flash in natively, with code they control. Now they are pulling h.264 out and it is being replaced with a plug-in they don't control that has performance problems, essentially doing the opposite of what they did with Flash and getting predictable results.

Re:Memory Leak

[dudpixel]

What the fuck does any of this have to do with Steve Jobs? This is Google we're talking about.

heh, just that all this anti-flash stuff started after SJ had a big cry about it. Before that it was just flash-based websites and advertising that people hated (from an annoyance perspective). Now its turned into a holy war.

Re:Memory Leak

[dudpixel]

oops, I think I skipped into the wrong thread. sorry.

Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[Sandb]

This will make H.264 acceptable again for commercial use, infecting the web with patented video tech all over. Hold on to your Linux horses people, you can expect another round of "possibly illegal in your country" extensions to allow you to view the interweb's content. Just say NO to H.264!!

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[RightSaidFred99]

As opposed to the patent unknown of WebM. Yeah, I'm sure people will jump right on that bandwagon!

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I would say no to H.264, if it had not revolutionized video delivery and became the standard format to deliver high quality HD video to end users.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[arose]

As opposed to the patent unknown of WebM. It's as known as H.264, e.i. we know who holds the known patents. If you are saying it is in violation of strong patents without naming them you are arguing against years of On2 selling video codecs withou being sued in the ground. In absence of contrary evidence the reasonable position is that On2 exhibited at least as much diligence with VP8 as VP6 even before Google went over things.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[tlhIngan]

As opposed to the patent unknown of WebM. Yeah, I'm sure people will jump right on that bandwagon!

A major worry actually given how the patent system is. Right now we think WebM is patent free (and it would be nice if it was - c'mon Google, don't you trust your engineers?), but you can bet everyone is quietly sitting on their patents and seeing where this WebM thing is leading. If it proves successful, you strike. But never before - let it be established and essential, then you strike so everyone has no choice but license your patent (or fight you).

That's a problem, these submarine patents.

And those of you claiming that you're in a software-patent free-zone, well, then you're technically in the clear about using h.264 as well since its patents wouldn't be valid, either.

Damned if you do (h.264 patents are recognized and that means WebM is also vulnerable), and damned if you don't (if h.264 patents aren't recognized, then yes, WebM is free, but so is h.264).

It's also a reason why WebM's spec is really source code - because it's close to h.264, alternative implementations may infringe on h.264 (or you use your already-paid-for h.264 licenses...).

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[alvinrod]

Unless they were making at least enough money to cover the lawsuit costs for the plaintiff, there is no reason to sue. Usually they wait until business picks up to the extent that they have something worth suing over or a pile of cash that they can easily pay. Google has deep pockets so I imagine once they've got a full roll-out that's in heavy use they're going to get hit with a lawsuit whether it has merit or not. The opportunity is just too good to pass up.

It's pretty similar to the Oracle lawsuit. They've seen how much Android has taken off, and if they can get a few dollars for every unit sold, it more than makes up for the millions that will be spent on the lawsuit. Hell, it even makes the Sun acquisition pay for itself.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[arose]

Usually they wait until business picks up to the extent that they have something worth suing over or a pile of cash that they can easily pay.

Vorbis FUD never materialized even after major game developers started using it.

Google has deep pockets so I imagine once they've got a full roll-out that's in heavy use they're going to get hit with a lawsuit whether it has merit or not.

OTOH, Google won't just roll over, so the typical patent troll approaches are out of question.

It's pretty similar to the Oracle lawsuit. They've seen how much Android has taken off, and if they can get a few dollars for every unit sold, it more than makes up for the millions that will be spent on the lawsuit.

True, but the lawsuit doesn't seem to have done much to slow adoption, so as long as Google is willing to stand up, and they have made every indication that they are, things are looking good.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[Zelgadiss]

To my knowledge a H.264 licence doesn't protect you from all lawsuits either - just the ones in the MPEG patent pool.

If some troll refuses to join the patent pool and goes around suing people, MPEG and friends won't be lifting a finger to help anyone.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[Anonymous Coward]

This will make H.264 acceptable again for commercial use, infecting the web with patented video tech all over. Hold on to your Linux horses people, you can expect another round of "possibly illegal in your country" extensions to allow you to view the interweb's content. Just say NO to H.264!!

If you similarly support that all your favorite music players drop support for patent encumbered MP3 tomorrow, I salute you. No ifs or buts, but tomorrow your music players don't recognize any MP3 files anymore.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[tomhudson]

As opposed to the patent unknown of WebM. It's as known as H.264, e.i. we know who holds the known patents.

That's so wrong that it's ... just wrong. The MPEG-LA patent pool states that they only license the patents of the pool members to licensees - you're still on your own if some 3rd party has a submarine patent.

-- Barbara

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[horza]

As Zelgadiss says below, somebody can still sue all H.264 users as well for patent infringement. However, (a) Google are trusting their engineers as they are converting everything, YouTube etc, to WebM, and (b) they are trusting On2 who spent a fortune developing a codec specifically to be patent free.

You can't live your life in fear of some invisible patent troll, whether H.264 or WebM. People have done their due diligence, and if the worst comes to the worst you can tie the troll up in court until a work-around is reached and their patent made worthless. CPU is cheap and transcoding may take a little time but easily done. It's unlikely though that Google would pay $133M without paying some pretty good patent lawyers to check. For all this talk of 'submarine patents', the patent databases are publicly searchable. You can delay publication but only for a limited time period.

Phillip.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[jedidiah]

h264 is nothing special in terms of "revolution". Although it does tend to cripple systems that aren't specifically built to accelerate h264 in hardware.

It drives the sale of lots of extra silicon (CPUs, GPUs, speciality SoCs).

h264 is why Flash video is such a pox on end users and why anyone with any clue wishes they could substitute a video player of their choosing. ...although none of this has any impact on most of the internet video out there. The DRM wrappers are too important.

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[arose]

My blockquote was bad, I was arguing that point against "As opposed to the patent unknown of WebM."

Re:Crap - the H.264 disease just got better

[juasko]

Why, MPEG4 is an open standard for anyone to use. It's good, while it's not free, it's still the best out there.

Google WebM is never gona be good enough if it's not standardized. And While it still may not be free from patent problems, why even try.

Unless Google gives it away to an Standardization organization like ISO/IEC, it's not gona be my chose of format. MPEG4 is under MPEG which is under ISO/IEC allready. Naturally Google can choose any other standardization organisation. But if it choses to keep it propriate though open and free. I cannot se it even compete a little with h.264.
Also h.264 is way better. And it runs way better in VLC on MacOSX when it uses Apple decoders, than when it uses it's open source x.264 libraries. No I understand that the not free part troubles some people. But I'm able to make h.264 material for free, so I don't see the issue other than ideologically.

Nope h.264 is not perfekt but it's the best out there. Thanks to that it's MPEG which is ISO/IEC.

OS

[truthsearch]

I still believe that every browser should rely on the codecs installed on the OS. Every platform (and optionally the user) can then choose what they want.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you do believe that way, H.264 has no place in Open Web (nor in HTML standard).

Re:OS

[dagamer34]

Businesses aren't going nor should they care if a format is open or not. They just want a reliable product to be delivered to their customers.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want it to work in the web browser without I have to download at least one codec just because companies can't agree on a standard. The minimum interaction I have to do while browsing the web is what I want. Why should the OS and I be bothered? And why should web services have to create all possible available codec on all OS' just to display a video on their web site? If they could use a single standard then less usage on their servers and costs.

Re:OS

[mdielmann]

Businesses aren't going nor should they care if a format is open or not. They just want a reliable product to be delivered to their customers.

The one key issue with that statement is that if you release a royalty-encumbered product that you can't charge for, you're on the hook for some amount of money. Hence the push for open formats in web browsers, and why a company may be uninterested in producing a free product that opens them for lawsuits at some time in the future.

This isn't a problem for paid-for products, because you can purchase royalties for the patented technologies and it becomes part of the product cost. So goes the theory, anyway.

Re:OS

[arose]

And I believe that cross platform software should work out of the box by minimizing it's platform specific dependencies.

Re:OS

[arose]

Opera isn't a business?

Re:OS

[rwv]

every browser should rely on the codecs installed on the OS

If browsers rely on OS codecs, then distributions of Linux would need to license H.264 and other proprietary codecs. The fact that these codecs are encumbered by patents (making them non-free) makes this an unlikely scenario.

Or would you, as a user, prefer to deal with purchasing licenses for every computer you want to install a particular codec onto? I doubt you would want this burden, so why suggest that Linux distributions should bare it?

Really... the winning solution (for users) is for a codec that is not encumbered by patents to become the de-facto standard. By enabling H.264 in Chrome on Microsoft platforms, Microsoft is trying to make a patent encumbered codec the de facto standard so that it (meaning Microsoft) can collect licensing fees in the future.

Re:OS

[Noughmad]

Can't they just ship VLC with the browser?

Re:OS

[Zelgadiss]

Then what's the point of specifying a standard video codec in HTML5.

Your suggestion is effectively the status quote. :x

The standard is to make it easier for users (so they don't have to going hunting for a plugin) and developers (so they don't have to worry if their video will work on platform X).

Re:OS

[Tubal-Cain]

The whole point of standards is to ensure that one can safely state that $FOO will work on both System_A and System_B without knowing anything about them except that they support the standard. If we rely on system codecs then users can't be sure that the site they're visiting provides content in a codec available on their platform. And the content provider needs to have 2-4 versions of every video if they're going to be reasonable certain that the website will work with a random visitor.

If we require that a certain format to be supported in order for it to be standard-compliant, then both content providers and users can be sure that $STANDARD_COMPLIANT_WEBSITE works with $STANDARD_COMPLIANT_SYSTEM

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really feel that about every cross-platform application that plays any form of video or audio? Each should include their own decoder/renderer?

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Every site should present files with mimetypes, and browsers should then display accordingly, either by direct support or by embedding / launching a player. If a mimetype isn't recognised, then the user is informed and can go get a player/editor. Simple, flexible, and exactly how the web was intended to work from the very beginning.

Re:OS

[Dayofswords]

I believe it should use both locally installed codecs and codecs of their own(which when they both have, OS would probably be the choice of the developer)
Best of both world you know.

Re:OS

[truthsearch]

Then what's the point of specifying a standard video codec in HTML5.

It shouldn't. The HTML specs don't specify supported image formats. I shouldn't specify video, either.

Re:OS

[Zelgadiss]

Well, not everyone sees it that way.

I don't see a downside to standardization to be honest.
JPEG, GIF, bitmaps are all support "voluntarily" but PNG on the other hand ...
Result? No one used it until recently. (if I'm right poor support in older versions of IE was what delayed adoption)

Re:OS

[spinkham]

Yes, if there was one high compression, cross platform, already in hardware, open standard, royalty free codec, it should totally be in the spec.
H.264 and WebM both fall down on different parts of those qualifications, so we get a turf war.

