Mozilla Debates Supporting H.264 In Firefox Via System Codecs

An anonymous reader writes "Adoption of the HTML5 video element has been hampered by the lack of a universal video format that is supported in all browsers. Mozilla previously rejected the popular H.264 video codec because it is patent-encumbered and would require implementors to pay royalty fees. The organization is now rethinking its position and is preparing to add support for H.264 video decoding in mobile Firefox via codecs that are provided by the underlying operating system or hardware. The controversial proposal has attracted a lot of criticism from Firefox contributors, including some employed by Mozilla."

Comments

WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

"Adoption of the HTML5 video element has been hampered by the lack of (software vendors like Microsoft and Apple implementing WebM)" is closer to reality than "a universal video format that is supported in all browsers". While the latter may be true, it obscures the reason for things being as they are.

Re:webm

[Billly Gates]

Because XP users will whine to the webmasters their internets wont show videos at the website.

What about Linux users? Leave them in the dark too? Mobile users? In India and China there will likely be more people browsing the web on phones than desktops and not everyone of them will have an expensive patent paid IPhone or Andriod. These mobile browsers do not support these patents to cut down on costs.

Re:WebM

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Those companies didn't have to implement WebM because they already had implemented H.264. In format wars Johnny-come-lately = also-ran. Plus why use a competitors' format, WebM, when you can use your own ? People are quick to call "patent trap" when Microsoft releases something "open", but when it's Google everyone has to trust blindly ?

Re:WebM

[Kjella]

"Adoption of the HTML5 video element has been hampered by the lack of (software vendors like Microsoft and Apple implementing WebM)" is closer to reality

Companies that won't support H.264: Mozilla
Companies that won't support WebM: Many...

Not to mention that for mobile devices, in many cases the hardware support for WebM is missing. H.264 is what almost all cameras record in now. H.264 is what professionals use in BluRays etc. H.264 is what pirates tend to use. Almost everybody, everywhere is using H.264, apart from the WebM beta on YouTube I haven't seen it used anywhere. Firefox represents one web browser, zero devices and a microscopic share of the whole video format ecosystem but think the whole world will bend to their will for WebM. The rest of the world will continue to work with H.264, while Firefox is worked around with Flash/H.264 until Mozilla either changes their mind or becomes irrelevant. Which I suppose is the case on mobile, I can't even find them on the mobile browser stats.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

You have that backwards. Adoption of the HTML5 video element has been hampered by the lack of software vendors like Mozilla and Google implementing H.264.

Re:webm

[Anonymous Coward]

Shame on you. You're showing your ignorance when a few minutes of looking around this grand network thingie would have told you that almost all celphones that have the ability to show video have dedicated h.264 hardware decoders doing the job. So do most video cards and video players. There's a reason it's a standard.

If nothing else, Steve Jobs' rant on flash and why it wouldn't be on the iPhone should have given you the clue.

As to the balance of this kerfluffle... Carry on.

Re:WebM

[SuricouRaven]

The only people who will impliment native support for h264 are those who hold the patents themselves - and they will refuse to support anything else.

Re:WebM

[larry bagina]

The M in WebM is for all the Motorola license fees you're going to pay. It's free as in free to get sued by Motorola.

Re:webm

[nightfell]

Webm is just as good as h.264 imho.

Except it's not. In every way, other than the meta aspect of patents, H.264 is superior to WebM. And there are a multitude of other meta aspects which H.264 is superior. Specifically, it's *far* more widely supported, both in existing video (which Mozilla has, in their infinite wisdom, decided their users do not ever need to view), and in existing hardware. H.264 is what has allowed Apple to support 1080p HD video from the iTunes Store while keeping file sizes down to damned close to their current 720p sizes while still maintaining respectable image quality.

Your choice: an iPad with 10 hours of video playback using the built-in H.264 hardware, or a "freedom" iPad which gets 1.5 hours of video playback using a software decoder.

That said, I see no reason why the browsers shouldn't use the decoding abilities of the OS they reside on. This just makes common sense?

Yes, it makes common sense, which is why Mozilla has decided against it so far. And even though it's an inscrutable fact that Mozilla could have done this from day one, there was no shortage of Slashdot nerds trying to claim that Mozilla could not legally support H.264.

Which is a load of bullshit.

If I already have a license/ability to decode for h.264, why shouldn't I be able to use it in my browser?

Because that would make you eeevillll. Somehow. I don't fucking know, just ask one of these freetards to explain it. I'm sure somehow they will be able to concoct an elaborate logical framework why using H.264 is no different from living in Soviet Russia multiplied by being an indentured servant to the power of Orwell, or some such nonsense.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, and they didn't need to implement PNG because they had already implemented GIF.

Hang on, Microsoft did actually try that one! That was a great time for the Internet wasn't it?

Re:WebM

[beelsebob]

Hmm? nVidia, Intel, AMD, ImaginationTech, Apple, Samsung, Google, HTC, Microsoft, Nokia, ...

Right... every single hardware and software vendor out there other than mozilla clearly has a vested interest...

Re:WebM

[CharlyFoxtrot]

List of H.264 licensors :
Apple Inc., Cisco Systems Canada IP Holdings Company, Cisco Technology, Inc., DAEWOO Electronics Corporation, Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, France Télécom, société anonyme*, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. , Fujitsu Limited, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hitachi Consumer Electronics Co., Ltd., JVC KENWOOD Corporation*, Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V., LG Electronics Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, NTT DOCOMO, INC., Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Polycom, Inc., Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sedna Patent Services, LLC, Sharp Corporation, Siemens AG, Sony Corporation, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, Toshiba Corporation

List of companies supporting WebM:
Google, Mozilla

All the above companies can make use of H.264 knowing they won't get screwed because they are on the inside. What guarantee do they have they won't get screwed by some patent covering some of WebM ? A lot are competing directly or indirectly with Google, what guarantee do they have Google won't screw them ? A lot of those companies are developing hardware right now that has existing H.264 hardware decode and/or encode support (already an industry standard), what would they gain by throwing that away and starting from scratch and coming to market god knows when ? Face it: WebM hasn't got, and never had, a shot. Either it's a cheap viral marketing campaign for Google or someone up there is pretty deluded about their clout in the tech world.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

Though it's been over a year and the codec is still supported, Google announced they plan to drop support of H.264 in the future. Opera also does not support H.264. Moving forward, I would wager that Google will phase out H.264 in favor of WebM on mobile devices as well. Google seems to be taking a more cautious approach of keeping H.264 support for now and hoping WebM catches on eventually before dropping it entirely.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

WebM is already on its way into hardware. What you mean to say is Apple do not use, and will not use it. Neither will MS^WNokia. However, Google have already given the details to IC manufacturers who are on-board to integrate.

Keep up that FUD though, Apple fanboi.

Re:WebM

[EyelessFade]

Companies that won't support H.264: Mozilla

And Opera

Companies that won't support WebM: Many...

Which? Microsoft and Apple? So to on each side then.. And guess what; Microsoft don't support h264 in IE, they just support plugins. Blah blah everybody blah blah.

zero devices and a microscopic share of the whole video format ecosystem but think the whole world will bend to their will for WebM.

Yeh google should remove all support for h264 in android. Oh thats 60% of smart phones. woops. And remove flash and h264 from youtube. Should make webM relevant then. How many sites do you use which have videos?

Re:webm

[Pentium100]

Yes, XP can only support DivX, that's why when the anime fansubbers abandoned it others reencode their releases to DivX because the XP users cannot play h.264, so they still don't know how great HD looks, since that is usually h.264-only.

Or they download CCCP or a similar codec pack and have h.264 codecs.

As for phones - it is more likely that a phone will support h.264 decoding in hardware than WebM. WebM will probably be decoded in software greatly reducing the battery life (assuming the CPU is fast enough to decode the video in the first place).

Ffdshow is also available for Linux and supports, among others, h.264.

Re:WebM

[Goaway]

Except that PNG is objectively better than GIF, while WebM is objectively worse than h.264.

Re:WebM

[Goaway]

These changes will occur in the next couple months

Posted over a year ago, and guess what, h.264 is still there.

Re:WebM

[Pentium100]

Yes, and when the chips are made, I'll buy one and solder it on my UMPC. Oh, wait, it won't probably work like that. I will have to buy a new UMPC (hopefully they will still be made by the time the chips are common) just to be able to watch videos and support a "free" codec. But then I paid whole $0 for ffdshow, I don't want the money to go to waste, so I might still use h.264, after all, the anime fansubbers and pirates still do.

Re:WebM

[Pentium100]

Yeh google should remove all support for h264 in android.

Yes, Google should do that. I hear people really like when they buy a device and then the manufacturer removes some features from it. Possible features, without which the user would not have bought the device.

And Sony should remove Bluray playback functionality from PS3, so people would need to buy another player.

Re:WebM

[mrnobo1024]

WebM supporters: Free Software Foundation, Participatory Culture Foundation, Xiph, Android, Codecian, Collabora, CoreCodec, Digital Rapids, FFmpeg, Adobe Flash Player, Flumotion Services, Google Chrome, Grab Networks, iLink, Inlet Technologies, Oracle Java, Matroska, Moovida, Mozilla, ooVoo, Opera, Oracle, Harmonic Rhozet, Skype, SightSpeed, Sorenson, Telestream, Tixeo, Ucentrik, VideoLAN, Wildform, Winamp Media Player, Wowza Media Server, XBMC Media Center, Allwinner Tech, AMD, Anyka, ARM, Broadcom, Chinachip, Chips&Media, C2 Microsystems, DSP Group, Freescale, GeneralPlus, Hisilicon, Hydra Control Freak, Imagination Technologies, Shanghai InfoTM Microelectronics, Leadcore Technology, Logitech, Marvell, MIPS, MStar Semiconductor, nVidia, Qualcomm, Rockchip Microelectronics, RayComm Group, SEUIC, Socle Technology Corp., ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Verisilicon, Videantis, ViewCast, ZiiLABS, ZTE Corporation, Anevia, Brightcove, Delve Networks, Encoding.com, EntropyWave, Flumotion Services, HD Cloud, HeyWatch.com, Kaltura, Media Core, MetaCDN, ooyala, Panda, Panvidea, Sorenson 360, thePlatform, VideoRX.com, VMIX, YouTube, Zencoder

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

h.264 comes with a patent troll organisation that wants h.264 be the only video codec so that they can demand pay from everyone that wants to upload h.264 encoded videos

Re:WebM

[Kjella]

And Opera

Actually, according to Opera itself:

Opera Mobile's support of particular video codecs is device-dependent: WebM and H.264 are supported, if available on the platform.

So Opera is not refusing to use the system codecs on mobile, like Firefox is.

Which? Microsoft and Apple? So to on each side then.. And guess what; Microsoft don't support h264 in IE, they just support plugins. Blah blah everybody blah blah.

Opera is practically insignificant on the desktop and they support H.264 on the mobile. And yes IE does support H.264 it's everything else they only support via plugins.

