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In-Depth Look At HTML5
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each article examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the <canvas> and <video> tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation."
They can accept it all day long and want to distribute software that will encode and decode h.264, but where do you expect for them to get the money for the per-copy royalties from? Of course, being unwilling to push software that is inherently un-free is acting like a little kid.
Why isn't there a "Caption" tag? (I mean for images, not for tables).
So if you had something like this:
<img caption="yadda yadda yadda" src='"blah blah blah">
Then the caption would be underneath the photo, with the photo and the caption treated as one block (i.e., with the body text wrapped around it the same way it is wrapped around the photo.)
I'm sure there's a good reason -- can someone enlighten me?
- aj
How do you figure they could license the patents? It's most probably legally impossible unless they write new browsers from scratch and then pay from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software. The ball isn't in the hand of the OSS people here.
c++;
Actually, HTML5 (the topic of this story) does have support for 'photographs' and other figure content:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figure.asp
And thus captions:
http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_figcaption.asp
I recall when the web was young people would claim "I program in HTML!" I was like "yeah, I can insert 'bold' and 'a' tags too..." In the beginning, HTML was nothing more than what the name says it is -- a markup language. (Of course "language" somehow means programming? No it doesn't...)
Well, now things are different, of course. Web programming today is real programming for some... still markup for others. But now the web is becoming more than a presentation medium which is very exciting I think.
There's been a lot of talk about HTML5 transforming today's browsers into tomorrow's platforms as this simple search suggests. Essentially, with all of these additions, there seems to be a keen interest in providing "local application" experiences to web-based tools. For example, many of these additions essentially provide access to hardware devices in one form or another.
This is all nice in theory, but once we start including the 'kitchensink' tag, who's to say that browsers won't end up as bloated as Adobe Reader?
Wow, that is so deep! It blows my mind, it really does. I mean, wow...
. Google and OSS people have to stop being like a little kid and accept that H.264 is already everywhere from mobile devices to GPU's and HDTV's and HTML5 will not get anywhere if it isn't used
No. H.264 doomsayers like you have to stop being like a little kid and accept that a royalty-encumbered codec will never be accepted as the "one codec." No, seriously, *NEVER*. If you insist on one codec then you can forget about H.264; put it out of your mind, it doesn't exist.
OSS people are not being pedantic or skinflints, it's just practical reality. It's "but H.264 has won!" people who need to wake up and smell some reality: H.264 is not nearly as permanently entrenched as you think it is. I'll take HTML5 with a mandated royalty-free codec over your "entrenched" de-facto standard any day of the week and twice on Sundays: in such a fight HTML5 will win nine times out of ten.
I want my Cowboyneal
Well, pushing software that has no hardware support and provides no clear advantage to the end-user over H.264 is.. something. Pushing it only because it'll allow your corporation to dictate by fiat the possible business models for web video, that's something too. OTOH, acting like something that is "inherently unfree" is worse, regardless of useful it is, is pretty childish.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
:rolleyes:
Because I was smart enough to care about emerging technology in high school and college instead of sex and drugs, I now have a well-paying job that provided me with a very, very nice house in one of the nicer parts of my town, the perfect motorcycle for my needs, an airplane, a late model truck and a (modest, granted) recording studio in one of the extra bedrooms in the aforementioned very, very nice house. As if that weren't enough, I have a smokin' hot wife and a daughter who makes life worth living, even if I didn't have any of the material possessions I mentioned first. Life is good. So, yeah, I'd say HTML5 probably will make some of us happy.
YMMV. Keep drinking cheap beer and chasing skirts while living in your mom's basement if you want, but when you find yourself old, fat, broke and alone, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Like h.264, who have a whole schedule of royalties based upon your business model? The only one that gets a free pass, mind you, is free-streaming video.
So pursuing alternatives to royalty-encumbered standards is childish. Got it. Time to start paying for those software patents. Perhaps instead we should just give up on open source entirely, because using it and considering it superior in any way is childish in the face of even moderately useful closed source, proprietary solutions. Gotcha.
Since you mention codecs, Google just released a version of VP8 for the WebM project. The improvements are noteworthy.
H.264 is royalty free for Internet video that is free to end users (Internet Broadcast AVC) until at least December 31, 2016.