Re:OS

[Jonner]

I still believe that every browser should rely on the codecs installed on the OS. Every platform (and optionally the user) can then choose what they want.

That would work great if every platform Chrome ran on supported all of the codecs people want. Do you like having to choose your OS on a web page to be able to watch a video? That's how it worked before the vast majority of web video switched to Flash players. Sites switched to Flash because it supported the same codecs on all platforms, not because it used those provided by the platform.

Re:OS

[ifrag]

If browsers rely on OS codecs, then distributions of Linux would need to license H.264 and other proprietary codecs.

Would they? FFmpeg seems to work fine. Maybe it's not entirely distro safe but it's not hard to get either.

Re:OS

[Zelgadiss]

/sigh

I wonder when this is going to end.

Re:OS

[sxeraverx]

Agreed. The problem is, there's no standardized way to access a codec for any OS, no robust API, and there pretty much can't be.

If a new codec comes along with a feature (say, multiple streams, or user interaction, or anything) that the OS codec API writers didn't anticipate, it can't use the codec API anymore, which means we're back to the situation of plugins for everything.

Additionally, if two programs you install (think Windows, not Linux) come with two different implementations of, say, the Ogg Theora codec, which one gets used? There are just too many things broken with the Windows model of doing things that something like this would be infeasible and unmaintainable.

And I'm not saying Linux or OSX are any better: I don't have experience with OSX, but as far as Linux goes, its problem is the opposite. I doesn't have too few standards, it has too many (although GStreamer seems to be dominating at the moment).

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it's still illegal to actually install it. Some of us like legal solutions. Especially given that the people encoding the videos have to pay.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

If this were the case, then Google would have to trust Microsoft to play fair with their codecs...

At least this way there is an opportun

Re:OS

[RazorSharp]

I think it's more them just trying to paint Google as the bad guy. Or make people think that Chrome isn't as full featured without a Microsoft add-on, which leads to the assumption that Microsoft's a more competent software company and they might as well use IE.

Re:OS

[Dynedain]

Or would you, as a user, prefer to deal with purchasing licenses for every computer you want to install a particular codec onto? I doubt you would want this burden, so why suggest that Linux distributions should bare it?

That's a licensing issue. Not a browser vs. OS issue. By pushing codec support to the browser, then the browser makers have to license every codec. Someone still has to deal with the licensing.

From a technical level, its' better for the OS to handle codecs because the OS should handle the various low-level hardware APIs, accelerations, splitters, and everything else that goes into decoding the media. Right now, Google has to implement the decoding each time on every OS they support. Safari has to implement the decoding on each OS they support. Firefox, Opera, etc... You end up with #ofOS times #ofBrowser different implementations of EACH major codec. Hand that shit off to the OS, that's what it exists for. The OS is probably already implementing most of those codecs anyways for local media players.

Re:OS

[randallman]

We've been there before and it didn't work out so well. Remember RealPlayer and Quicktime. On most systems flash is a dog, yet we use it instead of handing off to OS installed programs. That makes it clear that users and developers prefer to use a solution that is sure to work over one that may be better, but might not be available. In this case h.264 might be better than say, webm, but its proprietary nature will prevent it from being installed on the majority of systems, especially now that there is a healthy browser ecosystem. webm is good. Maybe not as good as h.264, but it is sufficient for a standard, and that's what we need - a standard.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

If browsers used the codecs installed on the OS by the user, wouldn't the codecs without license cost win out? They would surely be less hassle for the user. Then, the standard would also be chosen by the users? Maybe I'm naive.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us like legal solutions

It's still legal to move out of the US of A.

Re:OS

[dkf]

I don't see a downside to standardization to be honest.

Apart from the huge fight over it and all the patent and licensing worries? Let's face it, trying to standardized the whole technical stack is just making it incredibly hard to finalize any standard at all. Far better to drop the largely orthogonal bits like media formats and focus on how to handle larger classes of content (e.g., do video/* as a generic thing rather than nailing down exactly what sort of a baseline there needs to be there).

Standards should be focussed and composable, as that makes it possible to implement them. The whole HTML5 process has not ever given the impression of having been properly limited in scope. It's just one shark-jumping moment after another.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been that way for over 15 years now, and it hasn't worked.

Instead, users have had to install Realplayer, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, and god knows what other abominations.

And that's on Windows! Elsewhere, people have been told: suck it up.

So, if you don't mind, we're going to try something else.

It might not work, either (not with shenanigans like this, certainly). But we can't expect the same shit that hasn't worked for 15 years to suddenly start working now. You've had your chance; the rest of us are moving on.

Re:OS

[kiwix]

AFAIK, VLC does not use the codecs installed on the OS, so it would be basically equivalent to what Chrome and Firefox are doing today. VLC does support H.264, but that's probably just because they're not big enough to be a target for a lawsuit.

Re:OS

[kiwix]

You end up with #ofOS times #ofBrowser different implementations of EACH major codec.

No, you don't. You only have #ofBrowser different implementations, because the same code can be used on Linux and an Windows is you do all the decoding internally and you only use to OS to display the result. That's probably the main reason why they do the decoding inside the browser: they have to include an implementation of each codec, but they don't need to implement the video decoding API of each OS.

I agree that from a technical point of view, it would be better to use the OS API for video decoding, but that actually requires more work. And by the way, what is the standard video API under Linux these days?

Re:OS

[RichM]

If browsers rely on OS codecs, then distributions of Linux would need to license H.264 and other proprietary codecs.

Canonical licenses H.264, which means Ubuntu has or can have it.

Re:OS

[jedidiah]

If you're bothered by downloading another codec, then you're using the wrong OS.

People whine like the whole "plugin" problem wasn't solved already about 15 years ago.

Re:OS

[jedidiah]

> No, you don't. You only have #ofBrowser different implementations, because
> the same code can be used on Linux and an Windows

No you can't. They have different acceleration APIs.

The only stuff that's genuinely cross platform is the Adobe style stuff that does everything in software.

Unfortunately, h264 is far too much of a resource pig for that. That's why everyone whines about Flash performance.

Flash is your perfect example of the cross platform decoder. Everyone wants to dump that as it is.

Re:OS

[jedidiah]

> already in hardware

Something that the world is to be subjected to as a "standard" should not require specialty decoding hardware on an otherwise pretty fast PC.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Your video card probably already came with a license for H.264 decoding.

Re:OS

[theurge14]

Or, on the other hand, those of us who don't cling to the same patent-free manifestos that certain others do would rather have working consumer-ready software and hardware in our hands this year instead of a decade down the road.

Re:OS

[Malc]

Yawn. The codec license is included in the price of Windows. If you're not on Windows, you don't have access to it. If you are, there's mo additional cost. What's your point?

Re:OS

[arose]

That is pretty much what happens, yes.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Businesses aren't going nor should they care if a format is open or not. They just want a reliable product to be delivered to their customers.

Businesses that service more than 100,000 customers (i.e. Netflix, YouTube) currently have to pay up to $5 million/yr to *encode* their video. So yes, businesses should and do care.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing preventing the licensor of H.264 from refusing to re_license to Canonical when the current agreement expires. I assume Canonical does not have a perpetual license, of course. Really, it comes down to what content provides want to use which will be the eventual video standard online. It would be best for comsumers if Microsoft didn't have the ability to assert control over the eventual winning standard... and that would mean WebM (which Google, to my understanding, has promiced not to use there patents on) instead of H.264.

Re:OS

[spinkham]

Right, the hardware concern is for mobile devices and set top box type applications.

WebM will likely be in many handsets by the end of the year, but H.264 is in the last few years of mobile devices and set top boxes already.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

> If browsers rely on OS codecs, then distributions of Linux would need to license H.264 and other proprietary codecs.
You mean like Debian, who is shipping with a multitude of H.264 decoders?

Re:OS

[dudpixel]

but if its an open web, surely anyone can put whatever they like on it? otherwise its not really open is it?

You are free not to support it. But many will. That's just the way the world works.

iTunes/mac wouldn't be successful if that weren't the case. Sure its a locked down, restrictive system, but it gives people what they want, so they're generally ok with it.

Re:OS

[dudpixel]

but what can you do about it?

Who chooses the de-facto standard?

People will support anything that gives them what they want, even if there is a slight cost tradeoff.

I think you'll find that the money will decide what becomes the standard, and if Apple, MS and the media companies get behind H.264 (which seems pretty likely) then there isn't much that a few people can do (and yes, in reality, those who are pushing for free codecs are literally a drop in a bucket compared to those who will just go along with whatever windows gives them)...

Re:OS

[awshidahak]

I still believe that every browser should rely on the codecs installed on the OS. Every platform (and optionally the user) can then choose what they want.

In a way, I agree with you. I agree that the codecs should be handled by the OS. But I also think that the standard that's chosen should be a standard open for anyone to use, redistribute, and improve. The point here is accessibility. If there's a standard, OS and browser independent codec that actually works (sorry Theora) then I think we've got a winner.

Re:OS

[Zelgadiss]

Apart from the huge fight over it and all the patent and licensing worries?

This is the "necessary evil" part of a standardization process.

Sometimes it's easily resolved and everyone moves on with their lives enjoying the benefits of having a fixed standard.
Sometimes it's never resolved and the status quote is maintained with the standard hanging in limbo.

Re:OS

[ltwally]

If browsers rely on OS codecs, then distributions of Linux would need to license H.264 and other proprietary codecs. The fact that these codecs are encumbered by patents (making them non-free) makes this an unlikely scenario.

You mean like how Linux distros cannot support MP3, and users have to download and install support for it themselves? Yet this hasn't been a serious obstacle for MP3 players in linux in recent years.

The same "click here to download and install a h264 codec" process could easily be added to linux installs.

By enabling H.264 in Chrome on Microsoft platforms, Microsoft is trying to make a patent encumbered codec the de facto standard so that it (meaning Microsoft) can collect licensing fees in the future.

You do realise that Microsoft is not the patent holder on h264?

Re:OS

[GPLHost-Thomas]

FFmpeg *decoding* is fine. It's not when you are trying to compress a video using mpeg. For both mp3 and video mpeg, the real patent/license annoying part is encoding, not reading. Oh, and I forgot: every hardware device reading an MP3 should be giving 1USD of royalties... But maybe, like many others, the only thing you care is that it "works", which is the mistake (tm) to not do.

Re:OS

[Synonymous Homonym]

If browsers rely on OS codecs, then distributions of Linux would need to license H.264 and other proprietary codecs. The fact that these codecs are encumbered by patents (making them non-free) makes this an unlikely scenario.

Alternatively, instead of the distributors, the users themselves could buy licenses to just the codecs they need, which would really be the most sensible solution.

Re:OS

[juasko]

What do i do if it's deliverd trough a flash media player. Any codec is fine for me as it's not trough flash. Though I prefer h.264 by far as it gives the best user experience and compatibility of all the new moder.