Yeh google should remove all support for h264 in android. Oh thats 60% of smart phones. woops. And remove flash and h264 from youtube. Should make webM relevant then. How many sites do you use which have videos?

And here's really the clue, there's no indication Google is actually doing any of these things. Chrome still ships with H.264 support, every Android phone ships with H.264 support, YouTube's WebM is in eternal beta while everything is standardizing on H.264. Mozilla has been standing on the other side waiting for Google to join them but they're not coming, it's like threatening to migrate from MS Office to LibreOffice to get a better price but in the end you're staying on MS Office anyway. And Mozilla is now standing there dumbfounded saying "but but but you said you were migrating". It's not Firefox and Google, it's just Firefox and wishful thinking.

Re:WebM

[icebraining]

No. WebM is technically worse than h.264. How much does that count is subjective.

Re:WebM

[theweatherelectric]

So to on each side then.. And guess what; Microsoft don't support h264 in IE, they just support plugins.

Internet Explorer 9 supports two, and only two, codecs in the HTML5 video element. IE9 supports H.264 and it supports WebM if the codec has been installed. No other codecs are supported, not even, for example, Windows Media Video.

Re:WebM

[icebraining]

Assuming you mean Motoral Mobility, that's owned by Google, which gives everyone "a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of this implementation of VP8", that applies to any patent owned by Google, including future patents.

So how exactly will they sue anyone?

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on which "objective" standard you are comparing them on.

GIF was patent-encumbered, making it objectively worse.

h.264 is patent-encumbered, making it objectively worse.

Re:webm

[gmhowell]

So the entire world needs to be shackled due to a few slackers? Let me introduce you to my friend, Harrison Bergeron...

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

True. And WebM comes with an uncertain future as that same patent troll organization will probably come after the first well funded WebM implementer. At this point in time it is unknown whether they would succeed in showing that WebM violates any existing patents. However it is a virtual certainty that they will try and that it will be expensive to defend against. This is why folks like Microsoft and Apple have stayed away and simply said that they will use WebM if there is already a plug in on the system that implements it. Whoever writes and distributes that plug in gets to battle the wrath of the h.264 patent trolls.

Re:WebM

[Telvin_3d]

Yeah, and most of those show up on the h.264 supporter lists too. The subset who view this as a either/or choice is a very small subset.

Re:WebM

[jonwil]

Actually, a big reason Microsoft and Apple wont touch VP8 is that they hold H.264 patents and are members of the H.264 patent pool and that because of the extremely broad patent grant attached to VP8, supporting it would mean giving up the rights to use their patents as part of a future VP8 patent pool and extract money from those who ARE using VP8.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

Google isn't stupid. They want browser market share more than they care about getting away from h.264.

And it's working, as Chrome gobbles up Firefox territory.

Meanwhile, all are forced to find ways to support everything, or perish. That's a good position for users to be in, now that we're out of the dark ages of web browsers.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a load of bollocks. Mozilla can't support H.264 because it isn't supported on all platforms and they wouldn't be able to pay for the licensing fees involved.

The hardware support thing is likewise a non-issue for most things as desktops and laptops are powerful enough and several chip manufacturers have announced plans to add support to their chips. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM#Hardware

Re:webm

[viperidaenz]

I play h.264 and x.264 videos on my old XP Home laptop all the time. ffdshow works on XP too.

Re:webm

[Anonymous Coward]

Webm isn't "just as good as" H.264, aside from that though, you're dead on.

Re:WebM

[smash]

Being technically worse, when trying to win customers from a competitor which is already entrenched counts for everything. Really, other than pie in the sky idealism, there is zero reason to use WebM/VP8 - the content generation tools aren't there, inbuilt operating system/device support isn't there, and the CODEC itself is inferior. Other than for political reasons - which the average user has ZERO care for, it is lose-lose-lose. Thus, the average user won't use it.

If you want to win customers over, build something BETTER, not some half-assed attempt that has no hardware or commercial software support and due to inferior performance, never will do.

Re:WebM

[smash]

Cute twist you're trying to pull -- make a realistic statement mixed with falsehood. WebM is Open Source, h.264 is proprietary. Both are 'free' to use but there's much, much more likelihood that at any point in the future h.264 could implement 'fees'. Or maybe you're just naive and inadvertently mixing 'open' with 'free'.

Actually, h.264 is "openly" patent encumbered, with a well known licensing policy. WebM/VP8 is on shaky legal ground; there is only google claiming it is "open" and "free". It has yet to be tested in court, and an analysis of the code/algorithm shows siginificant similarities.

Re:WebM

[smash]

They can, if they use the system codec. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of platforms that do not "officially" support h.264 have a CODEC installed that contains support. Either that or the end user does not watch video, and thus is not in the video watching demographic.

Refusing to use the system codecs is retarded. Why should I have multiple copies of CODEC code installed that all need patching and updating, all take space, etc? Why don't mozilla write their own operating system platform while they're at it?

Re:WebM

[smash]

So, webM/vp8 has been tested in court and found to not infringe on anyone else's patents then? Thought not...

Re:WebM

[shutdown -p now]

They can support it on those platforms where it's already available and exposed to third-party applications (i.e., at the minimum, Windows 7 and OS X), without having to pay any licensing fees involved. They can also support it on Linux if the codec is available on the system, without bundling it with the browser. Then people in countries with sane patent laws will just use ffmpeg, and people in countries with insane laws can either shell out $$$ for the codec or vote for politicians who'll make software unpatentable (and, in the meantime, use ffmpeg).

Re:WebM

[icebraining]

How does that in any way invalidate what I wrote?

Re:WebM

[icebraining]

While I agree that WebM is doomed already, I disagree with your generalized assertion that technically superiority is all that counts. Cost, for example, wins over technical superiority regularly.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like FUD to me.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

WebM is already on its way into hardware. What you mean to say is Apple do not use, and will not use it.

All the hardware that would support WebM will support h.264 as well. Since WebM is inferior to h.264, why should they waste their time using the WebM portion?

Re:WebM

[marcosdumay]

So I guess after you paid the h264 racket nobody else can come and sue you because of some unknown paten, rightt? Tought not.

I'm glad we don't have this kind of idiocy around here.

Re:WebM

[mug funky]

all video formats come with the threat of a lawsuit from that cunt at MPEG-LA.

i say bring it the fuck on. when they try to defend their patent portfolio against google's lawyers (and any other vested interests that want to jump into the fray), they'll find their portfolio shrinking to the level their legitimacy hit years ago.

Re:WebM

[RocketRabbit]

"Which? Microsoft and Apple?"

Microsoft, Apple, Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony, Samsung, LG, Fuji, Panasonic...

Re:WebM

[mug funky]

cost-wise, VP8 uses more power for less quality.

there's people working on implementing some psy modelling into it, but those are largely backported from x264 (which thank fuck has implemented a lot of it's own innovative tech that can be applied to many other codecs, and hasn't put patents on them).

the _only_ benefit of VP8 is political.

webm itself is more than VP8 though. it's VP8+vorbis+TimedText in an mkv wrapper. you can drop-in replace VP8 with something else as it comes along (sadly Snow will never really get there).

Re:WebM

[unrtst]

Thus, the average user won't use it.

BS. The "average" user will use whatever youtube, hulu, netflix, funnyordie, xtube, pornhub, etc etc spit out at them.

The past has had real player, quicktime, wmv, mpeg*, flash (with multiple video codecs), silverlight (multiple codecs), etc etc etc etc. Neither WebM nor h.264 is going to be the format to end all formats.

We're down to only two formats now in this spec. This should be easily fixed with a combo of:

a) let the browser support both via plugins of some sort (or OS media layer calls)
b) let the site detect and send the supported format.

Maybe that's not ideal, but your average user won't give a rats ass. h.264 has the technical/performance edge, and WebM has the open edge... there is no clear winner (you may define one, but others obviously do not). There's no point in wasting any more time arguing about it until h.264 clears the patent roadblocks or WebM catches up in hardware and software support.... just plan to support both, and ALL your users will be happy.

Re:WebM

[smash]

Sounds like FUD to me.

Well that sounds like "head in the sand" to me. From someone qualified who has analyzed the code in detail:

Finally, the problem of patents appears to be rearing its ugly head again. VP8 is simply way too similar to H.264: a pithy, if slightly inaccurate, description of VP8 would be “H.264 Baseline Profile with a better entropy coder”. Even VC-1 differed more from H.264 than VP8 does, and even VC-1 didn’t manage to escape the clutches of software patents. It’s quite possible that VP8 has no patent issues, but until we get some hard evidence that VP8 is safe, I would be cautious. Since Google is not indemnifying users of VP8 from patent lawsuits, this is even more of a potential problem. Most importantly, Google has not released any justifications for why the various parts of VP8 do not violate patents, as Sun did with their OMS standard: such information would certainly cut down on speculation and make it more clear what their position actually is.

If google was confident they were in the clear, they wouldn't be stuffing clauses in the license to the effect of "if this code infringes, you're on your own!".

Re:webm

[Randle_Revar]

>As for phones - it is more likely that a phone will support h.264 decoding in hardware than WebM. WebM will probably be decoded in software greatly reducing the battery life (assuming the CPU is fast enough to decode the video in the first place).

It is true that it is more likely. But don't think it is not happening at all. At least the Tegra 2/3, TI OMAP4 (and upcoming 5), Rockchip RK29xx and ZiiLABS ZMS-20 currently support HW decoding of VP8 (and encoding in at least some cases). In February, Google released the 5th version of its royalty-free hardware designs for encoding and decoding.

Re:WebM

[timothyf]

And guess what; Microsoft don't support h264 in IE, they just support plugins.

Microsoft has supported h264 natively since IE 9.

Re:WebM

[CharlyFoxtrot]

My list was a list of licensors, yours one of users (and includes some pretty small time freeware at that). A list of h.264 users would take up the page. Secondly, your list is padded: several Google entities listed in there separately for example. Others aren't even tech companies but advocacy groups. Thirdly, I see a lot of companies that may have provided documentation but to my knowledge haven't implemented anything, like all those processor manufacturers on the list. And finally some, like Skype are simply legacy users that were using this codec before it was open sourced (V7 in this case) and have since actually partially moved away from it (h.264 for HD chat).

Re:WebM

[Endymion]

Ahh, yet again, Reality forcing it's way in the face of Idealism. Exactly as I predicted ~1.5 years ago. Once standards become entrenched, they are next to impossible to displace, and for better or worse, H.264 is the de facto standard.

But as i mentioned in that old post: this is not a total loss! The codec war may be lost (for this generation), but the CONTAINER and IMPLEMENTATION are easier to replace, and could still be a place to gain ground! To put it simply: displacing FLASH with a Free Software (but still patent encumbered) implementation is still a win! And more to the point - it's a win that's worth fighting for.

And even if a System Codec technique relies on a proprietary solution for now, that's a LOT easier to replace with a Free version in the future! (you're not telling people to replace all their existing infrastructure; it's just a "different install-and-forget driver")

Focusing on the codec ONLY ends up just giving these other areas back to Flash ("it makes my $FavoriteVideoSite work!"). for no good reason...