You need to pay a small licensing fee to use an encoder which Google would have to do with all the videos they encode on YouTube, but as far as including the codec in the browser, it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
Now is not the time to be pushing a private agenda, now is the time to get on board with established industry standards and get something more open into the next round.
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
How do you think H.264 started out ? With zero hardware support, this is where VP8 was a few months ago. Now they have a few hardware manufacturers that ship VP8 built in. Any many said they would do the same. The whole H.264 / VP8 debate is also about looking at the future not just now.
New things are always on the horizon
Would you buy a book written in disappearing ink?
"It's fine, you can read it right now, no problem!" ?
Not everything lasts forever. In fact, only few things do. You ate food yesterday and that ain't coming back. Nor is your ex-girlfriend. Sometimes you just have to move on and do other things.
I haven't heard of anybody claiming that should be the case for standards. What they typically advocate for is products like Crossover Office where you're paying for something that's nearly entirely made of open source code.
Firefox and Chromium (non-Google-branded open source base of Chrome) are open source browsers, the H.264 license model does not fit well with the open source development model. For example when a Linux distribution compiles Firefox or Chromium, they would need to get their own license for all the users of that distribution. The license cost up to 5000000 annually. In the past only Chrome included H.264 and not Chromium, Google didn't want to seperately maintain that part of the code, thus they dropped support for H.264 from Chrome. Just get with the program, H.264 for all browsers is not going to happen.
New things are always on the horizon
A consortium of 20 companies is far preferable to a single BDFL who effectively decides what will run on the web and what won't. A schedule of royalties is far preferable to the alternative, which is "I want to sell a better codec, but it's impossible because Google gives away mediocre ones."
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Even when the "BDFL" basically puts it into the open and goes hands-off? They're just putting a video codec out into the open, not deciding what will and will not run on the web (in contrast to Adobe and Microsoft, who are and have tried, respectively.)
I see this sort of sentiment leveled against open source software all the time, what makes it more true now than before?
No other open source vendors have a monopoly. Web video is Youtube and a minuscule fraction is everything else. Vendors only care about supporting YouTube. If Google is able to dictate the hardware codec your equipment is built with, by setting the codec of YouTube, then they can effectively force everyone else to use their format. People might invent better codecs than YouTube's, but it'll be impossible to bring them to market because the barrier to entry created by the "free" Google codec will make it too expensive for manufacturers to put on the hardware, or too cumbersome for average users to install.
The MPEG-LA actually has companies that sell real video gear, and they compete to make good video gear. Google doesn't give a fuck about how good video looks, they just want to know where the ads go. YouTube's monopoly insulates Google from competition from other players in the video market.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Your universe is only free for 10^1000 years. After that you're going to have to pay royalties.
Is there some sort of covenant and indemnification to that effect? Is there a Community Process? Is there a way for people to work within the process and still compete on quality and have a practical way of delivering a better experience outside of it?
I mean, like Android, this is really the most bullshit kind of open sourcing. None of the benefits accrue to the end users, because almost none of the end users know how to code. All of benefits go to the releaser and its cadre, like the OHA; the open sourcing isn't done to foster innovation, it's done to burn the crops of the competitors. Apple open-sourced Darwin and Clang; they did it so no one could ever compete with them on a FreeBSD platform or low-level compiler again, allowing them a free hand to compete on the playing field they chose. Google's no different.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Why is this an issue for you?
You can host your videos in H264 and WebM and deliver whichever is supported to each client. Or, if you don't like that, you can just support one and ask your customers to install a plug-in. After all, there will be free H264 plug-ins for the browsers that don't ship with H264 support (actually, I think there already are). The only exception, of course, is iOS where users will not be allowed to use WebM, so I guess you'll go for H264.
On the other hand, when a browser like IE9 decides to not support half of the technologies that we are talking about, you don't have much recourse (short of asking them to switch browsers), so I would say that that is much more important to discussion.
By using software patents loaded with royalties that make it impossible to redistribute software using them. Oh sure, Mozilla could pay for the royalties, but no one who distributed Firefox could do so anymore without stripping the h.264 code out.
Why do they have to decide on one or the other? What's wrong with supporting both? If someone wants to pay commercial licensing for encoding h264, they can. If they have a tighter budget and need something free and open but still supported, they can.
Everybody wins?
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
So, exactly what kind of business model should Mozilla adopt to pay for h.264's licensing fees?