The most compatible player and codec in the world is Quicktime and sorenson encoded. That works on nearly every operating system except some *nix and Unix flavours. While Linux has less than 1% market share of desktopusers. I cant find that so relevant. But you get Quictime with sorenson to work down to Windows 95, maybe even windows 3.1.

Belive me our company has investigated what platform to use for our videos, and our customers who are Diesel Powerplants owners or Ship Owner (cruisers, tankers etc) they are not so updated on their systems. But WM fails, and all other fails but Quictime and sorenson encoding. Only problem with quictime is to get that software approved for install, but that is the only problem we have with it. Otherwise the Apple parol holds true, it just works.

Re:OS

[juasko]

This is a problem for linux yes, linux desktopuser has a shrinking marketshare under 1%.
I know it's tough to be in a minority prefering your own system, and I would be glad if h.264 woudl become avail on linux too. But with more than 99% of the systems allready having h.264 support in one or the otherway, and h.264 is the only open standard out there that meets the requirements. Well there is nothing else. Instead of working against h.264. Lobbying for making h.264 possible on linux would be a much better aproach. MPEG LA has comitted them selves allready to great extent to ensure that the license modell should not bee too much of an obstakle.

Litte more lobbying for this would make h.264 an alternative for linux systems too. Now that would basically mean that h.264 would be supported by 99.95% of the systems out there in a way or other.

Re:OS

[juasko]

I doubt FFmpeg is base on h.264, I'm quite sure that it's based on x.264 which is not really the same and under VLC it performs not as good as when VLC uses Apples fraimworks instead on OSX.

correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Let microsoft pay for the codec which is build-in to the extension.
Everybody else will be using other codecs.

Can't win

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't beat 'em, appear to fix them.

Translation

[blair1q]

"No way are we at Microsoft letting Chrome users off the hook for autoplayed videos with our advertisements in them."

Re:Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I hear that Google hates ads.

Re:Translation

[thestudio_bob]

Yeah! As apposed to Google getting in bed with Adobe and making sure CPU sucking, system crashing, Flash is available to do the same!

Re:Translation

[dudpixel]

how come everyone thinks flash makes your pc slow and crash, and yet chrome doesn't do any of those things, even though it includes flash now??

Downright evil

[A beautiful mind]

Google dropped support for that crap because it's a patent trap, while a technologically equivalent format exists - WebM. I hope Youtube will remove h.264 encoding from their videos as soon as most Firefox and Chrome users migrated to a version that supports WebM.

Re:Downright evil

[RightSaidFred99]

x264 is not a patent trap, its patent implications are well known. WebM, on the other hand, is a patent trap - nobody knows who's going to come out of the woodwork to sue over some small piece of it that someone has a vague patent over.

Re:Downright evil

[shentino]

x264 is a patent trap whose teeth are so ginormous people are afraid to go near it.

Re:Downright evil

[A beautiful mind]

Bullshit. Let me break it down:

Patent risk from submarine patents: neither h.264 nor WebM offers any protection from it.

Patent risk from MPEG-LA for h.264: significant, as it can decide to raise prices / start charging for content at any time. Bait and switch is their strategy.

Patent risk from Google for WebM: none, they offered irrevocable indemnification:

Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable ⦠patent license to [infringe VP8 patents owned by Google].

Re:Downright evil

[unity100]

264 IS a patent trap, and one of the trap owners is microsoft. this is why they are being so charitable in this occasion.

Re:Downright evil

[arose]

Patent risk from submarine patents: neither h.264 nor WebM offers any protection from it.

At least not to the general public, I wouldn't be too surprised if there is an indemnification scheme of some soft behind the broad support Google was able to attract from other companies.

Re:Downright evil

[Kjella]

It's really much simpler. Windows 7 and OS X has already licensed the codec, Microsoft has absolutely nothing to lose by pushing it. Firefox has problems with it, Linux has problems with it. When there's so few competitors, pushing them down is as good as lifting yourself up. Not to mention in public perception they don't want it to look like Google is leading the pack and Microsoft tagging along. There's so many political and strategical reasons to do it that far outweigh the minimal patent royalties they get.

Re:Downright evil

[ClubStew]

I can't see how YouTube would outright drop support for H.264. IE still makes up 56% across all versions (source: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0). Google would be fools to dissuade that many customers away from YouTube as well as any sites that embed YouTube videos. As one reply says in this regard, they might use another site.

Re:Downright evil

[TrancePhreak]

That would be fine if there wasn't a bunch of hardware out there with dedicated h264 support and no WebM support.

Re:Downright evil

[Captain Spam]

x264 is not a patent trap, its patent implications are well known. WebM, on the other hand, is a patent trap - nobody knows who's going to come out of the woodwork to sue over some small piece of it that someone has a vague patent over.

"This hallway contains a series of traps. You will have spinning blades firing at your neck, boiling lava poured in, spiked walls crushing you, pillars crashing down from the ceiling to flatten you against the floor, angry poisonous snakes shot at you slingshot-style, sheer 500-foot dropoffs after blind turns, and a group of moody natives at the end who, at their whim, will force you back through the hallway once in a while for their own personal amusement and profit. Most of your popular friends chose this hallway, and you haven't heard from many of them in a while.

This other hallway is kinda empty. But, it might contain a few armed bear traps. *pause* We had a few inspectors look through it and they said it was safe, but those guys are total dweebs, y'know? I hate 'em. I mean, look at them, they're a bunch of ugly nerds. *pause* And this hallway's all boring and unpopular and nobody goes down it so what are you some kind of stupid nerd? *looks around cagily for a couple seconds* Ooo, scaaaaaary hallwaaaaaaay! What, do you want to live forever? Now, make your choice!"

Re:Downright evil

[Em Adespoton]

Youtube won't remove h.264 encoding until the majority of mobile browsers (I'm looking at you, Mobile Safari) support WebM.

Re:Downright evil

[h4rr4r]

Bullshit, h264 is a huge risk. There could well be other unknown patents out there for it. The MPEG-LA does not indemnify you at all.

Re:Downright evil

[h4rr4r]

Well then it is good that this is not the case. That hardware is generic stuff, it could easily do WebM.

Re:Downright evil

[RightSaidFred99]

Stop lying. h.264 certainly has some protection from submarine patents - namely a huge body of patents held for it. You know who has the patents, and they will sue the living shit out of anyone who tries to bring forth a patent for it. You have someone on your side, and that someone has very big guns.

WebM? Not so much... Google isn't offering wide indemnification, only for their own patents no?

Re:Downright evil

[RightSaidFred99]

Stop being silly. It's more like you can go down the trapped hallway with a free pass that disables all the traps (by licensing it), or you can wander down the dark WebM hallway where it's likely there are traps.

Re:Downright evil

[Rockoon]

I like how you failed to properly and accurately quote the text:

Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to...

"irrevocable.. 'cept for those cases where we reserve the right to revoke..."

Re:Downright evil

[Rockoon]

Well then it is good that this is not the case. That hardware is generic stuff, it could easily do WebM.

Yet nobody is doing it. There isnt a single device doing hardware accelerated WebM right now, but plenty of plans to add hardware acceleration to future devices. Nobody is adding hardware acceleration to existing devices, which tells me that in spite of your claim it "could easily" be done.. it is either not easy, or can't be done.

Re:Downright evil

[steveha]

"irrevocable.. 'cept for those cases where we reserve the right to revoke..."

Rockoon, I am wondering what your axe to grind is here. I've seen you write insightful stuff here on Slashdot, but not today.

Google hasn't reserved any right to revoke. They did specify one condition where you can forfeit your rights under the patent grant: if you sue to attack the patents, you lose your grant to use the patents. That's unusual (maybe even never seen before?) and it's sort of odd. But it doesn't leave Google with the power to say "We have decided we don't like you and we are taking away your patent grant."

So it really comes down to arguing over what "irrevocable" means. If it means "no third party has the ability to take away the grant" then this grant is "irrevocable". If it means "nothing will ever, ever, ever take away the grant", then this grant is not "irrevocable".

Personally, I think the fact that no third party can take away your patent grant rights means it really is "irrevocable". Google can't revoke your rights; nobody can; that's "irrevocable" enough for me. The fact that there is one, clearly spelled out, way that you can forfeit your patent grant does not cause any hidden dangers or uncertainty around the patent grant.

Compare with the H.264 patent holders, who have decided that if you use a camera that records in H.264 format, you have to dance to their tune, even if you immediately convert the H.264 video to some other format. Engadget asked MPEG-LA if the license agreement means what it says, and received official word that the license agreement doesn't mean what it says; that even though the license says you will need to pay extra if you used an H.264 camera for a "commercial" purpose, that you won't have to pay extra. But as I understand it, the patent laws give them the power to start enforcing that clause any time before the patents run out.

I'll take a format with an irrevocable patent grant (even if there is a way I could forfeit the grant) any day, over H.264. If you build a business on H.264, you have no idea how much you will have to pay to use it later; with WebM you know exactly how much you will have to pay, and that is zero.

steveha

Re:Downright evil

[wilsone8]

Did you read the article at all? The lack of indemnification is EXACTLY what MS is complaining about with respect to WebM.

Re:Downright evil

[wilsone8]

They offered patent indemnification from patents that 'Google' holds. That's nice, but that doesn't protect you from the patents that anyone else holds. H.264 has been around long enough that it is unlikely their are anymore submarine patents out there (or if there are, it is likely they can brought into the patent pool). Also, Microsoft has agreed to indemnify any user using H.264 on their platform. Google refuses to do the same for WebM.

Software patents are evil, but they are also very painful if you are the one sued. Personally, I would rather deal with the devil I know than the devil I don't.

Re:Downright evil

[tuppe666]

Stop lying. h.264 certainly has some protection from submarine patents - namely a huge body of patents held for it. You know who has the patents, and they will sue the living shit out of anyone who tries to bring forth a patent for it. You have someone on your side, and that someone has very big guns.

WebM? Not so much... Google isn't offering wide indemnification, only for their own patents no?

Patents don't work like that you can't sue someone for having a patent, you have to pay them for using it...or they sue you. Which is why I am I am concerned about Microsoft suing ME for using a codec.

Re:Downright evil

[steveha]

There isnt a single device doing hardware accelerated WebM right now

Google is paying people to develop reference code for hardware acceleration of WebM on existing DSP chips. WebM is close enough to H.264 in basic ways (e.g. both are based on discrete cosine transform) that hardware to accelerate H.264 can likely be used to accelerate WebM. So, it is very possible that a simple software upgrade will enable hardware accelerated WebM on existing devices; and Google is paying to make it happen.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1946532&cid=34846252

It's not done yet, so you are correct that there is currently no hardware acceleration of WebM on current mobile devices.

steveha

Re:Downright evil

[arose]

Did you read what I said? MS is in with us in the general public lounge here, we don't know what Google did to persuade, for example, AMD and Nvidia. If lack of indemnification was MS's real problem then why don't they apply it to H.264 as well?