Re:WebM

[theweatherelectric]

And finally some, like Skype are simply legacy users that were using this codec before it was open sourced (V7 in this case) and have since actually partially moved away from it (h.264 for HD chat).

Rather than moving away from it, Skype has been adding support for VP8 over the last year:

http://gigaom.com/video/skype-vp8-video-conferencing/
http://blog.webmproject.org/2011/08/one-to-one-vp8-video-calling-now.html

If H.264 Baseline is not offered under a royalty-free licence before the 15th of March 2012, then VP8 will be the required video codec for WebRTC. See the the Video Codec Requirements section of the WebRTC IETF draft: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cbran-rtcweb-codec-01. This is why semiconductor companies are keen to promote their WebM support:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/verisilicon-releases-new-generation-of-hantro-video-ip-products-to-promote-webm-and-webrtc-2012-02-22

Of course, it's unlikely that H.264 Baseline will be royalty-free before the 15th so VP8 will likely be the required video codec. Still, it could happen and if it does then everyone can implement support for H.264 Baseline in their browsers without issue.

Re:WebM

[smash]

You missed the "already entrenched" bit. Everyone already has h.264. Being "free" doesn't matter, as people already have a superior alternative that they are using (to decode) for free.

Re:WebM

[smash]

All the video I generate comes out of my devices in h.264. h.264 uses less bandwidth and is already available on mobile devices. There is a winner this time around and it is h.264. The ship has sailed. Writing something to compete (somewhat) with h.264 is a waste of time and will not get market share. An alternative needs to be better; developers should be writing to compete with the next standard after h.264.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear people really like when they buy a device and then the manufacturer removes some features from it. Possible features, without which the user would not have bought the device.

Didn't Sony do something like this with Other OS?

Re:WebM

[Pentium100]

OtherOS was used by the minority and as I recall, that minority was happy that OtherOS was removed. So now Sony should make the majority of PS3 owners happy by removing Bluray playback capability.

Re:WebM

[Ihmhi]

Companies that won't support H.264: Mozilla
Companies that won't support WebM: Many..

Agreed, this battle is already well lost.

Too little, too late.

What the open-source community needs to do is innovate in such a fashion that something becomes "killer" - clearly better in every fashion. From there, it's all a matter of the project avoiding selling out for a briefcase full of money and stock options and not having their information stolen and/or patented first by an existing, more lawyered-up company.

Easy!

Re:WebM

[Billly Gates]

You must have an old version of IE or use XP still.

IE 9 for a year had h.264 and IE 10 which is almost beta standardizes on h.264 for METRO apps. Apple and MS love h.264 since they can afford the license.

The issue does remain with XP and Windows 7 starter edition and non Andriod/Iphone smartphones which do not support it due to licensing costs and drm requirements. This will be an issue in Africa and Asia as it will be the main prefered method to get on the web over an $$$ desktop.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post isn't inherently FUDdy, but it becomes so by being so one-sided. You're right, Google doesn't offer any indemnity to users of VP8. But MPEG LA doesn't offer any indemnity to users of H.264, either. If the codecs are similar, then both are at risk of trollish lawsuits.

Re:WebM

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Rather than moving away from it, Skype has been adding support for VP8 over the last year:

Yes, they upgraded from V7 to it's newer version WebM, née V8, + h.264. Wikipedia :

"VP7 is used for versions prior to Skype 5.5. As of version 5.7 VP8 is used for both group and one on one standard definition video chat and H264 is used for 720p and 1080p high definition group and one on one video chat."

And of course this was reported as Skype moving to WebM. That's technically correct I guess (the best kind of correct) but you'll see that where there was one, there are now two and the part that's the future, HD quality video, is in h.264. That that's counted as a win is indicative of just how much WebM advocates are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Re:WebM

[RoLi]

Cost is a part of technical superiority. If something is way too expensive, it cannot be "technical superior".

Re:WebM

[theweatherelectric]

"VP7 is used for versions prior to Skype 5.5. As of version 5.7 VP8 is used for both group and one on one standard definition video chat and H264 is used for 720p and 1080p high definition group and one on one video chat."

That's in the context of a particular piece of hardware which happens to produce an H.264 stream. The Skype blog post cited by Wikipedia doesn't say anything about H.264 being used preferentially for full high definition video calls and doesn't imply that a web cam which produces a full high definition VP8 stream wouldn't be supported. You're reading too much into it.

Re:WebM

[smash]

Point being: VP8 is not the "open", "free" panacea that many claim it to be. It is legally untested and has been examined to be more than liable to companies implementing it being sued. So, its in the same boat at the moment as h.264. Except its technically inferior.

Re:WebM

[icebraining]

So if the MPEG-LA raised their royalties significantly, the H.264 would suddenly become worse than VP8 technically? That makes no sense.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

So, its in the same boat at the moment as h.264. Except its technically inferior.

Says the guy who just based his arguments that WebM is patent encumbered on WebM being exactly the same as h.264, except for the one point where WebM is better.

Re:WebM

[horza]

The video you generate comes out of your devices in h.264, for which the manufacturers are already paying a royalty. Now if you then want to generate some actual content, using the raw video, then you now have to pay a license unless you use WebM. There is no "winner", as a poster above pointed out the user will just use the format the provider spits out, the codec used will just be a balance of cost versus convenience. It's not that big a deal to use WebM instead of h.264 for general use, and pay a license to generate mobile content which you generally charge a premium for until WebM reaches the same hardware acceleration as h.264.

Phillip.

Re:WebM

[Lussarn]

I'm not sure how much this format war will matter in the future. Web browsers are getting faster and faster, Chrome can probably decode 720p or even 1080p H.264 using NaCL today. Javascipt sees speedups in every browser version, computers are getting faster, it's not unreasonable to think that it may in the quite near future be fast enough to decode video. When this happens you can send your codec along with your webpage. Yes, there are some stumbling blocks, like HW accelerating, not sure it will be needed though, maybe it could be implemented without "supporting" specific formats, don't know...

Re:WebM

[CharlyFoxtrot]

That's in the context of a particular piece of hardware which happens to produce an H.264 stream. The Skype blog post cited by Wikipedia doesn't say anything about H.264 being used preferentially for full high definition video calls and doesn't imply that a web cam which produces a full high definition VP8 stream wouldn't be supported. You're reading too much into it.

Hrm, I was relying on that wikipedia entry for my info so I'll concede that that I may be wrong on that point. It doesn't change the fact however that Skype does now support h.264 and webcams are implementing h.264 in hardware in order to prevent burdening the CPU like the other codecs do. Further more it seems Skype had to go h.264 in order to support a variety of portable and embedded devices :

"Skype’s decision to adopt H.264 was made because it has become the de facto codec for video delivery across a wide range of devices. Due to hardware acceleration built into low-powered devices such as TVs, Blu-ray players and mobile handsets, video publishers have increasingly turned to H.264 for video playback."

Re:webm

[aaaaaaargh!]

Which is a load of bullshit.

Honi soit qui mal y pense? Perhaps you are not fully aware of the fact that MPEG-LA are waiting now until H.264 is fully adopted and has "won" the race, and only afterwards start suing other companies and software makers?

The patents are valid until 2027 and the licensing terms are renewed every 5 years...

Re:WebM

[Captain Hook]

the format war is more about licensing than it is about implementation, it doesn't matter whether the browser or the plugin decodes the stream.

Re:WebM

[TheRaven64]

cost-wise, VP8 uses more power for less quality.

You're talking about client costs, which are irrelevant because clients are not the people making the decision about what format to support. If you want to stream half-hour videos, you need to pay MPEG-LA for a license. You don't need to pay anything for WebM. That makes it cheaper. On the other hand, your site then may not be available to some devices, which may affect your revenue.

Re:WebM

[TheRaven64]

All the video I generate comes out of my devices in h.264

If you look in your device's manual, you will see some small print that says that you may not use this output for commercial purposes without buying an additional license from the MPEG-LA.

Re:WebM

[TheRaven64]

VP8 was sold commercially by On2 for years before it was bought by Google. During this time, there were no patent lawsuits against it. A part of the reason for that is that On2 (and now Google) owns patents covering VP8 that may well be infringed by H.264, so if someone does sue over VP8 then Google can start suing everyone who uses H.264, which would seriously damage the MPEG-LA's credibility (why bother buying a license from them, when you're going to need a license from Google too?).

Re:WebM

[TheRaven64]

Most 'H.264 hardware' is not really H.264 hardware. It doesn't take an H.264 bitstream and fill the frame buffer with video. It is a DSP that has certain instructions that are heavily optimised for implementing H.264 decoders and encoders. A lot of these are also, due to the similarity between the CODECs, good targets for VP8 decoders. In contrast, something like Dirac uses a very different set of algorithmic steps, so is much harder to support on existing hardware.

Re:WebM

[TheRaven64]

I think that's the most ridiculous straw man I've ever read on Slashdot. No piece of software or algorithm ever created has been tested in court and found not to infringe on anyone else's patents. At most, it can be tested in court and found not to infringe a specific set of patents. So far, in spite of the fact that the MPEG-LA started trying to create a pool of patents that VP8 infringed two years ago, no VP8 user or distributor has been involved in a patent lawsuit over VP8 and the MPEG-LA has not produced a single patent that VP8 is alleged to infringe.

Re:WebM

[Lennie]

No, I don't think you can do the HW acceleration for other formats easily, probably not at all.

And HW acceleration is important, because of battery life of many devices, laptops, mobiles, tablets.

Re:WebM

[Lennie]

What did you expect, Skype is now a Microsoft company.

Re:WebM

[quacking duck]

The cost of a purpose-built supercomputer is way more expensive and still technically superior in many ways over the best PC you can custom-build.

What you're talking about is *value*. The cheaper general-purpose PC is of more value (to you) than a supercomputer because you can actually do day-to-day things like run games, browse the internet, etc, while a supercomputer might only be able to do very specific tasks.

Re:WebM

[oreaq]

So, h.264 has been tested in court and found to not infringe on anyone else's patents then? Thought not...

Stop trolling.

Re:WebM

[residieu]

Patents are supposed to support the development and spread of new technologies. What GOOD are they if you can implement a technology on your own and have to sit and wonder if you've violated any patents?

Re:WebM

[cpu6502]

>>>WebM is objectively worse than h.264.

Exactly. WebM quality is like MPEG3 (if such a thing existed). Besides the h.264/MPG4 patent fees will expire soon. I don't see any reason to avoid H.264 (MPEG4) and standardize on an inferior-quality open source codec that is little better than MPEG2.

That would be like voluntarily choosing inferior NTSC-video instead of HD-video (and then being stuck with that choice for years and years). In just a few years the royalty fees will expire and H.264 will be just as open as any other codec.

Plus it's not as if Mozilla is supporting some evil corporation, but instead a standards organization. I say pick the Best even if that means a few years of payments.

