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Microsoft Offers H.264 Plug-in For Google Chrome
Apparently Firefox was just the beginning: Pigskin-Referee writes "Microsoft has released a Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome so as to enable H.264-encoded video on HTML5 by using built-in capabilities available on Windows 7. As you may recall, less than two months ago, Microsoft released the HTML5 Extension for Windows Media Player Firefox Plug-in with the same goal in mind. Even though Firefox and Chrome are big competitors to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, the software giant has decided Windows 7 users should be able to play back H.264 video even if they aren't using IE9. Here's the current state of HTML5 video: Microsoft and Apple are betting on H.264, while Firefox, Chrome, and Opera are rooting for WebM. Google was actually in favor of both H.264 and WebM up until earlier this month, when the search giant decided to drop H.264 support completely, even though the former is widely used and the latter is not. The company also announced that it would release WebM plugins for Internet Explorer 9 and Safari. Although IE9 supports H.264, excluding all other codecs, Microsoft is making an exception for WebM, as long as the user installs the corresponding codec, and is helping Google ensure the plug-in works properly."
The whole point of HTML5 was to standardize web video.. now we have two standards in a never ending battle. What makes this so terrible is that instead of one competitor losing out like in HDDVD vs Blue Ray, video codecs are so easily sustainable..
Something strange has been going on at Redmond, WA lately. And I like it. It seems like a reversal of roles for Google to be reducing end-user choice and Microsoft to be making up for it.
I like freedom from patent-encumbered garbage.
And it's sad that patent-loving idiot companies are all over WebM trying to "prove" it is patent-encumbered as well. Go fuck off. Seriously, this is what we need to tell patent trolls. OH PATENT WE'LL SUE! "Fuck off." BUT-- "FUCK... OFF."
Chrome doesn't have H.264 not because they're unable to implement it, but because it has patent issues. Microsoft implementing the codec doesn't remove the patent issues.
Besides, it's a WMP plugin. I don't expect to see Linux support.
Hard to argue with that, surely. I'm very far from a Microsoft fan, but credit where it is due.
I want a plugin that intercepts HTML5 or Flash video and opens it in VLC instead of the browser window.
For Flash video, this means it'll get played in by a player that performs decently (instead of the crappy Flash video we get in OSX browsers). And it means I get a decent UI to control playback, with real controls that listen to keyboard input and whose preferences can be modified, instead of the pathetic mouse-only 'controls' offered by Flash video code.
It looks like it's just a NSAPI plugin, with a content script that converts video tags to object tags for all mp4, wmv, mp4v, and m4v files, and uses Windows Media Player to handle them. It's a bit of a misnomer to say it's HTML5; basically it converts the HTML5 back to HTML4.
The best part is that it looks like the plugin can be invoked manually through an object tag, no video tag required. Now all three browsers (IE, Firefox w/a Microsoft addon, Chrome) can have WMP invoked at will, unsandboxed (Plugins aren't sandboxed by Chrome since most wouldn't work correctly, the one exception being a modified Flash). Great.
But I wouldn't use it. The way this plugin uses the OS's media frameworks probably means that, unlike all of Google's Chrome plugins (including the invisible ones for video handling), this one will handle format parsing at the user account level, meaning that any website serving up malformed video will be able to bypass the browser sandbox entirely.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/02/02/175227/Microsoft-Makes-Chrome-Play-H264-Video
Interesting that Microsoft built the H.264 player on top of Media Player rather than Silverlight (given that Silverlight has H.264 support). Guess that's just more indication that Silverlight is not catching on.
I love how with some people, everything MS does has to be bad, no matter what. Give users more choice? Booo!!!!
This is a good thing. Choice is good. This doesn't render html5 as useless, as it just gives their users more choice.
not a single luxury.
Like Robinson Crusoe,
as primitive as can be.
Nice computer (or is it a phone) you seem to be using. :D
Say I run NetBSD/amd64, and I build all my packages from pkgsrc, and I have disabled all kinds of Linux support in my kernel.
Will whatever Microsoft is doing help me in any way?
Without actually looking into it, I'd say "No.".
Would whatever Google is doing help me get more compatible with next generation of web media?
Without actually looking into it, I'd say "Yes.".
Thanks, Microsoft! (oof, that's a hard thing to say)
As for Google - when will these hypocrites be also removing MP3 support?
Well, it's not like they cannot use the system codecs.
There are two problems here. First, Mozilla wants a page to work on the end user if it works on . For example, the end user might be missing a codec, which is likely if the end user is on Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, Windows 7 Starter, or any freely redistributable GNU/Linux distribution. Mozilla doesn't want web developers to give the excuse "But it works on all of our computers; try buying Windows 7 Home Premium and using that to view the web site." Second, Mozilla doesn't want users to blame Firefox if a defect in a system codec causes a crash or intrusion.
If there's going to be a war, let's pick the one that can produce the best quality
Are you willing to buy everyone in the developed world a licensed encoder and a licensed decoder?
At this point, WebM is a closed codec because there are not enough specs and no standard for which someone can create a compatible codec of their own.
WebM is Matroska, Vorbis, and VP8. Matroska and Vorbis are already well documented, and Google is at least trying with VP8, having submitted a draft RFC to IETF.
Google Chrome runs plug-ins in a separate container process. (Firefox has since adopted a limited version of this feature in the 3.6 series.) A plug-in crash doesn't crash Chrome; instead, the plug-in is replaced with a blank box with text to the effect "the plug-in crashed". Should defective plug-ins from one company become a problem, watch it show the name of the plug-in and its publisher: "the MPEG-4 AVC plug-in by Microsoft Corporation crashed".