Re:Downright evil

[Celarent Darii]

Not exactly true. MPEG-LA would have a vested interest in defending their patent pool, and thus could countersue.

Users of Ogg/Thedora have no such protection.

The whole reason that MPEG-LA came into existence was exactly to allow companies to use each other's tech without the specter of lawsuits.

Re:Downright evil

[WorBlux]

I don't know why people are so stuck up on software patents. It's mostly just math.

Re:Downright evil

[renoX]

> You know who has the patents, and they will sue the living shit out of anyone who tries to bring forth a patent for it.

Sigh, you're mistaken:do you know what 'patent troll' are?
They don't make products only registers patents, so a patent troll could certainly sue h.264 users for patents violation without risk of being sued in return for patent violation as they *don't* make products..

H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

H.264 is the standard. Browsers should play it.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft Office is the industry standard. Everyone should have a copy.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[SadButTrue]

de facto standard you mean?

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[VortexCortex]

LAMP stacks are the standard, everyone should be using Linux.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[sqldr]

popular =/= standard. Standards need to be published in a way that people can implement without being sued. You can't even avoid the patents, since by following the standard, you're implementing the patents.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Ash-Fox]

H.264 is the standard. Browsers should play it.

Not really, flash is the standard. Barely nothing uses the video tag out there and the places that do offer currently flash support over it. The biggest provider of video tag content (youtube), while not enabled by default provides the majority of that content in webm only for the video tag.

Thus, I wouldn't even say h.264 is the 'standard' for video tags either.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[toriver]

ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding

Sounds like a formal standard to me.

Unlike, say, a spec made by a small company that Google bought.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[SadButTrue]

And of course this would be relevant aside from the definite article used. "The Standard" does not mean the same thing as "A Standard". And therefore saying "H.264 is the standard. Browsers should play it." implies that H.264 is somehow special. Which is why of course I asked for clarification on her point. English can be complicated :(

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Zelgadiss]

Except when they can't because the developers can't afford a license ?

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course this would be relevant aside from the definite article used. "The Standard" does not mean the same thing as "A Standard". And therefore saying "H.264 is the standard. Browsers should play it." implies that H.264 is somehow special. Which is why of course I asked for clarification on her point. English can be complicated :(

By all normal definitions of standard h.264 is more of a standard than WebM. h.264 is ratified by standards organization, WebM is a Google thing. Standard !=open source, open source !=standard.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

The standard? THE standard? The standard WHAT? Video playback codec? Not hardly. If by standard you mean most supported/installed base, then flash is the standard. If you mean it's in some standards list for HTML4/5/6/? then you are simply being silly. As many things are in those standards and not one browser I'm aware of implements them all correctly. Even in the web streaming video world, H.264 is far from a standard, and no where near THE standard. Get a grip.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Jonner]

H.264 is the standard. Browsers should play it.

Yeah, you're right: the W3C says video elements should be H.264. Oh, wait, no it doesn't.

Re:H.264 good. Not supporting it, bad. Good for MS

[Anonymous Coward]

H.264 isn't standard for web video in any conceivable sense of the word. It isn't an open standard, it has a tiny real-world amount of content compared to Flash, and currently is supported by around 10% of browsers in use.

The backers of H.264 want it to become a "standard" like .doc.

We are better off with a real open standard, rather than helping a closed, patent-encumbered format become a de facto standard. It makes sense to support closed formats like mp3 and .doc because they are in such widespread use. H.264 is still barely a factor on the web, even if it is a de facto standard for things like digital video cameras.

Re:Now if only they would negotiate with the H.264

[node 3]

That's not how 'embrace, extend, extinguish' works. They are embracing H.264, but not extending it, are extending Chrome (in a way different from e.e.e. however), and extinguishing neither.

Sure MS... Sure

[Haedrian]

This is making you sound like you want chrome users to use H264... I wonder why.

I'm sure this is to give the choice, and not because you have interests in H264 yourself.

Good going guys!

[This post brought to you by the Sarcastic Foundation]

Re:Sure MS... Sure

[bonch]

This is making you sound like you want chrome users to use H264... I wonder why.

Because H.264 is the de facto standard for HTML5 video today?

Whoever wins, I win

[mibe]

I can't help but think I can only benefit from Google and Microsoft fighting.

Re:Whoever wins, I win

[SadButTrue]

At the very least it can be entertaining.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/bing-google-fight/

Re:Whoever wins, I win

[Zelgadiss]

Not really.

This is analogues to HD-DVD vs Bluray, movies got held up because they didn't know which format to use.

The sooner the standards battle is over the better.
Everyone can then get on with their lives.

Re:Whoever wins, I win

[Anonymous Coward]

At least as long as they fight by improving each other's products.

bravo

[Anonymous Coward]

I rarely praise M$ for anything (you know their history), but bravo to M$ for this one. I hope to see other plug-ins for several browsers on several platforms to enable H.264 - basically any browser that doesn't support it natively. Despite Google's attempt at thwarting an emerging standard, H.264 IS the standard, get used to it.

The Chrome h.264 plug-in seems to work fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is readying a WebM plug-in for IE9. No complaints about either.

c'mon!

[Beelzebud]

I eagerly await a wall of text explaining why this is actually an evil move by MS, and how .h264 is the devil's codec that will steal the internet from all of us!

Re:c'mon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is pushing VP8, a free and open, interoperable codec with no strings attached. MS can't have that sort of good idealistic thingamajig floating around the netz. What sort of person just puts something out there without retaining their god-given right to sue for EULA violations. By making H.264 available as a plugin, they make every other company go "ah, no need to switch to VP8 if everyone can run H.264".

Remember Google bringing SVG to IE?

[infernalC]

Do you remember this: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/22/1246248/Google-Brings-SVG-Support-To-IE ?

I remember when Google announced the svgweb javascript library to enable SVG support in IE. That sort of reinforced the notion that Microsoft was playing catch-up in the browser technology arena. Microsoft is now, at least trying, I think, to present the appearance that Google is the company that is behind. Not to mention it doesn't hurt MS to have value added to Chrome when it runs on Windows. They're not going to make this happen for Chrome running on GNU/Linux.

Re:Remember Google bringing SVG to IE?

[nschubach]

Especially since this plugin will likely be going out in Windows Updates so that the stranglehold of Internet video can remain in the hands of H.264 while those that choose non-Windows machines cannot view those videos without special provisions.

Re:Remember Google bringing SVG to IE?

[Pi1grim]

Nope, that still doesn't create an impression that Google is begind. Truth is, Google has implemented and then removed h264 support. So it's more like Microsoft being behind and attempting to drag others with it.

Re:Remember Google bringing SVG to IE?

[Kagetsuki]

Wait. Stop. Just around that time I was actually tasked with making an SVG based "app" for customizing products on a shopping site (the svg including the script inside was super easy to embed). The problem was IE, and we were wondering how to deal with it when this came out. Firefox ran it beatifully, Chrome/webkit ran it OK, the Google SVG Web thing ran it depressingly poorly. Add that to the fact the iPhone (one of the main reasons we were doing this in SVG) browser would crash whenever we tried to do even the most basic interaction with the SVG/Script and the project was a bust. We redid the whole thing in AS3 with the interface wrapped in an SWC exported from Flash - if you browser doesn't have flash all the customization portions show up as a set of drop down lists in HTML/JS. This was actually my first AS3 project, and after dealing with SVG/JS I really hate to say it but as a language JS doesn't approach the capabilities of AS3 and as a graphics technology SVG (and to a degree the HTML "canvas") doesn't come close to Flash. If you don't believe me then compare them yourself, just try and do anything complex in JS then try the same thing in AS3. Try making even a simple animation in SVG and then do the same thing in Flash.

Very few users will notice

[rsilvergun]

most end users don't keep windows up, they close them as soon as their down to avoid 'cluttering their desktops'. So it's not much of an issue.

Re:Very few users will notice

[SadButTrue]

I have had the misfortune of being the go to IT guy at a couple of small firms. Getting called away from dev work to "fix" sales drones PCs is all to common. 90% of the time it involved killing the 50 or so open IE instances. They get stuck between not wanting to bookmark something and not wanting to lose it so they just minimize...

Re:Very few users will notice

[Anonymous Coward]

most end users don't keep windows up, they close them as soon as their down to avoid 'cluttering their desktops'. So it's not much of an issue.

Thoughts like that are why those of us in QA have grey hairs.

Re:Very few users will notice

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it isn't any issue, since we other people don't use Windows.

Spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay. Now Microsoft can steal Google search results from Chrome too!

And

[unity100]

will it report which videos i choose to watch on youtube to microsoft ? so that they can use it to 'improve their results' in any potential video service they may be launching, depending on what youtube shows ?

Re:And

[DragonWriter]

If you're using Chrome, you've already proven you don't care about the app phoning home.

No, you've shown that you are willing to accept an app phoning home to Google for what Chrome gives you. That doesn't mean that you are willing to accept an app phoning home to Microsoft for what the H.264-in-HTML5-video-tag-plugin gives you.

Re:And

[TrancePhreak]

No more than Chrome already does for Google.

Re:And

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to familiarize yourself with Google's own privacy policy that explains exactly what information Google receives from Chrome... You might be very surprised that the propaganda you've consumed from Microsoft is completely incorrect.

Re:And

[aliquis]

No more than Chrome already does for Google.

As if they need to considering Google own youtube.

So switching browser won't take you that far :)

Re:And

[Beelzebud]

Yeah just ask Google, they'll be honest!

Re:And

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like:

When you type URLs or queries in the address bar ... Google Chrome will contact Google when it starts

?

no.

[unity100]

h264 is patent encumbered proprietary crap. you get used to it.

Anything you can do...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I heard they released a plugin for our browser that supposedly 'fixes' it. Well guess what? We just released a plugin for their browser that fixes it. You're welcome." - Steve Ballmer

Incomplete quote

[HalAtWork]

The full quote is:

"At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web including the ability to enjoy the widest range of content available on the internet in H.264 format"

They don't want Windows customers to have the best experience of the web, they want users to have the best experience of H.264 format content available on the web, a much narrower goal with less actual benefit to any user, not even just Windows customers.

It's important to have all the information and not just pull something out of context, because you will get the wrong idea. MS concentrates just as much on the way they express themselves as they do on the development of their own software.

no, I'm pretty sure not

[phantomfive]

'At Microsoft we respect that Windows customers want the best experience of the web including the ability to enjoy the widest range of content available on the internet in H.264 format,'

No, I'm pretty sure that most Microsoft customers just get confused and glazed-over eyes when someone mentions H.264 or any other numbers.

Re:no, I'm pretty sure not

[__aaelyr464]

Numbers? What are those?

-- Sent from my desktop PC running Windows ME

Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology.

Why should Microsoft support your particular belief system over the beliefs of anyone else? Why, especially, should they want their users to have a much worse experience watching internet video?