Re:WebM

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Well yeah that was my point to start with. They, like a lot of big industry players, are IN the MPEG-LA patent pool so why wouldn't they use h.264 over some Google thing where Google refuses to indemnify against possible patent suits ? It benefits no one but Google and maybe a handful of Linux desktop partisans that amount to a rounding error in the global view.

Re:WebM

[KingMotley]

Skype has NO solutions for making HD (1080p) calls using WebM at all. None, as in not a single one at all.

Re:WebM

[smash]

So my options are: pay a license to MPEG-LA for royalties (presumably) on commercial gains made using h.264. Or, buy all new hardware, deal with larger file sizes and crappier quality to use WebM, whether or not I'm using it for commercial gain or not. I'll take option A thanks :)

Re:WebM

[smash]

If you read TFA, it is "h.264 BASELINE +". I.e., it does not even have any options to compete with the other better quality variants.

Re:webm

[Anonymous Coward]

Honi soit qui mal y pense? Perhaps you are not fully aware of the fact that MPEG-LA are waiting now until H.264 is fully adopted and has "won" the race, and only afterwards start suing other companies and software makers?

Please. MPEG-LA never flipped to suing everyone in sight to extract extortionate licensing fees for MPEG-2. That being a "MPEG-LA" codec which, in its day, "won" the race and was very widely adopted.

You (and so many other victims of /. groupthink) have this irrational belief that any entity which exists only to license patents must, by definition, be about patent trolling. You need to open your eyes and look at what MPEG-LA actually is. It is not the same kind of thing as a classic patent troll, because MPEG-LA doesn't actually own any patents! It's an agent delegated to serve as a one-stop shop for licensing all the patents involved in the codecs it covers, and to promote their use.

So to understand what (if any) nefarious plans there might be for the H.264 patent pool, you need to look at the companies which actually own the patents in the pool, and think about their motivations. Most H.264 patent holders make money by selling things which incorporate the codec, not by licensing their patents. The last thing any such company wants is a litigious licensing authority trying to run up the cost of using H.264, because they benefit far more from wider adoption of the codec they're using in their own HW or SW than they would by squeezing a few more bucks out of licensees.

For example, consider Apple. They only have a token single patent in the H.264 pool, but do you think they want it to be expensive to use H.264 so that it's less likely videos will be encoded with the codec family their devices support natively? Hell no. And most of the entities which have a lot more than 1 patent in the pool are also hardware companies.

Re:WebM

[TheRaven64]

You might change your mind after you look at the prices for a commercial H.264 license...

Re:WebM

[Goaway]

Apple holds a single patent on h.264 out of several hundred. It is also mostly insignificant and entirely unrelated to VP8.

Re:WebM

[Anonymous Coward]

How much of that list is owned by the same company?

Re:WebM

[smash]

h.264 came out before vp7/vp8, perhaps the reason On2 haven't been sued is because they weren't a big enough target for the big boys to bother with?

Re:WebM

[TheRaven64]

On2 had a fairly large presence in the professional video market with a large turnover. Any company with valid patents could have easily made a decent amount of money from a lawsuit. It's not like they were a tiny startup with half a dozen customers, they were a company that had been around since the '90s and was eventually bought for over a hundred million dollars.

What???

[lennier1]

A last remnant of sanity over at Mozilla? Guess there's something to those Armageddon rumors after all.

Re:What???

[mrmeval]

They crapped all over Firefox anyway might as well ladle more shit in. Such an ugly thing and I doubt it can be forked and fixed as bloated as it is.

Re:What???

[fast turtle]

I've never understood why in hell Mozilla couldn't use codecs that are installed on the damn system as it wouldn't be their asses on the line in a lawsuit. Simply put, the browser shouldn't provide any codecs, just a container that uses what's installed on the system itself and it has the benefit of eliminating coding efforts devoted to reinventing the damn wheel. That effort could be better spent fixing bugs and cleaning up their code and for those who don't have a particular codec, that's the price we pay for using FOSS if we're purists. Otherwise install the damn non-free package from Debian and don't worry about it.

Re:What???

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way to fix firefox as it is at present would be to rewrite it from scratch, but if anybody bothers to do this, they're better off just making an entirely new browser.

Re:What???

[Randle_Revar]

Indeed. I am disappointed, but not surprised a bit.

Those cowards at MoCo wouldn't know right from wrong if it walked up and slapped them in the face, and it has been that way for quite some time. Not to mention horrible UI ideas... if there are any sane people left there, they have been powerless for some time.

Re:What???

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly suspect there's a real hesitation to pass anything off to the OS for parsing for fear of security holes being found somewhere in the OS's codec system leading to Mozilla being dependent on another source (the OS manufacturer) to patch a major security issue.

Re:What???

[zoloto]

And the cycle of the Phoenix is complete.

Re:What???

[iluvcapra]

I've never understood why in hell Mozilla couldn't use codecs that are installed on the damn system as it wouldn't be their asses on the line in a lawsuit.

If you run our software, you can only use codecs that we allow. You see, it's called "Freedom."

It's really about pushing around users and making them pawns in Mozilla and Google's political games with the W3C and MPEG-LA.

Licensed video codecs...

[Anonymous Coward]

A good way to alienate half of the windows users in the world.

Windows XP

[Billly Gates]

It looks like one of the technical (not political) arguments agaisn't h.264 is it is not supported on XP. Firefox could make h2.64 on newer versions of Windows, but that would create issues as web developers who test it on their Windows 7 boxes with FF will look fine, but their users with XP wont be able to see anything.

As someone learning web development, I am sick and tired of supporting old versions of IE on XP and it would just die already if people stopped supporting it. ... political wise it is a shame h.264 is patented and licensed. It is the only stumbling block on a political basis

Re:Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how this is a problem. All recent versions of Windows support h.264 out of the box. For people on older versions, they can install ffdshow.

Of course if you want to do it right, you'll just buy CoreAVC, since it is by far the best h.264 codec and well worth the $13 if you do a lot of encoding or watch a lot of h.264 content.

Re:Windows XP

[fusiongyro]

The counter-techincal argument is that those users already don't get h.264 on XP. So what's the difference between not having it because the browser doesn't let you use the system libraries and not having it because there are no system libraries? As presented, the difference appears to be that you aren't really getting the same browser on different OSes if there are dependencies on your OS and OS version.

I think the technical retort there doesn't hold a lot of water. After all, your OS probably came with a browser that isn't Mozilla-based which will gladly use native libraries for this kind of thing. Moreover, whether or not they decide to do this, the amount of work developers have to do to support the ridiculous WebM format alongside H.264 isn't going to change: you'll still have to have your content encoded twice and you'll still have to sniff out which version to show.

I think if you frame the argument as "why aren't we doing this?" instead of "why should we do this?" it becomes a lot more clear which course of action is the right one: the one that means a better experience for your users, which means better OS and hardware integration and better battery life when using your browser. Users plural may care about consistency, but a single user is much more interested in features and performance.

Re:Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

People still on XP can move to Win7. End of problem.

I can't imagine why anyone still clinks to old, slow, clunky, archaic, insecure XP except on the oldest of obsolete hardware... and why would THOSE peopel be using the latest versions of FF anyway?

Re:Windows XP

[Sarten-X]

Because I'm not really happy about having to re-learn the latest One True Way that Microsoft chooses to support this time around. I do have a Win7 Box (for education, mostly), and I have yet to get it properly sharing it's printer with my Linux and OS X laptops. This used to use SMB, but now it's the HomeGroup thing. I've spent 10 years learning the last One True Way, and all for naught. I know that any method still supported in Win7 is likely to be dropped by 8, so why bother?

Re:Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine why anyone still clinks to old, slow, clunky, archaic, insecure XP except on the oldest of obsolete hardware... and why would THOSE peopel be using the latest versions of FF anyway?

Because XP came on their (still working great) PCs, and the latest versions of Firefox, free as in speech and beer, work great on it.
Don't look at me--I use Konqueror, on a week-old computer.

Re:Windows XP

[Chakra5]

As someone learning web development, I am sick and tired of supporting old versions of IE on **** and it would just die already if people stopped supporting it. ...

LOL...the more things change....

Re:Windows XP

[viperidaenz]

Good luck after April 8, 2014. No more security fixes for XP. Windows 7 has extended support till Jan 14, 2020.

Re:Windows XP

[icebraining]

you'll still have to sniff out which version to show

Just wanted to point out that this isn't true: they can just add two <source> elements and the browser will choose whatever it supports.

Re:Windows XP

[DeathFromSomewhere]

It took you ten years to learn how to share a printer over SMB? WTF?

Re:Windows XP

[smash]

I would bet dollars to donuts that 85% plus of Windows XP installations in 2012 have h.264 codecs installed. Those who don't, don't watch video.

Re:Windows XP

[shutdown -p now]

This used to use SMB, but now it's the HomeGroup thing.

You don't have to add your Win7 PC to a homegroup. And if you don't do that, file and printer sharing works exactly the same as it did before.

Re:Windows XP

[smash]

But firefox doesn't work great on it, as it doesn't support h.264.

Re:Windows XP

[fusiongyro]

That makes the technical argument even weaker.

Re:Windows XP

[smash]

Maybe it's aunt tilly...

Re:Windows XP

[ledow]

Damn. Only another TWO WHOLE YEARS of support then. That's about 1 laptop or half-a-desktop lifetime for me.

Re:Windows XP

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how this is a problem. All recent versions of Windows support h.264 out of the box. For people on older versions, they can install ffdshow.

Shutting your eyes, clasping your hands over the ears any yelling "Nanana can't hear you!" is not going to help. Reality is, an operating system that is still installed on hundreds of millions of computers doesn't support h.264, it's moving very slowly, and you have to take this into account in your argumentation.

Of course if you want to do it right, you'll just buy CoreAVC, since it is by far the best h.264 codec and well worth the $13 if you do a lot of encoding or watch a lot of h.264 content.

Paying money just for the ability to watch some video I receive randomly from somewhere? Are you a crazy person? Thats going into the same direction as paying per view (which the MAFIAA would love to implement)... and it's certainly not your place to tell people what their money is "well worth", it doesn't matter if it costs $13 or $0.01, this financial barrier must go away.

Re:Windows XP

[Merk42]

Then no browser works great, since Browser X is missing Feature Y, that Browser Z has.

Re:Windows XP

[Lennie]

By that time Wine should support all currently running software for Windows XP ;-)

Re:Windows XP

[viperidaenz]

yeah, it'll be the year of the linux desktop

Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Tumbleweed]

If the purpose of Mozilla is to provide high-quality, standards-compliant products, then this is the smart move. If the purpose is to advocate for all things open source, then this is a bad move. The project is made up of people from both those camps, so there is going to be much gnashing of teeth over this, and the mandate from on high without discussing it isn't going to make it any more pleasant.

Nevertheless, Google's lack of commitment to removing h.264 from Chrome doesn't help. Maybe Google could buy MPEG-LA and end this nonsense once and for all?

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

The purpose it to make a web browser. No more no less. Preferably one people will actually use.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[gnick]

The purpose it to make a web browser. No more no less. Preferably one people will actually use.