I'm right between your argument and the GP's. I'm annoyed at Google for indicating they're going to drop support for h.264 (they can afford whatever future royalties will come), and I'm annoyed at Apple for saying they're not going to support WebM (they've got the resources to drop a few lines of code into their products to support it). I mean, all modern browsers support JPG, GIF and PNG; why can't we support even two major standards without everyone getting in a snit?
The CB App. What's your 20?
about HTML 5! Is it really gonna make any of you happy?!? Here's an idea: forget about new tags and focus on getting drunk and fucking some new women!
Tell us about the drinks you drank and the new women you nailed after clicking submit!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
That's easy for you to say.
>5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
On the web, the original 'language' attribute for the script tag was put in place for when other languages were ported to run in your browser. JavaScript was the default embedded language just until 'something better came along'. Although I've seen a few experiments done, fifteen years later your choice is still JavaScript or nothing.
I'd be rich if I had a nickel every time I saw something done in code that programmers thought was just a stop-gap measure until something better came along-and fifteen years later it's still in use.
Changes in standards typically take an obscene amount of time-just ask the W3C. Thing about how long it would take for all the companies that are heavily invested in H.264 to move off to something better if they started *today*. More than 5 years I'd wager.
How do you figure they could license the patents? It's most probably legally impossible unless they write new browsers from scratch and then pay from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software. The ball isn't in the hand of the OSS people here.
Google already licensed the patents. It was included in Chrome up till version 8. They took it out to promote their company-owned WebM.
So in otherwords, they wrote a new browser from scratch and paid from their own pockets for everyone downloading their software?
Actually yeah I would, especially if it was just a novel. It would actually make the book far more useful as then once I have read it I would have at least a usable notepad as apposed to the 3 rooms of my house with wall to wall bookcases that realistically never get touched once I have read everything on it.
H.264 is open standard.
Yes. Exactly! Its open in the same way a closed door is open.
To quote a poster at OSNews.com:
WebM: unencumbered by patents, free, Free, open source, can be implemented by anyone - wherever, whenever, however.
H264: none of the above, but instead of being developed by a single company, it was developed by a few big shots.
And somehow, H264 is more open?
So yes, absolutely, H.264 is completely open so long as you completely redefine what "open" means so as to make us ignore the man behind the curtain.
Posted too quickly and forgot the reference for the quote.
pretty much everything you've said here is bullshit, why would any hardware/software player manufacturer go "oh, i support youtube, guess i'm done, people won't want to watch ripped dvds or their existing content etc etc etc".
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
it's a poor deal if you the alternative is food you can buy once and eat whenever you want until you get sick of it and delete it.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
I mean, like Android, this is really the most bullshit kind of open sourcing.
That is a complete bullshit statement and a complete lie. Propaganda much?
Android does accept input and patches. Not only have bugs I've filed been fixed, at least one of my recommended patches are now running in Android; which was first adopted by third party roms. As are hundreds of other patches and improvements. And no, I do not work for Google or a carrier.
Android absolutely is open source in the most literal sense. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant or an idiot with an agenda.
With your idiotic logic, Linux isn't open source because we don't all have the source and/or input into the bios and firmware of all the installed components.
it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
We won't, and the whole point of standards is that we shouldn't have to.
This is not the time for you technophiles to go spreading your political agenda at the cost of everyone else, this is the time for us to unite and get it right the first time around with a proper, Free standard for the web, just as all its predecessors have been.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
In the case of Apple it's politics: they really don't like competition, and the h.264 licenses ensure the barrier of entry is high enough they don't have to worry about some puny little dev team disrupting their marketplace with some shiny new browser.
In the case of Google however, it's *also* about politics, but a slightly different take: they really don't like monopolies and oligopolies, since they tend to make dirtying and eliminating Google their first priority (see also: Bing, iPhone), and putting a Free codec in the standard ensures the big guys can't use the h.264 patents as a club to squash smaller competitors with.
Essentially, it comes down to whether you like seeing the web in the hands of a few or not. If you were around during the IE6 days, I assume you'll understand if I say I'm on Google's side in this one then.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Because all it takes is for a single significant player to decide not to support one of the codecs in order for the other to gain dominance over the whole market. And since Apple went crying and bitching to the W3C that they weren't ever gonna implement a Free codec because they didn't wanna, we need a counterpoint for the WebM/Theora side in order to have a meaningful debate instead of the zealots going all "iOS doesn't support it, therefore it's dead". Not that it has stopped them, but at least Firefox and Chrome's marketshare has made the more rational elements pause for a bit.