How about adopting (or adapting) a belief system that leads to better products instead of worse ones?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[El_Muerte_TDS]

MS Windows is technically highly inferior to Linux and Mac OSX, yet Microsoft hasn't "fixed" Chrome on those platforms.

The fact that format X is inferior is not a valid reason to not support it. After all, IE renders bitmaps just fine, even though it's one of the worst formats to use on websites.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

How is Ogg Theora "highly inferior to H.264"? I have read on many different sites that Ogg Theora is being somewhat inferior in certain instances.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

The fact that format X is inferior is not a valid reason to not support it.

Yes it is.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Teckla]

Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264.

That may be so, but when comparing non-technical merits, is Ogg Theora highly superior to H.264? That should be part of the equation too.

All it has going for it is religion and ideology.

Troll.

Why should Microsoft support your particular belief system over the beliefs of anyone else?

Because it might be better for users.

Why, especially, should they want their users to have a much worse experience watching internet video?

Even the latest version of Microsoft's browser (IE8) is a piece of shit. Microsoft has already demonstrated that the user experience is not their top priority.

That means one must wonder what Microsoft's true motivation is.

How about adopting (or adapting) a belief system that leads to better products instead of worse ones?

Oh, so you advocate moving away from IE entirely?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[10101001 10101001]

Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology.

And? Windows comes bundled with tons of old, obsolete, and inferior codecs, many of which never were mainstream in any reasonable sense of the word. Either Microsoft is for giving more choices or its for technological superiority. Yes, it's not black and white, but it's also the case that Theora being free makes the lack of inclusion either a sign of a choice on their part or a belief that Theora is so underused that it ranks below a ton of old codec; that's a little hard to believe.

Why should Microsoft support your particular belief system over the beliefs of anyone else? Why, especially, should they want their users to have a much worse experience watching internet video?

Because they said they were for choice and choice inherently involves trade-offs? Or are you suggesting Microsoft should drop support for everything but H.264? I mean, if it's all about quality per bit, then H.264 is the current best technology.

How about adopting (or adapting) a belief system that leads to better products instead of worse ones?

The second I see Microsoft chose and endorse a competitor's product because it's superior, we'll talk. As it stands, Microsoft's action seems more an attempt to ingratiate themselves with H.264 supporters while simultaneously mocking Google and Chrome. That's certainly their right and choice. But, it's not about generally giving more choice to the user. I'd be happier if Microsoft would just be honest and say they believe Google made a bad choice.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[ThatsNotPudding]

How about adopting (or adapting) a belief system that leads to better products instead of worse ones?

Does that include better walled gardens topped with better razor wire?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

Because it might be better for users.

How? When? How is it worth having to use worse video until then?

Patents expire after 20 years. The patents in question will be long gone before Ogg Theora or competing non-patent formats are technically competitive with H.264. And even then, the obvious choice for true believers will be to abandon inferior formats and switch to H.264.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

well, for once, in order not to be religious i have to give up my freedoms. Yes, i have to give up freedoms.
Faith-full devoted Linux Zealot here. Because of licensing issues, i can't use H.264, so from my point of view, Theora is far superior than H.264, at least i can use it.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

Does that include better walled gardens topped with better razor wire?

Even if that were an apt analogy, it would depend on what's inside and what's outside the wall.

Asceticism isn't for everyone.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the latest version of Microsoft's browser (IE8) is a piece of shit. Microsoft has already demonstrated that the user experience is not their top priority.

That's just like, your opinion, man.

Oh, so you advocate moving away from IE entirely?

I wish there was a term like Godwin for you zealots.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[SuricouRaven]

It is now. Theora was actually one of the most sophisticated and capable video codecs around... a few years ago. Technology moved on. It missed the window. If it had caught on when the time was right, it could have become the video MP3 - a format that is techologically inferor, but remains in common use due to widespread support.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[SuricouRaven]

I would not be at all surprised if, some point in the next fifteen years, an extension is passed to lengthen the term. It's already happened with coopyright, many times over - taking it from a 14 year term right up to 95 years, and with another increase quite possible. When there is this money money at stake, no lobbyist is too expensive.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Wave that flag! Harder! HARDERRRRR!

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[darien.train]

You are projecting your ideology onto others troll. If you actually thought about the issue from from a business perspective you'd realize that whether or not the technology is inferior is largely irrelevant to the issue at hand. It's about giving choices to users that better position you to capture as many more users as possible. If this was a job interview for a bizdev or related position you would have been shown the door in the first 5 mins.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[advocate_one]

Does that include better walled gardens topped with better razor wire?

Even if that were an apt analogy, it would depend on what's inside and what's outside the wall.

I prefer to be outside the wall in control of my own destiny than inside the wall being force fed what someone else want me to see/use

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the latest version of Microsoft's browser (IE8) is a piece of shit.

Troll.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

Similarly, I would not be surprised if the government enacts a retroactive tax on emails and send us all a bill. Therefore, everyone should immediately switch to using carrier pigeons.

You see, that type of argument can be used to justify any decision, no matter how wacky. There's always a horrible future to be imagined and a way to make myself poorer now that will avoid it. And then when it doesn't come true, you can claim credit!

Argument rejected. Please use real life for justifications instead of imagination. Thanks.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Sam36]

This isn't religion or about technical merit. Who wants to pay up to $6,500,000 a year to use this crap?
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2368359,00.asp

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

So all your posts on Slashdot are always in the imaginary context of a "job interview for a bizdev or related position"? That's strange, even for the internet.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

And you would have gotten the job, developing a plugin for crappy software.

So, who's the winner?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I heard IE supported VP8. It doesn't have the issues of H.264, and it is technically superior to Theora. Why support Theora? It's technically inferior to another free codec, and nobody uses it.

What about Dirac? Why doesn't Chrome support Dirac in HTML5? Or FLAC? Or speex? Or AMR? Or OpenEXR images? All of those codecs are free, thus superior in non-technical merits to MP3, which Chrome still supports AFAIK. And they would be very useful. AMR and speex might be good for listening speeches, especially on low bandwidth, not to mention if one day HTML5 allows you to send audio and video (think Chatroulette). Dirac is inferior to VP8, but somewhat superior to Theora, why not support it?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[BenoitRen]

It's not imagination if there's precedent (in this case, copyright extensions). Your e-mail and career pigeons comparison, now that is a great case of imagination. Stop trolling.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[coliverhb]

Err... Rejected? I have to say, I don't know what world you live in. You see, 'normal' people when confronted with historical facts - and having kept up with american politics would probably pay attention. Just because you can use silly red herring arguments to say that in many cases you can come to ridiculous conclusions (which, by the way, any intelligent person would immediately throw out as preposterous) doesn't mean that our representatives haven't repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to support increases to copyright terms and continue to aggressively support 'intellectual property protections.' Inevitably an intelligent person comes to the conclusion that the world isn't binary, there are gradients, and that whether people are intelligent or not, they can come up with logically sound however factually and historically inaccurate statements that do nothing but stroke their ego and support the foundations of their personal ivory towers.

Yes, you CAN use historical and modern events to predict trends. Scientists do it all the time, its part of the scientific method. I'm sorry to say, only an idiot would place fingers in their ears because they don't agree with a particular argument. Now please, use your logic wisely in the future.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with your opinion that Ogg Theora is "highly technically inferior" to h.264, and I present here the same amount of supporting evidence.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Rockoon]

I remember the comparisons of Theora Vs "H.264" and the only one even remotely favorable for Theora was actually underhandedly using H.263 for most of the comparisons. If you need a citation beyond the one I just gave, notice how this page never mentions the fact that that is H.263, but instead propagandizes that it is H.264 in their comparison images (directly copied from the first citation, which does at least honestly note that it is H.263)

Sorry. H.264 is miles ahead of Theora, *especially* at low bit rates, as you can see here, take note of the 486Kbit still images halfway down. On the left is 1Mbit Theora, on the right is 486Kbit Theora, and in the middle are the best images... 486Kbit H.264

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

There's precedent for retroactive taxes.

Regardless though, it's a very very poor argument. If there are current costs to be paid for future benefits, the future benefits shouldn't be purely a fantasy.

There's a lot longer and more extensive precedent for patent terms staying about 20 years than there is for them changing.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Rockoon]

es, it's not black and white, but it's also the case that Theora being free makes the lack of inclusion either a sign of a choice on their part or a belief that Theora is so underused that it ranks below a ton of old codec; that's a little hard to believe.

..and by "free" you mean that if Microsoft includes the theora codec with windows, then they also have to provide source code upon request... that whole GPL thing that Theora falls under...

..and lets suppose they included the theora codec in 2009.. well you know that the reference implementation has been changed multiple times since then, right? bug-fixes and all that? (how can anything in the reference be a bug? but hey... its not my project... I didnt call a beta a reference.. they did)

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Teckla]

How? When? How is it worth having to use worse video until then?

That's a straw man. You've lost the context of the thread. Now you're trying to change the context to score points.

In this thread, nobody suggested MS and IE being forced to only support Ogg Theora. That, of course, is ridiculous.

The context of this thread is that perhaps MS should worry about making their own browser not completely suck, rather than adding H.264 support to Chrome.

Patents expire after 20 years. The patents in question will be long gone before Ogg Theora or competing non-patent formats are technically competitive with H.264.

Troll.

And even then, the obvious choice for true believers will be to abandon inferior formats and switch to H.264.

Troll. Loaded language: "true believers". You should try not being an ass for a while.

Feel free to get in the last word.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Kohath]

Troll. Loaded language: "true believers". You should try not being an ass for a while.

Feel free to get in the last word.

It's not a troll. I've expressed a fairly clear preference for practical merit over ideological purity. Where's the argument that isn't the choice here? Where's the argument that the tradeoff is worth it?

I apologize for the tone. Can you address the substance now?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

When somebody doesn't count freedom for everybody as part of a better product, and associates it with religion then it's easy to see they are deliberately misinforming or misleading for one fucked up reason or another.

It's not a good sign that misleading trolling patent PR is modded up so high on Slashdot while a lot of reasonable statements are getting squashed.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

..and by "free" you mean that if Microsoft includes the theora codec with windows, then they also have to provide source code upon request... that whole GPL thing that Theora falls under...

Bzzt. Wrong answer, you're out. All xiph.org implementations are BSD-licensed.

..and lets suppose they included the theora codec in 2009.. well you know that the reference implementation has been changed multiple times since then, right? bug-fixes and all that?

So? Are you implying that Microsoft never released updates to its Office products after it submitted the ooxml specs to ISO?

how can anything in the reference be a bug? but hey... its not my project... I didnt call a beta a reference.. they did

Do you happen to know the difference between a reference implementation and a format specification?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[steveha]

..and by "free" you mean that if Microsoft includes the theora codec with windows, then they also have to provide source code upon request... that whole GPL thing that Theora falls under...