Maybe that's what you want the purpose to be, but the reality is that for many of its developers (and users), Mozilla is about half browser and half "damn the man" movement demanding that everything be open. We'll see who wins. My guess is that the top echelons will just ignore the "movement" people and keep going after the best market share using the rational that they're giving the user what he wants.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that's what the vast majority of the people want the purpose to be, but the reality is that an insignificant portion of loud mouthed geeks screaming at the top of their lungs trying to make their insignificant lives meaning full, Mozilla is about half browser and half "damn the man" movement demanding that everything be open.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[larry bagina]

MPEG-LA is the SCO of h.264. SCO collected Unix license fees, but the actual copyrights were owned by Novell. Just like the actual h.264 copyrights are owned by Apple, Microsoft, and dozens (hundreds?) of other companies.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[BZ]

No, the purpose is a free and open web and has been all along. Which is why Mozilla is doing various non-browser things (opposition to SOPA/PIPA, the Do-Not-Track header, B2G, BrowserID, etc, etc).

It just happened that while there was a browser monopoly the most important thing standing in the way of an open web was the existence of the browser monopoly, and the best way to fight it was to create a better browser.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[rjstanford]

If the purpose is to advocate for all things open source, then this is a bad move.

This is almost as silly as saying that, to advocate for open source, Linux kernels should refuse to run closed-source software.

More reasonably, consider that all modern operating systems provide a codec library. Firefox is one of the very few products that provides its own, out-of-sync one. Its a throwback to the times when every program used to include its own graphics, sound, and printer drivers. We moved away from those times for a very good reason.

If the Mozilla Foundation wants to make sure that all Firefox users can view at least the same subset of videos, they could always include and install a variety of freely licensed video codecs into the O/S store, and have that as a default part of the Firefox installation scripts. Of course, then the users' experience might be better in non-Firefox products also...

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[thegarbz]

The question is not what they want it to be but what the people want from them. If they start moving the browser in the "damn the man" direction then they'll lose their core user base, common people.

I personally could not care less what format a video on the internet is, but damn any browser which won't play it.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because nobody uses h.264.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[westlake]

Maybe Google could buy MPEG-LA and end this nonsense once and for all?

MPEG LA manages patent pools.

The AVC/H.264 pool alone represents 29 licensors ---

most of them global industrial giants with no compelling reason to dance to Google's tune.

Here is a small sampling:

Cisco
Fujitsu
HP
Hitachi
NTT
Philips
Mitsubishi
Samsung
Sony
Ericsson
Toshiba

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[viperidaenz]

Are you confusing copyrights with patents?

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Zenin]

"Its a throwback to the times when every program used to include its own graphics, sound, and printer drivers. We moved away from those times for a very good reason."

There's a reason why VLC can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet. And it sure as hell isn't because they're leveraging whatever maze of codec hell happens to be lying around a user's system.

System codecs were a nice idea in theory that never delivered in practice. Too many bad codecs included with every random software application that all register themselves to try and be the first priority codec for every format for the entire system... Did I mention there's no sane way for users to adjust codec priority order? The best of tools are 3rd party and at best can be described as incredibly cryptic. And they each are trying to reinvent that wheel because the ones actually shipped with the base OS are themselves, bad.

Mozilla using system codes would increase crash reports 100 fold overnight, as well as security breaches, 99.9% of which would have nothing to do with Mozilla but damned if the users know or care about the distinction, and there wouldn't be a damned thing Mozilla could do to fix it if they wanted to.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[SeaFox]

MPEG-LA is the SCO of h.264. SCO collected Unix license fees, but the actual copyrights were owned by Novell. Just like the actual h.264 copyrights are owned by Apple, Microsoft, and dozens (hundreds?) of other companies.

Um, except MPEG-LA is actually assigned the duty of licensing the patents and collecting the royalties by the holders. SCO was just a company that liked to claim it owned something it didn't, to try and get money for it, in effect stealing the royalties from the legitimate rights holder.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the purpose is a free and open web and has been all along. Which is why Mozilla is doing various non-browser things (opposition to SOPA/PIPA, the Do-Not-Track header, B2G, BrowserID, etc, etc).

It just happened that while there was a browser monopoly the most important thing standing in the way of an open web was the existence of the browser monopoly, and the best way to fight it was to create a better browser.

If they concentrated on making a good browser instead of all the other bullshit nobody cares about, than maybe their browser will stop losing users.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[shutdown -p now]

That's a load of nonsense, starting with "H.264 copyrights". It's a patent issue, not a copyright issue.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[shutdown -p now]

Mozilla using system codes would increase crash reports 100 fold overnight

It will if they use any random codec that is requested and happens to be installed. An alternative model is to do what IE9+ does with respect to WebM - it does not use third-party codecs in general, but Google's WebM implementation is specifically whitelisted and will be used if installed. Firefox can similarly whitelist Microsoft's H.264 implementation on Win7 and Apple's one on OS X (and whatever else is out there on mobile platforms).

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

My primary reason for using Firefox (well, Iceweasel) is the fact that it is FOSS. If that changes of course, I'm gone (probably to Chromium). If it remains FOSS and simply passes the buck of h.264 to another program that's fine too; indeed, it's the way it should be in my opinion.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, most people who understand both think that h.264 is more important for the web than Firefox and, if forced to choose, will abandon the latter. I couldn't disagree more but I am in a very small minority.

Also, on the whole freedom scale (if there is such a thing), h.264 is better than Java (partly because the language is actively developed and partly because languages need to be held to higher standards than video codecs) and both are better than Flash. Having Java or Flash built into the framework of Firefox would be horrid but providing handles for third-party solutions is a solid approach.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[jonwil]

You cant "buy" MPEGLA.
The patents that are part of the H.264 patent pool are held by a diverse range of entities including Apple, Microsoft, LG, Phillips, Cisco, Columbia University, Daewoo Electronics, Dolby, Fraunhofer, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Randle_Revar]

>personally could not care less what format a video on the internet is

That is because you lack insight

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[flimflammer]

If that was truly the case then there would not be so much internal struggle over this issue. h.264 would be implemented and we could all move on with our lives.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[flimflammer]

Who the hell was ignorant enough to actually mod this up?

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

You're in crack if you think VLC is anywhere near the best media player. KMPlayer, PotPlayer and SPlayer all put it to absolute shame.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

So Mozilla should not use VLC as a backend, It should compile VCL source into itself.

Why don't I like this idea ...

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I don't use FireFox.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[tlhIngan]

Maybe Google could buy MPEG-LA and end this nonsense once and for all?

Well, you can't really buy MPEG-LA. They just offer a license of the patents in h.264 depending on use (consumer amateur use, professional use, etc).

You are, however, free to NOT use MPEG-LA and implement your own h.264 stuff. You just go and license each patent individually from every company. Of course, the general time and cost of doing so is rather prohibitive since you're going to be dealing with dozens of companies and hundreds of patents and individual terms and conditions on the use of each one. It's why MPEG-LA exists - so everyone who wants to use those standards can go to one place, and license them all at once under FRAND type rules (very handy if you're a competitor - the MPEG-LA will license to you, but the individual company may refuse).

An alternative is like the 3G stuff, where everyone who wants to make a phone has to go every company and license patents seperately. The only rule governing it is that all patents must be licensed under FRAND rules, but you have to go to each company and license them. At least though, the various organizations are enforcing FRAND-ness.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[smash]

The reason VLC plays anything is due to the work that has gone into it, not specifically because it is a monolithic blob of software.

If they wrote and released codecs as seperate DLLs/shared libraries, we'd still be able to play just as much content using said shared libraries.

Or perhaps you'd rather we go back to the bad old days, when every game, etc had to have specific support for your video card and specific support for your sound card (and which broke in rather annoying ways if you had something technically far better but not able to emulate say, SB-Pro hardware perfectly - eg a GUS or PAS16, etc), rather than being able to use whatever future hardware you may purchase via a standardized driver framework.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[thegarbz]

It's not that I lack insight. It's that I as the end user could not care providing:
1) It works well.
2) It doesn't cost any extra.

Insight is not required for general purpose computer use, and nor should it be. As a consumer I should not need to care what format a video is. Taking it one step further I should not even need to KNOW what format a video is. I should simply be able to go to youtube and watch a video, bonus if there's a high quality button somewhere.

And my lack of insight shouldn't speak for or against h264. I personally wouldn't care if it's WebM or any other format either providing it follows the two important criteria listed above.

Developers may care, they may have the insight, and if they stake a stand which in someway breaks the important criteria above they may find their project is not quite as popular as it could be.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

FFdshow delivers just fine, and DirectShow's DXVA2+EVR path is nice & fast on lower-end machines with hardware decoding. I couldn't say about other platforms though, but GStreamer is supposed to be sorta like DShow, so unless it fails at the design, it should be able to deliver just as well.

About the crashes, DirectShow works on custom graphs that you can build on your own, and having a whilelist system of "trusted" codecs wouldn't be that complex.
If you look at MPC Home Cinema, it provides internal codecs for most things, but I choose to replace the mpeg2/4/h264 decoding with ffdshow, and I enable some filters in it when the vids come from SD sources.

Note how they are talking about h264 specifically, not just "any codec". That means they can keep a very short list of known working codecs.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[SeaFox]

There's a reason why VLC can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet.

LMAO. The only thing VLC can do reliably is play back crappy AVI files.

Until the recent version 2.0 VLC hasn't been able to play any h264 files of HD resolution without macroblocking on sudden scene changes or scrubs, it didn't supported ordered chapter MKVs (and the support that's there now is half-baked), resource usage was higher than ffdshow-based playback apps, and picture quality wasn't as good.

There's a reason VLC has been considered a joke in the fansubbing world for awhile now.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[aaaaaaargh!]

Maybe Google could buy MPEG-LA and end this nonsense once and for all?

They should buy MPEG-LA and then sack all of them. That would be great...

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Would perhaps a DoS attack work by plastering them with lawsuits? You know, fight fire with fire and such?

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[del_diablo]

Somebody has not tried VLC in a long time then.
Happy camping since 0.8, and VLC is still good. The only bad thing is that it can frameskip.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Lennie]

"If the purpose is to advocate for all things open source"

Actually, I think the purpose is open, not open source. Open standards, that also means without royalties.

Open source is "just" the development model.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Lennie]

Which means no Windows XP support, nice.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Lennie]

As far as I know frameskip is an option you can turn off.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

install k-lite codecpack, there you can configure with codec is used for which format.... It was a lot better than vlc before vlc 2.0, I haven't testet it anymore after vlc 2.0 came out...

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[shutdown -p now]

There's no H.264 support out of the box on XP, so it's a given anyway - since there's no license Mozilla can purchase while still remaining FOSS. But that's a licensing issue, not a stability/security issue.

Of course, they could also whitelist one particular implementation on XP.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[SeaFox]

Try again.

Been following VLC since version 0.86 at least.