And then there's the potential legal issues with a heavily patented codec for Free Software, both present and future.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
It's one of the perks of operating a multi-billion dollar business: you can easily afford any paywall your competitors try to burden you with.
Sucks for everyone else, though, and thankfully Google is well aware of that.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Nothing you say here contradicts what I said.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Not marginally so. Not just a little bit. But massively so.
Pure delusion. The latest release of WebM almost completely closes quality gap. H.264 still has a huge lead in encoding performance. WebM has an edge in decoding performance. Given, as consumers, who have a primary need to decode, which makes more sense.
So basically we have more or less visual quality parity between H.264 and WebM. Hardware support is steadily growing for WebM which means battery life parity. H.264 is clear champ at encoding performance. WebM is pushing ahead of H.264 at decoding performance. For most devices, the later means superior battery life.
Contrary to you delusion, WebM looks to be offering H.264 some serious competition.
Ah this is where you're wrong. It's all about controlling the streaming from large providers to set-top boxes, Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu to AppleTVs, Rokus, and the (basically moribund, due to Google's incompetence) GoogleTV platform. The companies in the MPEG-LA and Google both see that streaming distribution will be the future, and that no one will rip movies in the future, because it won't be sold. Physical media's days are numbered. I will be extremely happy if hardware supports both formats, and more, but people up the thread are arguing for MPEG eliminationism, and that would be bad for competition and consumers.
The only question is, do you stand with the monopoly that sells you to advertisers, or with the cartel that sells hardware to you? I'll always vote for the people I buy things from directly over a advertising company.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Yes, it doesn't contradict anything you said, except for the parts where you talked about Android.
WebM still isn't ready for public consumption. By introducing the h.264/VP8 debate prematurely, Google have derailed the progress of HTML5.
Coupled with the stagnation of HTML5 YouTube and increased reliance on Adobe Flash in Google Maps, Stocks, Analytics and Android, it appears that Google have gone off HTML5. How long till Google Docs and gMail become Flash-based?
By introducing the h.264/VP8 debate prematurely, Google have derailed the progress of HTML5.
You mean by creating competition before a defacto incumbent could be entrenched, they stopped HTML5; which ignores video was a tiny, tiny element of the spec? WTF?
Coupled with the stagnation of HTML5 YouTube and increased reliance on Adobe Flash in Google Maps, Stocks, Analytics and Android, it appears that Google have gone off HTML5. How long till Google Docs and gMail become Flash-based?
So you're saying their open support for HTML5, such that they don't want to support flash vs a current need to drive their business can only be interpreted as support for flash? Paranoid much? You're conflating a business need now with a business need for tomorrow. They used what's available. They're working to change that for tomorrow. Someone you interpret very clear anti-flash behavior for being pro-flash to the detriment of themselves. How could you have possibly reached that conclusion?
HTML5 didn't exist yesterday. Flash did exist yesterday. Their only options were, use flash, create an entirely new technology which wouldn't be supported by other browsers, or push for a new standard. They picked the first option, to address current business needs and the third option to address tomorrow's business needs. I don't see the problem. Its the same decision any half way decent businessman would have made.
h.264 is an open standard, WebM patents are mostly owned by Google. Although since h.264 is a pool of patents, and many of the patents are very broad (sadly) several probably apply to WebM as well. The real push here is not for open standards, but free usage of those patents. h.264 has granted an indefinite free license to those distributing video for free. Those charging for video will likely have to pay royalties in the future whether they use h.264 or WebM (if the patent attorneys have their way). One is hardware supported, one is not. As an end user I simply want to keep watching video for free or cheap. Some business models may need adjusted accordingly.
The only exception, of course, is iOS where users will not be allowed to use WebM, so I guess you'll go for H264.
The problem with that is the market has changed and will continue to move away from Apple as a significant market segment. It used to be Apple and RIM where the only mobile platforms with clout. Now Android is pushing RIM out and eclipsing Apple in the numbers game. Which means, in the next couple of years to decade or so, if Apple doesn't support WebM, their owners will likely have an inferior experience which in turn likely means reduced sales which in turn quickly spirals into Apple supporting WebM or it becoming a dying platform.