If you were correct, and Theora were under GPL, Microsoft could trivially discharge this obligation simply by putting a Theora .tar.gz file (or .zip file if they prefer) on one of the many Microsoft web servers. Microsoft would not be obliged to share the entire source code for Windows.

But in fact Theora is released under the BSD license so Microsoft wouldn't even need to do that much.

..and lets suppose they included the theora codec in 2009.. well you know that the reference implementation has been changed multiple times since then, right?

What matters for Theora support is the Theora decoder, which has been finished for years. The Theora bitstream format has been frozen since 2004 and any decoder written since then can play Theora files.

It's true that the Theora project has made huge improvements to the encoder, but that has exactly zero impact on the cost to Microsoft of supporting Theora for playback in Windows.

steveha

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[steveha]

H.264 is miles ahead of Theora, *especially* at low bit rates

I agree with this statement.

The original page, comparing Theora to YouTube videos, was not trying to trick people into thinking Theora is better than H.264. A guy at Google famously claimed: "If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet." The Theora guy compared the quality available per bit with Theora, with the actual quality of actual videos from YouTube; and he concluded that Theora was able to meet or beat the quality of the example videos he pulled from YouTube. At the bottom, in the conclusions section, he noted that YouTube uses H.263, and just a subset at that, for many videos, making it easier for Theora to match YouTube; and even for H.264, YouTube isn't making full use of the standard. He speculated that perhaps YouTube was making a tradeoff, allowing the files to be bigger to make them easier to seek within or some such. Here's the link again; go read what he actually wrote.

I'm sure there are idiotic, deranged Theora fanboys out there who claimed it is better in all ways than H.264, but I am not one. If you make effective use of H.264 you get the highest quality per bit possible with current video technology, full stop. The only advantage of Theora is that it is patent-free and BSD-licensed. That is a very large advantage for some purposes.

But now we have VP8, which is much better than Theora, while still freely available for use. It's not as good as H.264, but it seems to be better than everything else, and good enough for practical use. It will have its place.

H.264 isn't going away. But short of a successful patent challenge, WebM isn't going away either. Its advantages in freedom will make it the top choice for many purposes, even though it can't match the ultimate quality per bit of H.264.

steveha

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[adamdoyle]

It's about giving choices to users that better position you to capture as many more users as possible.

Giving "choices" yields more users? So a browser that supports 30 decent video formats is "strategically better positioned to capture customers" than a browser that supports 5 good ones? No. You pick video formats based on (a) what format is used by videos that users are most likely to encounter, (b) cost of licensing, and (c) efficacy of the format. I agree that Ogg Theora is a waste of time but your reasons are way off. Theora fails criteria (a) and (c). Also, the internet is not a job interview.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Rockoon]

What matters for Theora support is the Theora decoder, which has been finished for years. The Theora bitstream format has been frozen since 2004 and any decoder written since then can play Theora files.

The reference decoder implementation has been changed recently (15 months ago) and that includes bug fixes.

There is thus a set of input files that will not produce the same output, BY DEFINITION.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[huzur79]

Open Source Fanatics, do the world a favor, strap on a bomb, pray to the oh mighty Richard Stallman God and blow up something.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[LordLimecat]

That means one must wonder what Microsoft's true motivation is.

Anyone who wonders that hasnt been paying very close attention; I thought the last 20 years demonstrated that rather clearly.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[huzur79]

Just have to look at GIF and PNG, PNG was developed to replace GIF as a open source version of the format. By the time the format could match GIF, the patents for GIF expired removing the issue and need for PNG. The same will happen for Theora.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[lennier]

Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology

Well, and legality (in the USA), which some might consider to be slightly important. But YMMV on that score.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that PNG is also superior to GIF in most ways, so the need for it wasn't removed at all.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[steveha]

The reference decoder implementation has been changed recently (15 months ago) and that includes bug fixes.

And what of it? Are you implying that the bitstream format was changed such that old Theora files won't play back anymore? Are you saying that new Theora files won't play back on 16+ month old decoders? Or are you implying that it would be terribly expensive for Microsoft to accept patches to free software that they are using for free?

I really don't understand your point.

steveha

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Dutch Gun]

I think you misunderstand the function of a lossy codec's decoder. The decoder isn't guaranteed to reproduce the exact input data no matter what. It's producing output based on an approximation of the original data. If the reference decoder can be tweaked to produce a better representation of the original data, then great! The bitstream (the format) stability is what's important. Updating the reference decoder is a good thing as they make optimizations and improvements to quality. Likewise updating an encoder to more efficiently encode and improve visual quality.

Also, ALL complex software is liable to having bugs in it. So, you're saying that declaring something as a reference means it can't have any bugs? Your argument here is sort of odd... I don't get what your beef is.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Lanteran]

anyone who doubts the merit of that opinion should be forced to code for IE8 for at least 10 straight hours, with a kick to the teeth for every time code that should have worked doesn't. It is far from an acceptable browser.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Draek]

A different set of input files will also produce a different output, yet magically that doesn't stop the decoder from, well, decoding them.

You really should learn how computers work, you know.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Qubit]

Open Source Fanatics, do the world a favor, strap on a bomb, pray to the oh mighty Richard Stallman God and blow up something.

Gosh, you know I wrote it down on my computer a long time ago, but I think it was in a proprietary format and I can't find a program to open the file, so could I please ask for your physical address again?

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

There is thus a set of input files that will not produce the same output, BY DEFINITION.

Wow, I can't believe I missed this line the first time I replied.

I am happy to inform you that you are completely mistaken on this point. It is very possible to improve a reference decoder without changing the output at all. Speed improvements, perhaps reducing memory requirements. It might be that the output changed very slightly but I wouldn't bet on being able to tell any difference just by watching the video. There might be bug fixes that improve the quality of the output, granted, but I don't see where that poses any real problem to Microsoft.

In short, the claim that any changes to the reference decoder amounts to a change in the frozen bitstream format "BY DEFINITION" is not a defensible claim.

As I understand it, you are attempting to argue that it would be somehow difficult or expensive for Microsoft to add Theora support. You have not successfully supported your argument with facts yet.

Microsoft is not obligated to support Theora. They can choose not to do so, and they have chosen not to do so. But they have supported and continue to support old codecs that are worse than Theora, so it is really not possible to claim that there are compelling technical reasons for them to refuse to support Theora.

Why would Microsoft support lame old codecs? Simple: once Microsoft supports something, they are very good about not removing that support. I haven't checked the specifics, but I'll bet that whatever lame video codecs Microsoft was shipping in 1995 are still shipping today as part of Windows 7. And to folks who think Microsoft is somehow being evil: they may not want to support Theora because once they do they will support it forever, and they may not see enough benefit there. (To me, being able to watch the videos from Wikipedia is enough of a benefit to want Theora support. But Microsoft doesn't necessarily think that's a compelling enough reason.)

steveha

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[darien.train]

So all your posts on Slashdot are always in the imaginary context of a "job interview for a bizdev or related position"? That's strange, even for the internet.

Nope. Not a single one exists in that context except the one I mentioned per that context. But nice try.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[darien.train]

It's about giving choices to users that better position you to capture as many more users as possible.

Giving "choices" yields more users?

I didn't say that universally giving more choices to users increases your user base as that would be a stupid strategy (or not a strategy at all). I'm saying that adding support for things just because they're "better" doesn't mean it extends your user base. Giving choices to people based on what they're most likely to encounter is a much better strategy. That's why Real Player support is still out there for example. We're actually both stating the same idea, just differently...and perhaps I'm not saying as well as you which is likely.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[adamdoyle]

Yeah I definitely agree with you that Theora is a waste of time. There are hardly any videos on the internet encoded with it (or at least that the average user will encounter). I guess I just thought you were being a bit harsh with the "job interview" thing.

Re:Ogg Theora has no technical merit over H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of retard you have to be to call anyone you disagree with a "troll"?

Don't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a trap!

When I first read the headline...

[cvtan]

I thought it said "Microsoft Makes Crime Pay".

NASA TV, yay

[Joe U]

Well, at least NASA TV works in Chrome now.

That's a plus, if I ever remember to watch it.

Why doesn't Google add a patent indemnity clause?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Google wanted to stand behind WebM and end this mess all they need to do is put some type of patent indemnity clause into the WebM license. Because, when all is said and done, that's all it boils down to. Companies like Microsoft pay for H.264 licensing because it is safer for them to do so. If a lawsuit arises then the MGEP LA steps in and takes care of it (ideally through patent-pooling, I guess).

That said, it isn't the *big guys* who are really worrying about it. It's the smaller shops that generally are the first targets in the patent troll "war chest" strategy. Who's going to go to bat for you when your company is the target of a WebM patent troll?

IE + Chrome + Frame + This = Awesome?

[Anonymous Coward]

So to have the ultimate in browsing experience, I need to install Google Chrome Frame and this new Microsoft Chrome extension so that I can run an Internet Explorer interface with the Chrome rendering engine with support for H.264 videos?

Bing?

[jimmerz28]

Maybe they really just want people to install a chrome addon so they can send even more google searches to Bing for optimization!

Microsoft interoperability?????

[Anonymous Coward]

"...said Claudio Caldato, Microsoft interoperability program manager"

WHAT? Microsoft has an interoperability czar? What good is he since, in particular, Silverlight is not interoperable. I'd sure like to watch my netflix streams using Linux - maybe I wouldn't have to reboot my media pc as often. Plus any Linux-using Zune [if there are any :-] owners might want some interoperability, too.

OTOH maybe it's better we don't have any Microsoft crap-apps for Linux...

I've heard this one before

[Boawk]

That wording seems odd:

Microsoft Makes Chrome Play H.264 Video

Chrome tries to file a police report. Officer replies, "Well, yea. Just look at the way you're dressed."

On a day where Bing is stealing from Google

[Anonymous Coward]

This is announced on a day where Bing is stealing results from Google. Perhaps they are trying to make a deal.

You open source...

[Anonymous Coward]

zealots should just stop using the word choice when you really mean foss. Users should have...foss.

YouTube replaceable

[perpenso]

... I hope Youtube will remove h.264 encoding from their videos as soon as most Firefox and Chrome users migrated to a version that supports WebM ...

And wouldn't the followup to that be h.264 advocates promoting a different video sharing site? Such a site may get critical mass merely by Apple replacing the Mac Safari built-in YouTube link and the iPhone/iPad built-in YouTube app. Apple might even do such a site themselves, they have that new data center. It would be a textbook retaliatory attack on a competitor's core asset. Microsoft might join in.

Basically Google could start a chain of events that seriously undermine a core asset. YouTube is probably more easily replaced than MySpace and Google is probably smart enough to know this. Dropping h.264 from chrome is a minor thing, unlikely to prompt serious retaliation, doing so with YouTube would be quite different.

Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[erroneus]

We have seen in the past how well the .net for Firefox stuff went over. It caused all sorts of uproar, confusion and problems.