No styled subtitle support until after 0.90, a feature other players had for years already.
Version 1.0 was an improvement in playback, but still wasn't nearly as good as MPC-HC.
Lots of regressions on h264 playback in the .0.x releases after that. I could play 1080p in ffdshow-based players, but VLC couldn't even get 720p smoothly.

New 2.0 version is MUCH better, still doesn't handle order chapters right. There's a noticeable pause in the breaks between the linked segments and the "font database" updates (WTF is that, anyway. No other player seems to need to catalog my fonts before starting playback).. Ordered chapters are by definition supposed to be seamless. I shouldn't be able to tell when one segment ends and another begins.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[EdZ]

There's a reason why VLC [videolan.org] can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet.

More reliably, maybe, but better? Hell no! VLC still chokes on properly deinterlacing DVDs, let alone proper audio timing, display filtering (macroblocks ahoy!), etc. VLC can play most things, often even acceptably, but it rarely does it very well.

Too many bad codecs included with every random software application that all register themselves to try and be the first priority codec for every format for the entire system.

I've never had a CODEC installed that I didn't install myself. Of course, if you have problems keeping unwanted CODECs out then you're almost certainly already infested with various malware causing all sorts of problems.

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about PING

Re:Defining the purpose of Mozilla

[Jonner]

The issue is much bigger than Open Source development. The most fundamental issue is that it requires payment of royalties to implement what are called open standards. This is more of a problem for an Open Source project than for many proprietary ones, but it can be an unreasonable burden on them too. This is why Opera has been a very vocal supporter of unencumbered alternatives to MPEG standards despite being a totally proprietary software developer.

Shooting themselve in the leg.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Because they ran out of foot to shoot.
Good grief, seems there can't be a single good article about Mozilla as of late.

Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[gQuigs]

I thought we were going in the other direction. You know the one were we don't have to pay a patent fee for online video.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Billly Gates]

Or pay $$$ for proprietary tools for developing websites.

One of the reasons I hated flash was the web was no longer open. 10 years ago you could use Linux to develop web pages because it had cool xml, php, database and other tools. Then flash and Adobe came around and turned it into a win32 and to a much lesser extent mac platform.

All the good candidates with the right skills had these $2,000 tools as HR check listed flash, flex, dreamweaver, illustrator, etc.

I view h.264 as another tie in to expensive tools that force you to pirate and not update your own pc just be job competitive. That is against the spirit of the web. No free tool can exist because h.264 is licensed and proprietary.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[TD-Linux]

You don't. The vast majority of systems today already include a decoder, you don't need to include one in the web browser. This actually makes a lot of sense. What business does the web browser have decoding the video? If you offload it to the system, it'll often be done by dedicated hardware that's a lot faster and consumes a lot less power.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[dreemernj]

I remember it being announced that Chrome was dropping support for H264. I only remember because a month later Microsoft released a plugin to add support back to Chrome on Windows and I thought that was hilarious. I don't recall if they ever actually dropped support though. I mainly use Opera, which has never had H264 natively anyway so I've mostly ignored the arguments.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[BZ]

Google promised they'd drop H.264 in Chrome... and then never did. Recent queries about the state of that promise are met with curious silence.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I have some bad news for you: if you own a smart phone you already have paid because it contains a H.264 hardware decoder that's licensed. Now what's wrong with Mozilla using that existing hardware to get some decent performance instead of using an outside codec that will lead to lousy performance and worse battery life on the meagre content that's available to it ?

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Pentium100]

You can still use WebM, but it will only be supported on some browsers. Like it is now. Also, not all countries recognize software patents, so h.264 is free to use in them.
Also, the vast majority of hardware (camcorders, phones etc) supports h.264 but not WebM, so if you want to put a video that you recorded on your web site, you have to transcode it to WebM (and have a h.264 decioder).
Even DVB-T in my country uses h.264.

You want to break that compatibility (and make it impossible for me to watch online videos on my UMPC that has a slow CPU and GMA500 only supports h.264), make people buy new devices to just support a codec that only matters to the minority. Can you find a clamshell UMPC (max 4.8" screen) that has a x86 CPU and either has hardware WebM support or a CPU that is fast enough to do it in software?

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[TD-Linux]

I view h.264 as another tie in to expensive tools that force you to pirate and not update your own pc just be job competitive. That is against the spirit of the web. No free tool can exist because h.264 is licensed and proprietary.

The hell kind of reasoning is that? Have you ever actually tried creating a webpage? H.264 is not proprietary. The only thing that even touches H.264 is your video encoder. You probably already have one, and if not, there are plenty of good ones out there that you can use.

What is H.264 forcing you to pirate, exactly? How is H.264 preventing you from updating your PC? Why can no free tools exist? Have you read the actual license on MPEG-LA's website?

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[beelsebob]

Better yet, it'll allow for faster evolution of what video formats are used online... When a new MPEG5 or WebM2 format becomes immensely popular amongst implementers, suddenly we'll all magically be able to use it on t'internet too.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[slew]

No free tool can exist because h.264 is licensed and proprietary.

IANAL, but as far as I can tell, this statement is misleading.

First of all, almost all codecs are proprietary and licensed (including WebM), so you really need to look at the terms of the license to compare them.

Here's the WebM license.

Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of this implementation of VP8, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by this implementation of VP8. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of this implementation. If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

Basically, free unless you or anyone you know sue anyone. In which case you don't get a license (the time-bomb provision).
The H.264 license is of course longer, but here is a brief summary of the relavent terms...

For (a) (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = “unit”), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one Legal Entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15....
In the case of Internet Broadcast AVC Video (AVC Video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an End User for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither Title-by-Title nor Subscription), there will be no royalty for the life of the License.

So although technical no free tool can exist (unless it was somehow capped at 100,000 units per year), a tool costing .20 cents or less is certainly possible, so I don't think "expensive" is really the right adjective to apply to it.

Basically, you don't have to pay anything at less than 100,000 units per year, and there's an upper cap on the amount you have to pay and you don't have a timebomb where if one of your customers decides to go sue crazy, it destroys your buisness. If you were a business person, which one would you pick? Of course not everyone is a business person, but as a freelance website developer, perhaps there is some sympathy with some business folk...

On the other hand the actual existance of "free" h.264 tools like x264, seems to disprove that fact that "no free tool can exist" (even if you debate the legality of x264, it's hard to debate its existance)...

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Anonymous Coward]

h264 is just a video codec. by itself it is NOT a replacement for flash, unless all you ever do with flash is play video. in which case, in html5 you can specify multiple formats of the same clip in the same tag. so browsers supporting h264 won't stop you from making web pages... what will stop you, however, is if you're a complete friggin moron who doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I believe that no internet standards should have patents hampering them, there is an easy way to have your cake and eat it too.

The solution, rather than making the patents a certain $$$ value why not make them a percentage of the sale price.

For example if the h264 patents are worth 1% of the sale price then a $100 product this would make $1 to the patent holder, while free/open source software / would have to pay 1% of $0 which they should be able to cover. If the free/open source project was covered web advertising the patent holder could maybe get a slice of that.

Why this obviously wouldn't work in all scenarios i believe it is a must for any internet "standard".

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[icebraining]

What the FUD? You don't lose your WebM patent grant just because one of you customers decides to sue someone.

As it says right there, you only lose if the people suing is one of:

• You
• An agent representing you
• An exclusive licensee of your patents

A costumer is none of those. There's no "timebomb", that's plain false.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[icebraining]

And we shall return to the 90s, when each video website required a different codec.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[SiMac]

Google bought Motorola Mobility. Now instead of being unhappy that they have to pay a patent fee for online video, they stand to make a boatload of money off of Motorola's H.264 patents and/or use these patents to settle other patent lawsuits. Is it much of a surprise that they haven't dropped H.264 support in Chrome?

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason it doesn't exist is because idiots like you keep buying using what has existed rather than adopt better newer freedom friendly formats. You have no problem buying an overpriced piece of shit Mac, but then won't buy an good replacement just because your older solution was slightly better in some regards. Nahh. Not good enough. I'd rather not use that hardware/software than subject myself a hellish security ridden system. I don't use Mac or Microsoft Windows for a reason. Both are problematic as hell. They don't work with older hardware/software. You are forced to shell out constantly for upgrades which aren't even faster/better. I'm not cheap. I've spent $2,275 on freedom friendly laptops (although not every one cost that much- I've also spent significantly less) and donate a considerable amount to free software projects / buy freedom friendly products.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Pentium100]

I do not have any Apple product.

I use what works. I do not care about the ideology. I use Firefox because it is a good browser and supports the addons I like. I do not care about the openness of the source. I use Windows because it is a good OS and runs the software that I like (including games). I also use Linux because it is good OS for a server that does not need to run any Windows-only software.

I agree that modern versions of Linux run better on older hardware (assuming you can manage to get the GUI to work on the old video card) than modern versions of Windows, but the solution to that is to use an older version of Windows.

I have a Viliv N5 UMPC. It has Intel GMA500 IGP that supports hardware decoding of h.264 and with CoreAVC I can watch a 720p video file with no problems. WebM would be decoded in software so 720p would not work.
Maybe you know of a UMPC (with keyboard, max 4.8" screen) that is made now (not in 5 years) that has x86 CPU (I want it to run Windows-only software) and hardware decoding of WebM? Oh wait, even if there was a WebM codec that used hardware acceleration (CUDA or whatever) Firefox wouldn't use it because it has its own, "better" codec.
How about a hardware DVD/Bluray player that can decode WebM so I can play the videos I downloaded from youtube or whatever without spending time transcoding?

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Anonymous Coward]

H.264 is not proprietary.

Give it a rest. Can you use it freely without permission? No? Then it's proprietary. End of story.

The fact that it owned by a cartel rather than a single company is irrelevant.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the x264 licensing FAQ:

"You will need to get a separate patent license from MPEGLA, see: http://www.mpegla.com for more info."

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[crawling_chaos]

You mean you believed that "don't be evil" shit? How cute.

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Then flash and Adobe came around and turned it into a win32 and to a much lesser extent mac platform.

No way. Flash has *always* been a total piece of crap that serious webdesigners made fun of. I've *never* had Flash installed in any browser and I didn't miss a single piece of "teh Internet" because of that. I've always refused to develop websites in Flash and I've always considered my "friends" using Flash to be clueless amateurs.

Now of course Flash is "really" dead. But honestly it never has been an issue: the Web and Web development has *never* been a win32/Mac thinggy. A lot of very serious and very succesful webapps have been designed using non flash-technologies (LAMP stacks comes to mind, but so does webapps developped in Java, like FedEx, etc.).

I've always been able to use Linux and Linux-only to develop websites. Flash has never been a concern.

The only thing Flash has always been is a mediocre piece of excrement for amateurs...

Re:Wasn't Chrome supposed to drop H264 support!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because they realised the majority of their user base actually want H.264. Dropping it would force many windows users back to IE and Mac users to Safari. Chrome's support for H.264 was the only reason I switched as it meant my Linux desktop was no longer a second class citizen when viewing online video content. Firefox is not even a contender anymore.

The patent fees will expire soon.