[snip Weird Al Yankovic lyrics taken from the closing theme of Gilligan's Island TV series]
No, giving up software patents doesn't necessarily mean you have to move to an Amish paradise. Once you buy a computer, all the hardware patents are presumably licensed and paid for.
(oh, and you can play it on Linux if you install the right codec)
Who sells a lawfully made copy of this codec, apart from the version tied to Adobe Flash Player?
a lot of the predictions concerning HTML5 are turning out to be rather accurate, lets face it.
One of the main reasons it's doesn't get anywhere is because it seems to be several years away, and perhaps always will be. As far as large organizations and businesses are concerned that is a complete non-starter.
Google is behaving like any other company. Do you really think they've dropped h.264 because they love open formats? No, it's a strategic move with the ultimate goal of making more money - either through search, through monetizing your personal data, or both.
If they were being altruistic, they'd have dropped Flash support and mp3 support at the same time. Heck, to really be pure they'd need to drop gif and jpeg as well. No, they dropped h.264 because right now their browser is trending upward, and they see a way to grab an edge versus both Apple and Microsoft.
#DeleteChrome
In an effort to support reuse, my comments are an instantiation of the same discussion we had about this topic two weeks ago. You can download them at the following link: http://slashdot.org/story/11/02/02/175227/Microsoft-Makes-Chrome-Play-H264-Video
What you say is true as far as it goes ... it's a strategic move that, if it pans out the way I'm sure they're hoping, WILL increase their profits. But you're missing that they've made a choice in basic company business plan - that their business plan is to benefit when computing advances in capability, and individual users are empowered to do more and create more with it. MS, Apple, etc. have business plans that really work best if they monopolize a whole segment of the computing market, and suppress innovation from competitors.
I'll take Google's approach.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Until they release a version that adds H.264 support to Chrome on Linux, I'm filing this under "Yet ANOTHER self-serving move by a patent-focused company that fears innovation that it doesn't control."
It's actually a pretty thick file already.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Flash Player doesn't crash Firefox anymore; it crashes the plug-in container.
It might crash the system.
If Flash brings down X or the kernel, then X or the kernel is defective. It's the job of X and the kernel to make sure a userspace application can't crash the system.
Also, the codecs can also be invoked by a separate process so they do not crash FF.
That's what I meant by "plug-in container".
This was news 10 days ago. No wonder Slashdot is not one of my frequent websites for current news...
Both Opera and VLC are only two names I can mention on the top of my head that implemented their own blend of the WebM decoder. There are many others who implemented it even without using the official Google codec. The reason the Codec is used in many situation is not because of the lack of choice, but the lack of work associated with just using free code from Google. When you get free code that you can use any way you want, you will probably end up using that code instead of writing something new entirely from scratch. It's called being object-oriented.
Why should i be forced to apple/windows crap because you want to force me to pay corporations for codecs?
Even if you had the codec, you wouldn't have the digital restrictions management layer that all six major movie distributors require. That's why Netflix doesn't work in Moonlight: Moonlight has an available non-free codec pack but lacks the DRM.
I'm not worried. This doesn't look suspicious at all.
Very informative. Do you have a source?
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
AVC/H.264 Licensors
There are about thirty licensors, mostly industrial global giants in manufacturing like Mitsubishi, which began R&D in television 85 years ago.
AVC/H.264 Licensees
There are about 950 licensees, a list which reads like an Asian Fortune 750 in tech.
Something that sucks the living hell out of a battery, that has ZERO hardware acceleration on mobile
A lot of current smartphones and tablets use a system-on-chip similar to the OMAP on the BeagleBoard, with a programmable digital signal processor. With a programmable DSP, hardware acceleration is a matter of rewriting the transforms to use the intrinsics of the DSP. The infamous article 377, which analyzed VP8 and showed it to be in effect baseline AVC with the patented parts scraped off, demonstrated that a DSP-aware decoder for VP8 shouldn't be any harder than a DSP-aware decoder for AVC. So did you mean this in the sense of "VP8 cannot be accelerated on a mobile SOC", or "VP8 is not yet accelerated in the mobile firmware versions deployed as of Sunday, February 13, 2011"?
Microsoft's plugin is nothing more than a lame extension that replaces the native element with a plugin, when the page loads, which renders windows media player. Lame, lame, lame !
Maybe he meant it in the sense of VP8 isn't ever going to cause a mobile phone device manufacturer to develop, test and deploy an update to their firmware to support a new codec
Google is the primary maintainer of the firmware for numerous smartphones with numerous SOCs. The market share of phone's running a Google operating system has already surpassed Apple and is headed for RIM. Google also owns the (permissively licensed) copyright and patent in VP8. So Nexus phones will get VP8 first just as they get other Android updates first, and then other phones will get it as they update Android. Have I already linked you this article about hardware acceleration of VP8?
already shipped non-Nexus phones
Relevance? Most carriers really want you to buy the new phone every two years. T-Mobile, home of the Nexus, is also home of the "Even More Plus" discount. It's the only U.S. carrier I know of that carries midrange to high-end Android phones and knocks $20 off the monthly price of a voice and data plan if you bring an unlocked phone, buy a new phone at retail price, or finish a 24-month service contract. AT&T, for example, does not offer such a discount; in fact, an AT&T rep sounded surprised when I mentioned T-Mobile's "Even More Plus" plans. So after two years, most phones will have been upgraded even if through replacement. By that time, any Android phone still in active use will be either on T-Mobile or on one of the pay-as-you-go MVNOs such as Virgin Mobile USA.