Will Microsoft be releasing the source code for this plug-in so that we can properly trust it? I doubt it. And will there be a 3 mile long EULA attached to it? Almost certainly! Will it be hard to remove? Probably. I make these assumptions because we have seen this from Microsoft before. So unless they explicitly say they will do this any other way, we can presume they will do it the way they always have... and no, they will not support a Linux version of the plugin and not likely MacOSX.

So in summary:

1. It will be incomplete
2. It will be closed
3. It will be hard to remove
4. It may not be "optional"
5. It will cause problems with the browser and maybe the OS.

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[VortexCortex]

So in summary:

1. It will be incomplete
2. It will be closed
3. It will be hard to remove
4. It may not be "optional"
5. It will cause problems with the browser and maybe the OS.

6. It will be installed in Firefox as well, then MS H.264 will be the universal exploit attack vector -- Finally, crackers can create a single drive-by-download exploit that works in all major browsers.

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[rossjudson]

1. Works fine.
2. Who cares.
3. Disable/uninstall, like any other chrome extension.
4. Are you a moron? Don't install it.
5. None I can see.

Yes, you're full of crap. There's nothing stopping someone from creating a similar plugin on Mac (using its H.264 playback), or Linux, or anything else. The point here is that it's possible to inject support for H.264 into Chrome, even if Google doesn't do it.

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[Malc]

We have seen in the past how well the .net for Firefox stuff went over. It caused all sorts of uproar, confusion and problems.

Not really. It just upset some people on /., who aren't really representative. Most people didn't even know... so I guess it didn't cause so many problems.

5. It will cause problems with the browser and maybe the OS.

Again: highly unlikely, but if you want to have little fantasies and tell little scare stories, have fun.

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please please PLEASE mod parent up. I don't know how GP got modded even to +3. I used to think FUD was limited to proponents of closed source. Guess I was wrong.

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[Prune]

6. MS-FUD-like conjecture and speculation on Slashdot will get a post moderated as insightful.

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[westlake]

Will Microsoft be releasing the source code for this plug-in so that we can properly trust it? I doubt it. And will there be a 3 mile long EULA attached to it?

Win 7 supports hardware accelerated H.264 video natively.

Not so very different, really, than what Canonical offers to its OEM customers.

DirectX Video Acceleration Specification for H.264/AVC Decoding

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[GPLHost-Thomas]

1. It doesn't work on my Linux, or on my ARM phone
2. I do care about my freedom, like many at ./
3. If using Windows, how can you be so sure that it didn't fuck-up your registry and such?
4. It may not be "optional" in the sense that if you mandatory need it to watch video. Who's the moron?
5. There's already a memory leak...

The crap is ... in your eyes. Sure, there's nothing stopping someone from creating a similar plugin for Linux, but there's patent issues if you want to release and ship it. In no way, for example, this kind of plug-in will be shipped inside Debian. The point here is that we DO NOT want windows-only patent-only videos on the Web, and the more H.264 will be supported, the more this may happen.

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[erroneus]

Remind us again what the current market share is for Windows XP, Vista and 7? Windows 7 is clearly covered. Did you conveniently forget that the majority are still on Windows XP?

Re:Can Microsoft resist added monkey business?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more worried that it will be slipped into a security update and suddenly unremovable plugins will appear in FF and Chrome.

Hope for Netflix streaming under Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a person who exclusively has Linux boxes at home, I hope this provides some extra hope for one day being able to stream from Netflix under Linux.

Re:Hope for Netflix streaming under Linux?

[Xtifr]

Dubious that the release of a Windows-only plugin will have any direct effect on your system's ability to stream Netflix. As for indirect effects, if any, I think this should give you slightly less hope, as Netflix now has even less motivation to support a codec you can legally use (at least if you're in the US--I have no idea how this might impact Canadian Netflix users).

No AAC/MP3/H.264 on the Open Web petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Please Slashdotters, read, sign, and share: http://www.petitiononline.com/noh264/petition.html

No AAC/MP3/H.264 on the Open Web

Re:No AAC/MP3/H.264 on the Open Web petition

[Ash-Fox]

Do online petitions really work? I don't think the people who 'need' to see them even see these to begin with.

Re:No AAC/MP3/H.264 on the Open Web petition

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a more useful petition to ban WebM on the web?

Video Lan Player

[Anonymous Coward]

who would want WMP in any browser?

VLC ftw

Am I awake?

[zigurat667]

Microsoft has an interoperability manager ??

Re:Why doesn't Google add a patent indemnity claus

[Zelgadiss]

If a lawsuit arises then the MGEP LA steps in and takes care of it (ideally through patent-pooling, I guess).

But if the troll refuses to play ball you get sued all the same.

MPEG isn't required to help you in such a case BTW.

Wrong title...

[hesaigo999ca]

Title is wrong....should appear
Microsoft makes their H264 format available to those who did not want to pay royalties and be tied down to yet another M$ format.
In all seriousness, I wonder how many of the stories posted are actually M$ paying off bloggers and forums alike to run their
"look at this, we did this, and now you will see us in a better light" stories.

Had M$ played by the book to begin with , with HTML5, then there would have been no issues...

Re:Wrong title...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're a complete fucking bozo dipshit. Kill yourself or don't speak, with preference to the former.

Re:Wrong title...

[Anonymous Coward]

> M$

twitter, is that you? Are you back?

Re:Wrong title...

[adamdoyle]

You can't have it both ways. You can't complain when they do the wrong thing and then complain again when they do something right. Pick one. They're a corporation - not a charity. Also, you come across as ridiculously paranoid when you start spreading conspiracy theories about companies "paying off" websites for positive press. And what's with the "M$"? Yeah - all they care about is money. That's the point of a business... to make money.

Re:Wrong title...

[hesaigo999ca]

>Also, you come across as ridiculously paranoid when you start spreading conspiracy theories about companies "paying off" websites for positive press

Oh how little we know, if you knew how many people posting to forums or to blogs are being paid to help
1) page ranking by spreading hyperlinks where they can.
2) reviews for anything tech (and even then some), that way the word being spread is always good for xxx product (which could be really bad)
3) falsify claims , allegations, or even slurring (defamation) of individuals or companies which are direct competition for such said products...
4) stocks is another big player in this, to help push or pull the stock prices of companies by giving ou fake reviews all the time.

My complaint was only that M$ always does this, from the beginning if they stuck with the program instead of crying like a little girl that they wanted it their way, there is a governing body for all that is html for a reason ya know. M$ plays by their own rules...being that big, I guess they can, until they see the market is not picking up on something and then they waver and change to follow the rest. I got to say, being a developer for 12 years, I tend to see the trends that M$ pushes as I am a .net programmer....so I am not talking for nothing, I do have some background with all their products, from sharepoint, to OOXML, from SOAP, to AJAX (their version was ATLAS back then...another prime example of what I am saying)...even the silverlight, why bring out a product 10 years late to the game, because you see adobe has the market with flash, you have to come out with your own, flash is pretty amazing that it is that good, and did not come from M$, I think M$ is jealous...

Windows Media Player plugin FTW! :-P

[Anonymous Coward]

All this extension does is replace the element with an tag causing all HTML5 video to be replaced by Windows Media Player plugin controls. This seems like it will do more harm than good as it will interfere with pages that expect to interact with their tags.

Re:Windows Media Player plugin FTW! :-P

[SuperKendall]

Incorrect since most content providers will be expecting a browser that supports the video tag will also support h.264.

Microsoft just fixed something Google broke.

Re:Why doesn't Google add a patent indemnity claus

[imric]

Google has irrevocably released all of its patents on VP8 as a royalty-free format - and while the "lead developer of the H.264 encoder x264, raised concerns about the similarity between VP8 and H.264", "other researchers cite evidence that On2 made a particular effort to avoid any MPEG LA patents"

"Patent indemnity" is a smokescreen, of course. Why won't MICROSOFT offer patent indemnity after all? Who's going to go to bat for you when your company is the target of a H.264 patent troll?

Can't seem to find any debs

[h4rr4r]

I can't seem to find any debs.
I guess they mean windows chrome users only.

Re:Can't seem to find any debs

[liquidweaver]

It probably has something to do with lack of source (which Debian is pretty against)

A global view of H.264

[westlake]

This will make H.264 acceptable again for commercial use.

Badly in need of an update, I suspect, but still suggestive is this list from the Wikipedia:

List of video services using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

There are 951 H.64 licensees, of which a breath-taking number are Asian - global giants in industry, tech and broadcasting. AVC/H.264 Licensees

Google is big. But not that big.

FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

I just love the way you conveinently omitted the most important reason a person would use Theora, and in fact the very reason why it was created: openness. Real, honest openness -- NOT the booby-trapped half-assed "openness" that H.264 offers. You do know that Theora was created precisely to provide an alternative to patent-encumbered formats? Of course you do, but you couldn't say that because it would rain on your teeny-bopper just-discovered-the-world-of-computers "religion and ideology" parade.

Re:FUD

[kiwimate]

I have to laugh. From the original post:

Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology.

Way to prove the point, Mr. AC, with your teeny-bopper hasn't-yet-woken-up-to-the-real-world-of-practicality bitter-and-completely-out-of-touch "my way is the only way, forget whether something works, everyone has to support it because it fits in with my religion and ideology" parade.

Moron.

how is that surprising?

[Lazy Jones]

Microsoft has an interoperability manager ??

they have a long history of "managing" interoperability between Windows and products that compete(d) with Microsoft Office, for example...

Google Started It!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft: "Google shit on us so the only logical thing to do here is to shit on them!"
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/15/2131205/Google-To-Push-WebM-With-IE9-Safari-Plugins

Re:Why doesn't Google add a patent indemnity claus

[Ash-Fox]

Companies like Microsoft pay for H.264 licensing because it is safer for them to do so. If a lawsuit arises then the MGEP LA steps in and takes care of it

Then why didn't they step in with the latest H.264 patent troll?

Haha

[watermark]

Am I the only one that laughed when I saw that Microsoft did the same to Google that Google did to Microsoft? It's like the 5th grade school yard.

Re:Haha

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that laughed...

One would hope so, but given the general level of childishness and immaturity on Slashdot these days, I'm sadly pessimistic.

Not available for Linux or Mac Chrome Version

[Anonymous Coward]

Not available for Linux or Mac Chrome Version?

Microsoft is a bunch of fiefdoms

[rsborg]

Microsoft has interesting priorities... "Lets release a plug-in for a third party browser to fix a perceived short coming..." as opposed to "Lets fix the problems and short comings in our products". Slow clap for Microsoft.

One of them did something good and increased choice (at least on Windows).

Reward good behavior, I always say.

Adobe is that you?

[rsborg]

I thought "interactive" advertisements was Adobe's ballpark?

Interoperawhat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see the terms "Microsoft" and "Interoperability" and I can't help but think...

Doh

[RazorSharp]

I replied to the wrong comment. My comment is totally irrelevant to the parent.