Apple may not support WebM today but the writing is already on the wall they will support it tomorrow; either by sheer user demand or by falling market share.
Where? Demonstrate:
Never said they didn't. They love it when people do their work for them for free!
It most certainly is, I never said it isn't. It's a bullshit kind of opensourcing, but that's just a qualification.
You should restrict your comments to things I actually say.
My "logic" has nothing to do with the definition of open source, it's based on competition. Google didn't want to compete with Symbian, Windows Mobile, or RIM, thus they released a phone OS for free, and now Symbian and Windows Mobile are dead, and RIM wheezes. This is all about eliminating competition through market dumping, except instead of China dumping cheap steel in order to bankrupt US producers, Google is dumping a free OS in order to destroy the cellphone OS producers. If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.
In general, as with so many of Google's ventures, they've perverted the competition for consumer purchases -- they simply give great service until they are the monoculture, and then the service to the consumer is indifferently better or worse, but people keep coming because it's the only realistic game in town, and Google then moves to the moneymaking: brokering consumers to content and service providers, taking their cut along the way.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
So you don't think Google is interested in the real money it could save by creating better codecs, allowing them to reduce bitrate for current quality, and saving them a tremendous amount of bandwidth?
Also, I take issue with this: "people might invent better codecs...bring them to market." Do you bring equations to market? No, of course not. You bring products to market. Charging for encoding/decoding is a doomed business model and it deserves to be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the age-old data format lock-in that companies more interested in profit than innovation (the very ones you are defending) have been pushing for years. That's what I and many other people here are trying to tell you -- open-sourced code is immune to this kind of treatment, because it can't be taken back or controlled; and when it grows large enough to attract a plurality of development, it becomes strong just on the basis of people not wasting time reinventing the wheel and instead contributing their effort to new frontiers.
how is a set top box not a media player? just because the front end is probably running a html 5 browser doesn't mean they can't do whatever the hell they want with the codec behind the scenes, in fact they'll probably encode and stream it in whatever codec they feel gives them the most quality for their bandwidth, if the MPEG-LA want to stay competitive they'll have to . the idea that no-one will rip movies is just plain stupid and is a completely separate issue to whether physical media will become irrelevant. Who do i stand with? who cares. but currently we have a bunch of codecs and 90% of my media will only play on PCs, maybe an open source codec as the default will fix that, i'm willing to give it a try after the fucking mess that's occurring at the moment.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Marginal cost != cost of production, and even if it were, that would be for an intellectual resource with no physical manifestation, that is never updated, and never serviced. Are you seriously claiming that Google spends zero dollars on the development, maintenance and support of Android?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I think Google is interested in providing the bare minimum quality required to keep the hits to youtube where they are. That is the extent of their commitment. Making 250,000 people with cellphones happy is far more important to them than making one filmmaker happy.
Software is a product. That's just where I come from on this one.
If you think an open-source codec will save you from lock-in you are mistaken. The locks will just move up the pipeline, to different parts of the business. The people who make the content will be the ones forced to use essentially whatever is the monoculture, because using a different standard will become impractical.
But you can't control YouTube or Hulu or a Roku. These are services and products, not code. You can hit "git push" until your keyboard breaks but it won't create a viable competitor to YouTube; just because the codec is "free" doesn't mean it's any easier for competitors to create their own sites, services, and codecs, in fact it makes it harder. Open source is great, but it tends to create monocultures where competition on price is impossible, thus the revenue ends up being derived from services. The end result is a situation like Mozilla's, which Google basically owns at this point, they're utterly beholden to them for search referral revenue. Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
"I want to sell a better codec, but it's impossible because Google gives away mediocre ones."
this is outrageous. if there's no market, you don't have a viable business. that is no-one's fault. you seem to imply we shouldn't give things away because they'll hurt the market for expensive alternatives, which is so fundamentally bullshit it makes my brain hurt.
Browsing with classic discussion, noscript, at -1 and nested
no hidden comments and I only mod UP
How do you know that WebM is unencumbered by patents?
You're assuming that algorithms are a product, which I am not convinced of. Video encoding is one of a class of problems which is not yet solved; i.e. we're constantly improving at it. Having a large target use an open-source tool attracts more development, not less; or, put another way, business dollars are not the only source of development funding.