This misses the really important news

[hcdejong]

From the link in TFS

The Extension is based on a Firefox Add-on that parses HTML5 pages and replaces Video tags with a call to the Windows Media Player plug-in so that the content can be played in the browser.

What we need is that add-on, but with calls to VLC instead of WMP. That would make the add-on multiplatform.

It may not be the politically correct thing to wish for, but I'll take anything that replaces crappy Flash video on the OS X version of Firefox.

In a related story...

[Pedrito]

The Internet Explorer team said, "WTF?"

A license is not indemnification

[snowwrestler]

A license grants you rights to make use of technology that Google owns. That is not the same thing as indemnification against submarine patents of which Google is not aware. In other words if a submarine patent surfaces and you get sued, Google is not going to bring their legal team in to defend you.

That is important because WebM does not have a patent pool and has not been litigated. At least H.264 has a patent pool, which means some patents are "surfaced", and if a submarine pops there will be a lot of very big players fighting alongside you.

This is getting confusing.

[crhylove]

Let's sum up:

Microsoft has the world's most popular OS, and bundles a browser, making it still the most popular browser.

They're both buggy, crash a lot, and not open, so Firefox makes an open source competing browser.

That browser sees explosive and sustained growth, until by some metrics it is approaching the MS browser popularity.

This touches off a bit of a freedom rally, and open source codecs and standards and even OSes gain popularity, mind share, and quality code.

Enter mega corp B (Google), releasing yet another browser, which is faster than either of the old ones, but lacking in open licensing and extensions (compared to Firefox). Then hey presto they buy YouTube the single most popular online video source, and also release an open source codec and announce that soon YouTube will be all de facto on that open source codec.

Immediately almost everybody besides Microsoft and Apple get behind that codec.

Meanwhile Apple and Adobe have a spat, and Apple unincludes flash from it's ipad.

Apple announces that they are sticking with the closed source h264. Shunning Adobe AND open source.

Then Microsoft releases a plugin for both Firefox AND Chrome (teh Goog) that allows h264 playback in the "open" browsers.

I'm reminded once again by the large commercial projects vs. open source of Princess Leia's famous line:

"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers!"

I for one cannot WAIT for Apple and MS to be relics of a bygone era, when the world is using almost universally open source products, hardware, and infrastructure. If only there was a way to speed this process up.

Re:This is getting confusing.

[TangoMargarine]

Enter mega corp B (Google), releasing yet another browser, which is faster than either of the old ones, but lacking in open licensing and extensions (compared to Firefox). Then hey presto they buy YouTube

Google bought YouTube (2006) some time before they even mentioned Chrome (2008).

PS: One sentence does not a paragraph make.

WRONG summary line

[markdavis]

>"Chrome users will be able to play H.264 video â" thanks to Microsoft."

WRONG! Here it is corrected:

MS-Windows Chrome users will be able to play H.264 video -- thanks to Microsoft.

Unless, of course, Microsoft has suddenly decided to port their software to the other operating systems (Linux, MacOS) on which Chrome runs (like zero chance there). Picky- yes. But there is a difference between the two; especially when you are not an MS-Windows user.

Because it creates infinite liability

[snowwrestler]

No sane legal team is going to let their corporation offer open-ended indemnification to all end users of a technology--especially in a heavily patent-encumbered space like video compression.

Under such an agreement, Google's potential liability would scale with the success of whoever is using WebM. That aggregate value could exceed Google's entire market cap. What if a suit is filed? Google would be liable for more than they are worth.

That's obviously a worst-case scenario, and perhaps Google has negotiated limited indemnification with a few key partners like Adobe. But they're never going to offer blanket indemnification.

Quite different from Chrome Frame

[gmor]

To be fair, Google has done that (in a much bigger way) for IE.

Except that there's a critical difference between the two plugins. Chrome Frame was an attempt to bring standards-compliant CSS and fast Javascript to websites that still have IE6 users. Even if it became ubiquitous, it would only relieve Web developers from having to support IE's broken rendering engine. On the other hand, Microsoft's plugin exists to shift the de-facto meaning of the <video> element in the HTML5 draft to support only the H.264 format instead of WebM. Microsoft's plugin is insidious if you care about the freedom to implement Web browsers and tools.

The underlying question is, should a company or open-source project be able to implement a Web browser from scratch without having to purchase patent licenses? The academics at the W3C think the answer is emphatically yes. This goes back to the beginning, when Tim Berners-Lee and CERN decided not to demand royalties for HTTP and HTML. But commercial OS vendors such as Microsoft and Apple would prefer <video>s in H.264, since forcing H.264 would give their OSes an advantage over open-source OSes and other underdogs that can't afford the licenses.

Not so different from Chrome Frame

[DragonWriter]

Except that there's a critical difference between the two plugins. Chrome Frame was an attempt to bring standards-compliant CSS and fast Javascript to websites that still have IE6 users.

Right. Chrome Frame was built to fix what was, from Google's perspecitve and in terms of Google's business strategy, a problem with IE.

Microsoft's H.264 plugin for Chrome was built to fix what was, from Microsoft's perspective and in terms of Microsoft's business strategy, a problem with Chrome.

Google's preferences in this area might be more in line with mine or yours, to be sure.

Re:Not so different from Chrome Frame

[gmor]

Naturally, what Google does is in Google's interests, what Microsoft does is in theirs, what I do is in mine, etc. The relevant question is what effect their actions have in the marketplace and community. Google has been careful to release software that is good for them and good for the Web. Microsoft releases software that is good for them but potentially damaging to the Web, if you care about keeping barriers to entry low for future Web software. Quite different.

Re:Not so different from Chrome Frame

[DragonWriter]

Google has been careful to release software that is good for them and good for the Web. Microsoft releases software that is good for them but potentially damaging to the Web

Anthropomorphizing something that is not only not a sentient being, but not even a concrete entity is somewhat pointless. "good for the Web" and "damaging to the Web" really just mean "supportive of my desires for the web" and "opposed to my desires for the web".

Like you, incidentally, I like what Google does for the web much better than what Microsoft does. If you read upthread, you'll note that the point of similarity being discussed is about an issue raised with Microsoft's priorities in fixing what they perceive as problems in Google's product rather than devoting all of their resources to their own products, something Google very much did to Microsoft's product with Chrome Frame.

No comparison of the desirability of the motivation for those approaches was expressed or intended in the comparison.

Re:Why doesn't Google add a patent indemnity claus

[stewski]

The w3c don't offer patent indemnity. No one offers patent indemnity for linux, mysql and lots of other royalty free stuff. - Get over the fud.

This has done more damage them people realize

[huzur79]

I think this issue will cause more damage to the internet community then any one realized. Its going to cause a major split between the Free source hard line fanatics (which I think should all be rounded up and shoot) and the rest of us who still grasp common sense and can live in a world with both free and non free recognizing there is a place for both. Theora is clearly crappy in every way and the only thing to support it on is that it MAYBE is free which its most likely not. Hard line fanatics don't give a dam about how crappy it is except that its free. The rest of us will argue to the bitter end how its not wanted or needed. This could be the tipping point that really creates a split between the internet community as a whole.

Well done, Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I applaud you for this move, bringing people back the freedom to choose a video format with a non-abysmal quality/filesize ratio. ISPs and end-users should be grateful. Thanks!

Re:Now if only they would negotiate with the H.264

[gmor]

Microsoft has finally "embraced" HTML5. Now, they are extending the element in ways that F/OSS can't support due to inflexible patent licenses. They're not attacking Chrome on Windows, they're attacking open-source browsers on open-source operating systems.

Re:Why doesn't Google add a patent indemnity claus

[Celarent Darii]

Yet MPEG certainly has a vested interest, as after all they were founded to allow companies to use each other's tech without the threat of lawsuits. They would certainly countersue using their pool of patents.

Stop "helping"

[Randle_Revar]

Dear Microsoft: Please die in a fire

Re:Stop "helping"

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Randle_Revar: Please don't die in a fire. Just get horribly burned and suffer for the rest of your life.

Re:Stop "helping"

[Randle_Revar]

Sweet, I get to live!

Re:Now if only they would negotiate with the H.264

[node 3]

How have they extended HTML5 outside of the W3C/WHATWG? And assuming you mean H.264, what part of H.264 is a proprietary MS extension to it?

It's silly to claim that F/OSS software can't support H.264, when both Safari (WebKit) and Chrome (browser + WebKit both), in their open source incarnations, support it just fine. In fact, what MS is doing is providing that very thing to Chrome!

Also, what open source operating system cannot encode/decode H.264? Do you not know that MPEG-LA distributes H.264 as open source?

Clunky Title ~ Forces

[TangoMargarine]

"You'll play 264, and you'll LIKE IT!"

Re:Why doesn't Google add a patent indemnity claus

[Zelgadiss]

Kind of depends if they have anything to sue.

If it's a "make nothing" patent troll there would be nothing to counter-sue over.

WIndows 7 Only

[MarcAuslander]

As with the firefox extension, this only works on Windows 7. So it in no way makes H.264 universally available.

Ubuntu/Netflix next, please?

[dustinkirkland]

Dear Microsoft, Can you please make Netflix streaming work in Chromium and/or Firefox in Ubuntu next? kthxbye, :-Dustin

Anyone notice the Win7 requirement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth is this plugin for Windows 7 only? What good is it then? This doesn't seem like a kind gesture if most Windows users (and all Linux users) cannot make use of it.

On open-ness of the competing formats

[Wild_dog!]

I read this a while back and found it thought provoking.

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2011/01/googles-dropping-h264-from-chrome-a-step-backward-for-openness.ars

Re:On open-ness of the competing formats

[Wild_dog!]

Oh... and here is a more interesting blog about it.

http://antimatter15.com/wp/2011/01/the-ambiguity-of-open-and-vp8-vs-h-264/

Because it's the belief system that made the web

[weston]

Ogg Theora is technically highly inferior to H.264. All it has going for it is religion and ideology... Why should Microsoft support your particular belief system over the beliefs of anyone else?

Because it's not just an arbitrary or personal belief system. It's one of the important qualities that made the Web a wildly successful medium. When you've got protocols and formats that anyone can freely implement -- when authoring and rendering tools are unencumbered by rentiers who would extract tools -- then anybody who wants to has nearly no barriers to creating value-adding services around the "edges" of this agreement.

Imagine for a minute how well things would have gone for the WWW if tolls were required for anybody who implemented a browser, a server, an authoring tool. It might have been somewhat successful anyway, but it likely would have been a lot more like AOL or eWorld instead of what it is today.

I think Google is one step ahead of MS on this one

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting this from Google's CR-48 netbook with Chrome OS. Obviously, the codec is not even available for this OS. I tried to install the extension and it failed. I think Microsoft is just trying to add value to the Windows operating system. What can you do with Windows that you can't do with [insert other OS here]? You can play proprietary videos, even if you don't use IE!