Do you really think that a site driven by a qualitatively better codec couldn't threaten YouTube, especially if its lower bandwidth requirements lowered its costs? You keep talking about monoculture -- but surviving as a company because you have secret tools is hardly a strong business model. Tell me why there still exist compilers besides GCC, or web servers besides Apache, or heck, shells besides bash? By your theory, those should all be monocultures with no alternatives. Yet markets thrive around all of them. (Well, maybe not a financial market around bash, but a market nontheless *grin*)
Your way, there are a million development hours split across a hundred codecs. My way, those hours improve in the same place, and the people who want something different can still go and create it. Trying to introduce some kind of software socialism where the company gets to hide its toys so that people don't use them only leads to the situations that exist in the real software markets -- Microsoft on every machine. Now that's a monoculture.
Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.
They're free to accept it or not accept it. I tell you what, though, if I wanted a build of Firefox that changed the default page to Bing, I could do it, and run it, and no one would stop me. I could even make it a formal fork and distribute it for the people that wanted it. I can't imagine many would want it, so it wouldn't get much action. Why do you advocate "propping up" inferior, unwanted software? And why don't you try making a custom build of Internet Explorer?
I think your brain hurts because he reflexivly assume that anything tha tis open source is virtuous and gives everyone everything they may want. The fact is that it almost never delivers viable consumer solutions, unless the project is the pet of a huge private company that shelters it's development and steers business it's way.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
By using software patents loaded with royalties that make it impossible to redistribute software using them. Oh sure, Mozilla could pay for the royalties, but no one who distributed Firefox could do so anymore without stripping the h.264 code out.
You know who else could? Anybody shipping less than 100.000 units a year could do it for free, that's who.
Fandroids hate facts.
This argument has no basis in fact. VP8 has started to appear in the lists of hardware accelerated codecs from most ARM SoC manufacturers already. Some even have firmware upgrades to enable it in chips they have already shipped.
I'm not sure if the form validation is such a great idea. Sure, it will save a lot of time and headache, but there is nothing stoping unscrupulous and technically knowledgeable people from sending whatever data they want to the web server. I guess 99% of the time if you use client side validation you'll be ok, but I would feel obliged to still check everything on the server side. I guess having the specific form elements to validate email addresses and constrict dates is very nice. I suppose it doesn't hurt anything to have those new elements, as long as sever side validation doesn't get forgotten about.
How do you think H.264 started out ? With zero hardware support, this is where VP8 was a few months ago. Now they have a few hardware manufacturers
H.264 is supported by every digital HDTV system on the planet. It is studio production codec, a broadcast, cable and satellite distribution codec.
It is deeply entrenched in CCTV, commercial, industrial, medical, military and security applications.
Yes, VP8 has the support of a few hardware manufacturers.
But H.264 is suppported by Apple, Fitjusitu, Hitachi, JVC, Microsoft, NTT, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and Yamaha.
In the second tier, by the 953 H.264 licensees like LG and Vizio.
The whole H.264 / VP8 debate is also about looking at the future not just now.
Then you need to be thinking about the next-generation codec, HEVC/H.265, which should be ready in a year or two.
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.{/quote> High Efficiency Video Coding
On the other hand, Google has absolutely no problem pushing Adobe Flash. So obviously Google is quite flexible when it comes to these things.
Why is Vorbis a casualty? I finally got an Android phone recently and it supported Vorbis right out of the box. My old Nokia never supported, not even the N800 tablet.
Do you really think that a site driven by a qualitatively better codec couldn't threaten YouTube,
Yes.
You are falling for the classic geek error of assuming that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. No, it won't. People still buy crappy, inelegant, not very effective mousetraps because they are cheap, and everyone knows what they do. .
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Funny how people don't mind Google doing this, but everyone was outraged when Microsoft gave away Internet Explorer for free, thereby destroying Netscape as a business.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The problem with your little rant is that H.264 is technically superior to all of the "open" standards.
I stopped reading here, nothing else you say matters if you're stuck on this point. Technical superiority is 100% irrelevant. Take a moment to read it again, maybe it will sink in. If it's illegal for e.g. Mozilla to use it, and it is, then it doesn't matter if it has some advantages--even vast advantages--over the thing that is legal for them to ship. Superior is nice, but royalty-free is king .
I want my Cowboyneal
Please note, I said it is unencumbered, not that it doesn't have any. This is according to Google. Such claims are legitimate unless someone can prove otherwise. Seemingly such claims carry significant weight given the MPEG community's effort at trying to locate ammo. Its likely they've already looked fairly hard and have been unable to find anything which is why they went publicly shopping.
Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.
No one is arguing for MPEG eliminationism and if they are, they're idiots. The argument is that HTML5 should list WebM as a base codec that everyone must support. The reasoning is that as long as you provide a WebM version, you're guaranteed that all users can view it. If you want to have an H.264 version or whatever other codec that's fine, but the standard should specify that everyone at least supports WebM.
The reason for not using H.264 as the common codec that everyone should support is due to the W3C's own rules that nothing in the spec should require patent licensing in order to implement or ship.
Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.
Why do I have to submit a patch to Mozilla? I can just fork the code, create my own version with the search set to Bing by default and distribute it myself. Done. Try having a version of IE where the factory default search is Google instead of Bing.
If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.
Except the actual market forces prove you wrong. The cost of an Android phone vs an iPhone vs a Windows Phone vs Symbian phone are all around the same. The customers aren't seeing a drop in price for a phone because the OS is free, so your argument fails because Android has outsold Windows Mobile, Symbian, and RIM due to people actually wanting them because they like them better. Whether it's the OS, the hardware specs or whatever, it's definitely not the price.
As for the barriers to entry among hardware vendors and whatnot, I can agree with you but that has nothing to do with Open Source or Android at all, it's a problem with the entire system. The fun part is that because Android is Open Source and Free, anyone can just take the Android code and fork it. They can give it a new name, rebrand it, whatever they like and just release it. You can't do that with Windows Mobile or a RIM phone or iPhone. If a company with enough resources decided to give it a go, they could definitely compete by using Android or by creating their own if they make a better product.
You realize the problem wasn't because Microsoft gave IE away for free, the problem was that they used their position in the OS market to bundle IE with the OS and give themselves an advantage over Netscape.
They have granted a free license for free web video streaming. If you give away a dvd or other video (ie not streaming via the web) you still have to pay.
If the patents they already had for H.264 applied to WebM, then the MPEG-LA wouldn't be publicly requesting the creation of a patent pool against WebM and asking anyone with patents they believe are essential to step forward. What that says is they don't have anything.
WebM has some hardware support, and the support is growing.
As an end user I simply want to keep watching video for free or cheap
So why would you want whoever is giving you video to have to pay? Or whoever is giving you your decoder to have to pay? or whoever is encoding the video you're watching? The only part of the chain that is free is for someone to provide a video for streaming. Whoever encoded the video had to pay for the encoder. Whatever is decoding the video had to pay for the decoder distribution. Etc. WebM is free for encoder, decoder, streaming, etc.
It wouldn't have the first thing to do with people beating a path to your door, and lots to do with "what YouTube does, I can do for cheaper (less ads, more content) -- and better is just a side effect." You are falling for the classic error of having this idea that just because something is popular it is inviolate. Look at MySpace. That was a pretty thorough monoculture, and yet one quarter it just deflated. Facebook. Altavista. Geocities. Gawker. Are you really claiming eternally enduring web sites? Show me a website that has survived on something besides merit.
Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.
Freedom is just another word for having no more than 100.000 downloads a year. Firefox is too big to be free.
Fandroids hate facts.
Google might be wrong when they say WebM is patent unencumbered.
If someone sues you for patent infringement for using WebM, is Google going to help defend you? Even if it isn't a valid complaint it could still cost you a lot of money.
but what about good old VRML?
I remember hacking around with it a little back in college, but it never really went anywhere. Seems like we finally have the bandwidth and processing power to make this a "reality".
Just a little quibble here:
People do not buy Android phones. They are given away "for free" with the contract. The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone.
Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.
Freedom is just another word for having no more than 100.000 downloads a year. Firefox is too big to be free.
Wait....what? It's too big to be free? Says who? Firefox is free to download, free to modify, and you can submit patches and fixes and they'll get incorporated if they're good. So...how is Firefox too big to be free? Or do you think that since it has so many downloads it just "shouldn't" be free?
People do not buy Android phones. They are given away "for free" with the contract. The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone.
Perhaps I should ask Verizon for my money back when I purchased the original Droid early last year. Or what bout the cost of the HTC Evo? Or the other tons of Android phones which are at various price points which range from some "free" with contract to being at the same price point as the various iPhone models. Sorry, but claiming that "The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone" is just flat out bullshit.