[cpu6502]

I don't see any reason to avoid H.264 (MPEG4) and standardize on an inferior-quality open source codec that is little better than MPEG2. That would be like voluntarily choosing inferior NTSC-video instead of HD-video (and then being stuck with that choice for years and years).

In just a few years the royalty fees will expire and H.264 will be just as open as any other codec. Plus it's not as if Mozilla is supporting some evil corporation, but instead a standards organization. I say pick the Best even if that means a few years of payments.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[betterunixthanunix]

I say pick the Best even if that means a few years of payments.

Except that the standards will be updated in a few years to support the next patent-encumbered format. You are missing the broader picture here: fighting against math^H^H^H^Hsoftware patents.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Billly Gates]

Weren't patents extended for 30 years now?

Still it is copyrighted and the requirements to use mean your os and browser must support DRM. The issue mentioned on Ars Technica, is that XP does not support h.264 because its GDI does not support DRM like Vista/7 due with HDMI.

XP needs to die and is very stale.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno where you got that the h.264 patents expire any time soon. The first google link when searching for this suggests that this will happen in 2025 (13 years from now).

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[_xeno_]

In just a few years the royalty fees will expire and H.264 will be just as open as any other codec.

How few is a few? If I'm not mistaken, the patents on H.264 date back to the 2000s, and will still be enforceable for another 10 years or more. Which I guess is "a few years" in the grand scheme of things, but given the pace of Firefox version numbers, we're looking at Firefox 50.0 at least before H.264 is patent-free.

And that's just in the US. I have no idea how long the various parts of it are patented in other countries.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[TD-Linux]

H.264 is not copyrighted. It is patented.

DRM has nothing to do with it. XP does not include a software H.264 decoder because it didn't exist at the time XP was released.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[tlhIngan]

Still it is copyrighted and the requirements to use mean your os and browser must support DRM. The issue mentioned on Ars Technica, is that XP does not support h.264 because its GDI does not support DRM like Vista/7 due with HDMI.

XP supports h.264 just fine. You can get lots of h.264 decoders and encoders for XP. It's just that Microsoft hasn't extended licensing of h.264 to XP (it costs money).

The DRM thing is a non-issue. "Protected Path" is a DRM technology for use in specific use cases - e.g., playing back Blu-Ray movies, where a software playback app MUST use measures to protect the stream. So if you want to play back Blu-Ray, you need Vista or Win7.

Heck, XP plays h.264 just fine - if you ever view YouTube videos in 720p or 1080p (and sometimes 480p) YouTube is sending you an h.264 stream.

h.264 has nothing to do with copyrights - it's just that the algorithm uses a lot of patented technologies and it's the patents that require paying royalties to use (you can make agreements with every patent holder, or just pay a flat fee to the MPEG-LA). The mateiral encoded in h.264 is copyrighted.

So an XP user has at least three ways to play back an h.264 video without spending a dime. First would be Flash player which includes h.264 support for videos. Second is iTunes/QuickTime which provides its own h.264 decoder for free. Third is to install VLC.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Suddenly_Dead]

This page has a list of H.264 patents. The last one expires in 2028, but from an extremely brief glance it doesn't look encoder-related. Last relevant one might be 2027; it has a 1215 day extension.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"Little better than MPEG-2"? Any hard data to corroborate that claim? I thought that MPEG-2 lags far behind both MPEG-4 AVC and WebM/VP8.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

In just a few years the royalty fees will expire and H.264 will be just as open as any other codec.

15 years is a "few"? 2027 for most of the patents to expire.

Plus it's not as if Mozilla is supporting some evil corporation, but instead a standards organization.

MPEG Private Corporate Licensing Agency For Extortion (MPEG-LA).
ISO MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group).

It is the only stumbling block on a political basis

I never realised that cash is "political". So, if I shout loudly enough someone will just dump a wad of money in my hand?
H.264 is supposed to RAND, that doesn't make it free. Per copy fees to be paid to a patent holder violates the GPL, if you need to work with GPL code then it's just plain illegal.

I don't see any reason to avoid H.264 (MPEG4) and standardize on an inferior-quality open source codec that is little better than MPEG2. That would be like voluntarily choosing inferior NTSC-video instead of HD-video (and then being stuck with that choice for years and years).

"Little better than MPEG2" is a pretty high standard, what format do you think DVDs use? They were around before MPEG4 was standardised. WebM is not the best format but that is not the same thing as being bad.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Last h.264 patent expires 2027

http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[hhedeshian]

Giving up mod powers for this:
How few? In 2027.
Summary: http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/
Patent break-down: http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists#H.264_patents
To quote the summary

H.264 is a newer video codec. The standard first came out in 2003, but continues to evolve. An automatically generated patent expiration list is available at H.264 Patent List based on the MPEG-LA patent list. The last expiration is US 7826532 on 29 nov 2027 ( note that 7835443 is divisional, but the automated program missed that). US 7826532 was first filed in 05 sep 2003 and has an impressive 1546 day extension. It will be a while before H.264 is patent free.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[cpu6502]

When I first heard of WebM I went-off and watched tons of videos, and to my eyes it looks like MPEG3 (if such a thing existed). I see no reason to choose an inferior standard that is blurry and filled with mosquitos (lossy artifacts). Choosing WebM would be as illogical as choosing MPEG2 or 1 to standardize upon. Those are old tech/low quality.

IMHO.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Pentium100]

First would be Flash player which includes h.264 support for videos. Second is iTunes/QuickTime which provides its own h.264 decoder for free. Third is to install VLC.

Fourth: use ffdshow. Then you'll be able to use your favorite media player that supports DirectShow to play back the video.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Pentium100]

H.264 is supposed to RAND, that doesn't make it free. Per copy fees to be paid to a patent holder violates the GPL, if you need to work with GPL code then it's just plain illegal.

That's why you use system codecs instead of putting the codecs (that probably don't even support DXVA, OpenCL or CUDA for hardware acceleration) in the browser.

"Little better than MPEG2" is a pretty high standard, what format do you think DVDs use? They were around before MPEG4 was standardised. WebM is not the best format but that is not the same thing as being bad.

And h.264 can put a 720p resolution movie in a DVD5.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, Theora is better than MPEG-2 in the web video space.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[shutdown -p now]

Except that the standards will be updated in a few years to support the next patent-encumbered format.

That is extremely unlikely. Once a standard gets entrenched, replacing it with something new and incompatible is very hard and takes a lot of time (see also: PNG vs GIF). Right now we're at the crossroads, sorta, because there's simply no standard codec specified in HTML5, and so they're basically fighting it out for the title of a de facto standard. H.264 seems to be winning so far, and if (once patents expire) it gets set in stone as part of HTML5, that's it for many years to come.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why you use system codecs instead of putting the codecs (that probably don't even support DXVA, OpenCL or CUDA for hardware acceleration) in the browser.

So... your solution to fragmentation in browser codecs is to deliberately cause fragmentation in browser codecs? The current problem is that not all browsers support all codecs (specifically H.264 being the sacred cow), your solution is to depend on an external uncontrolled codec source which may or may not include H.264? (XP doesn't have H.264, I'm not even sure Vista does. Win7 does. OS X probably does. Linux may or may not depending on if the distributor is being blatantly illegal or not).

You'll have to forgive my scepticism that this somehow solves anything at all.

And h.264 can put a 720p resolution movie in a DVD5.

And? So? H.264 is the current best format, so what? WebM is passable and free, technology masturbation is fine but we have other problems besides attaining absolute best visual quality here.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[evilviper]

I don't see any reason to avoid H.264 (MPEG4) and standardize on an inferior-quality open source codec that is little better than MPEG2.

WebM/VP8/VPx is only slightly lower quality than H.264 at worst.

That would be like voluntarily choosing inferior NTSC-video instead of HD-video (and then being stuck with that choice for years and years).

No, it would be like standardizing on a royalty free baseline, rather than one that needs to be licensed... just like the w3c and other standards bodies have insisted upon doing, forever.

In just a few years the royalty fees will expire and H.264 will be just as open as any other codec. Plus it's not as if Mozilla is supporting some evil corporation, but instead a standards organization.

MPEG-1 was standardized in 1991 based on technology developed in the late '80s... At that time, the WWW hadn't even been developed. GUI web browsers wouldn't exist for another couple years. MPEG-1 still isn't free of patents today (see: MP3).

In short, by the time all the patents on H.264 have expired, we likely WON'T HAVE WEB BROWSERS ANYMORE.

And finally, the MPEG gets none of the patent license fees you pay for H.264. They go directly to the huge corporations that attend the MPEG meetings and recomend inclusion of technologies they've patented, in whatever the newest standard will be, because they want the windfall of patent license fees from an MPEG standard.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Pentium100]

So... your solution to fragmentation in browser codecs is to deliberately cause fragmentation in browser codecs?

The difference is that I can download a h.264 codec and install it on my system. I cannot make Firefox (current version) show videos that are encoded in h.264 even though I have the codec in my system, so I can download the file and watch it using mpc-hc.

CCCP (ffdshow) is free, anybody can download it. Ffdsow also works on Linux.

It's the same as it is now. You install the browser, then Flash, then Java RE, then some addons for the browser (adblock etc). Why it becomes so bad to add one step and go download the codecs?

Actually, I would like that Firefox used system codecs even for the "free" WebM and Theora. That way, if somebody released a WebM codec that used hardware acceleration, I coudl install it and Firefox would use that instead of still decoding videos in software.
Also, Flash has its own h.264 codec and I dislike it. That codec does not support DXVA on Intel GMA500 IGP (some old version supports it, but the latest version does not), I would really like if Flash also used the system codec (CoreAVC) since then it would use DXVA and I could watch higher resolution videos on my UMPC.

A very long time ago software had internal drivers for hardware (video etc), but now the OS handles the drivers and in my opinion it is better. The same should be with codecs. After all, Firefox does not talk to the video card directly, so it should just pass the video to the OS and tell it to decode and show it.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[cpu6502]

>>>(Score:0, Flamebait)

I see the religious nuts (opensource fans) have struck again. Or maybe it's just slashdot "groupthink". If you don't fall into line and love Apple, or Google, or WebM, then you're attacked and modded into invisibility (censored).

I'm sorry but I think WebM video looks like ass, just like MPEG1 and 2 videos look like ass, and I'm not going to stand behind ass codecs. They are old and inferior. I want to choose the best most-advanced technology not inferior junk.

If open-source had a codec that looked or sounded as good as h.264 or AACplus (MPEG4) then I'd support that OSS codec, but they do not, so I will not.

Re:The patent fees will expire soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>(Score:0, Flamebait)

I see the religious nuts (opensource fans) have struck again. [...] I'm sorry but I think WebM video looks like ass.

Except that the post you are referring to was nothing but praise for H.264, and made no mention of webm. And when we calmly explain to you time and again why choosing H.264 in this particular instance is a bad idea, and you just ignore it and continue to spout the same praise of it.. well, ok, I guess Flamebait is an inappropriate mod. Troll would be more accurate.

ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[msobkow]

It only stands to reason that if you're using standard system APIs to access codecs that have been purchased or installed by the user/owner, then ALL of those codecs should be usable, not just the free ones.

What's the point of having a general purpose browser if you let it get polluted by political arguments about which codecs the USER installs? Using system codecs is not "polluting the code" -- it's letting the user decide.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[betterunixthanunix]

Using system codecs is not "polluting the code" -- it's letting the user decide.

It also creates problems for web developers, who are already burdened with supporting multiple incompatible browsers simultaneously.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Fastolfe]

I think the point is that content publishers would like to see a small set of standard/mandatory codecs, so that they don't have to keep a library of many different versions of their content, or go through the CPU expense of transcoding everything on demand. Think of YouTube's storage costs, for instance.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[J0nne]

Because they tried this before, with the <object> tag, which could support any possible codec (quicktime, realvideo, wmv, ...). This ended up being such a huge mess that web developers decided to just go with flash instead, because for all its failings, at least it worked on most computers (and you didn't need to deal with the ugly default controls media players insisted on at the time).

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that is a big 'ALL', complete with incompatibility.

Let's not go down the road we were doing before with 'the fun thing about standards is there are so many of them!'

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Pentium100]

Yes, they are so burdened right no too. Some users do not have Flash installed, some do not have Java Runtime, some do not have Silverlight. Some browsers may not even support Javascript. the developers have to take all this into account and provide functionality even if you don't have Flash, Java and Silverlight.

Oh, wait, they just tell the user to go donwnload the required plugin.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[watermark]

Some codecs (read H.264) are patent encumbered so require a royalty to be paid to use. Using any particular codec will encourage the proliferation of those formats on the web. H.264, unfortunately, has nearly become the standard due to it's wide use. This basically kills any dream of a free ($) operating system that could be made affordable to the poor, education, or developing nations.

Windows alone cost $100, a Raspberry Pi costs $35.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Rockoon]

It also creates problems for web developers

..and being a network administrator would be easier if every box in the universe ran the same version of the same operating system with the same hardware.

..and being an automobile mechanic would be easier if every car used the exact same identical parts as all other cars.


We should care that web developers have to do their job? They get compensated for doing their fucking job. They simply arent part of this equation. Of course web developers want an easier time of it. Duh. Next you'll tell us that the Pope is going to come out against a war.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[nonicknameavailable]

most people do not have silverlight and do not have any use for it

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[game kid]

Then let the user (or, if not, the browser) choose a separate player backend and player control panel, and recommend some default params (autostart, controls, ...) and some default DOM methods (play, stop, etc.) if the object has an audio/[name here] MIME type thinger. Not everyone will like the quality or controls of, say, Firefox's default audio player, so hook the desired player to the desired layout of buttons and go from there.

I'm a bit biased, though; I want the entirety of HTML5 to join Windows 8's Metro in a spectacular plane crash. Actually, not the associated script- and CSS-side stuff like Web Workers, Web Sockets, setImmediate, CSS animation...those seem useful, even crucial.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[viperidaenz]

Web developers decided to go with Flash instead of <object />? You do realise %lt;object /> is used to embed flash in to html pages? You could use >embed /< if you wanted to though, but thats not part of HTML4 so good luck with that.

The two are only slightly related anyway, so comparing them is rather stupid. Its more relevant to compare video with img. When you embed an image in a page you have to take into account the users browser can understand the image format. Old versions of IE didn't support PNG. Not so old versions of IE didn't support alpha channels in PNG. Slightly less older versions supported alpha channels but not semi-transparent values.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[shutdown -p now]

If you load any random codec from the system at the request of the web page, you're exposing those codecs to potentially malicious input - and quality of some of those can be pretty low, especially the more obscure and exotic stuff coming from various codec packs. This increases the attack surface of the browser manyfold - a web page can now attack the viewer by requesting some codec with a known exploit, and feeding it an appropriate video stream to cause remote code execution.

What can be done is whitelisting the specific codecs that are permitted to run when web pages request them. That's what IE9 does (it only allows H.264 - which is always there - and WebM, if installed).

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[msobkow]

When you use a system-installed codec, it's up to the USER to pay for that codec, not the developer of a third-party product that simply enables the use of the codecs installed on the system.

Do you think anyone paid for my copy of DiVX because they could use the codec in their movie player? Of course not! They only paid for the codecs they shipped with the player.

The same is true of audio codecs. The only exception I found was a Fraunhoffer MP3 codec that somehow tied itself to only be available to the application that installed it. Every other codec I've ever installed has been available to any program that supported the codec APIs. For an application like a web browser to block the use of user-installed codecs is asinine.

That's like saying "You can buy gas anywhere, but if you buy it from Shell, it won't work because you bought a Ford."

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on. I cannot remember the last time I was told to download a Java plugin, and I have literally never been told I need Silverlight for something. And the only time an average user will not have Flash installed is when they're using an iOS device.

So you only really have two scenarios to worry about: use Flash, and provide an iOS app to access your content. Job done.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[quacking duck]

The end user doesn't have to care, but just because supporting IE6 or IE7 (for example) might be part of a web developer's job, doesn't mean their griping about supporting those two steaming piles of shit browsers aren't legitimate, and they can try taking steps to improve things (like raising awareness of Firefox, back in the dark days of 95% IE6 market share).

That principle applies to any job.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Lennie]

The topic of this discussion is Mozilla. And Mozilla cares about webdevelopers.

That is the reason why the choose to support Theora and later WebM, they want webdevelopers to be able to use free tools instead of proprietary and per-per-use license encumbered.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Lennie]

And now Flash has been pronounced dead on mobile devices.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[Lennie]

Widespread use of a codec without alternatives forces people to buy a license even though the content may be free, doesn't it ?

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It also creates problems for web developers, who are already burdened with supporting multiple incompatible browsers simultaneously.

Except that serving a single stream in multiple formats based on, say, small variations in resource URLs is such a simple job that it shouldn't place any burden on web developers as such. This could be easily solved by a specialized stream server. If you make it configurable enough, you should be able to hook it into whatever web platform you're using, with little effort on the web developer's side. The ones having extra work would be the ops people, admins and such, not web developers. It actually sounds like a good idea for a FLOSS project - a server for automatic transcoding, sharding and streaming of all videos you drop into a watched directory.

Re:ANY native-supplied codec should be usable

[betterunixthanunix]

It actually sounds like a good idea for a FLOSS project - a server for automatic transcoding, sharding and streaming of all videos you drop into a watched directory.

Indeed, and I have often wondered if patent issues could be entirely avoided by simply placing the transcoding server in a country that does not respect mathematics^H^H^Hsoftware patents. Unfortunately, the issue here is not technology -- the technology allows Mozilla to just have an H.264 decoder built in to the browser -- but the minefield of patents that surround video codecs. If ever there was a case of innovation being blocked by software patents...

webm

[TheSimkin]

Webm is just as good as h.264 imho. That said, I see no reason why the browsers shouldn't use the decoding abilities of the OS they reside on. This just makes common sense? If I already have a license/ability to decode for h.264, why shouldn't I be able to use it in my browser?

VLC Plugin?

[rHBa]

It's available for all platforms, it's 'free', it decodes h264. What am I missing , honestly...

Re:VLC Plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is a US company and there are US laws that protect h264 decoding.

Re:VLC Plugin?

[viperidaenz]

They don't have to support h.264 decoding. They just need to support native codecs already licensed and installed on the system. Please explain how there are US laws preventing this.

Practical end result

[93 Escort Wagon]

This battle between open and proprietary standards hasn't resulted in people adopting open standards - it's just encouraged the continued use of Flash. Enough people use Firefox that its lack of h.264 support means sites stick with the lowest common denominator (BTW is Google actually going to ever follow through and remove h.264 support in Chrome?).

On a side note - it's annoying that Firefox is only considering this for their mobile browser, which is not a particularly widely used product. They really should do this in their standard product, if they do it at all.

Re:Practical end result

[_xeno_]

This battle between open and proprietary standards hasn't resulted in people adopting open standards - it's just encouraged the continued use of Flash.

I think that has more to do with <video> support sucking compared to Flash. Specifically, things like:

1. The ability to fullscreen a video in a single step.
2. The ability to skip ahead to a section of the video that hasn't downloaded yet.
3. The ability to seamlessly switch between different bitrates depending on connection speed.
4. The ability to seamlessly switch between different resolutions depending on connection speed.

I think of that list, the only one that works fairly reliably across browsers is #1. And even that's fairly recent - it used to be that if you provided your own playback controls, you lost the ability to fullscreen without making the user fullscreen the entire browser.

Flash and Silverlight do all of those. Well, sort of - I'm not sure how well Flash handles #4 based on YouTube, but I know that the NetFlix player handles all of those through Silverlight. Granted NetFlix also requires DRM, so they'll never be able to use HTML5.

Overall, though, this list should give you an idea why people still use Flash to stream video. It has more to do with the capabilities Flash provides that HTML5 does not.

Of course, there's also things like the lack of decent tools to encode WebM video...

Re:Practical end result

[93 Escort Wagon]

2. The ability to skip ahead to a section of the video that hasn't downloaded yet.

Hmm... maybe this works better on Windows; but on the Mac Flash absolutely sucks at this, while h.264 is seamless at it (in Safari and Chrome.

Seriously, if I try to scrub ahead in a long Flash video, the delay can be a minute before Flash will start playing from the new location.

Re:Practical end result

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its because you sucked too many trucker dicks to fund your meth habit? I just tried scrubbing on YouTube using Chrome/Mac and it loaded up in 5 seconds.

Re:Practical end result

[Anonymous Coward]

progressive yes, will need to wait, rtmp can jump ahead to any key frame, and in some cases , construct a key frame out of slices.

Re:Practical end result

[Lennie]

1. The ability to fullscreen a video in a single step.

is already solved in Firefox and Chrome.

3. The ability to seamlessly switch between different bitrates depending on connection speed.
4. The ability to seamlessly switch between different resolutions depending on connection speed.

I don't know how seamless this is, most systems, like YouTube seem to use a simple HTTP-download methode which doesn't support that.

They use simple HTTP because real streaming through corporate proxies and firewalls sucks.

Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[not already in use]

The death of FOSS is going to be the inability to adopt pragmatic solutions to problems, and instead trying to achieve some ideal solution that aligns with their fundamentally flawed ideology. RIP GPL, you've grown to old and stuck in your ways. The younger, better looking, not-as-cynical-and-angry bsd-style licenses are quickly replacing you.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Not to mention the fact they are incessantly trying to solve yesterday's problems. I guess it makes sense seeing as FOSS started as a re-implementation of existing tech in the first place, still it's a shame they haven't been able to outgrow their roots.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD license = We take your code and use it for free and we do not tell anyone about it and we do not have to tell you that we made some changes and bugfixes

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[arose]

The pragmatic solution to the dominance of IE6 was to use IE6, not to stubbornly work on the Netscape 5 code base until a Pheonix sprang from it.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[not already in use]

Your particular example isn't one of pragmatism, it was of necessity. Some people needed a modern browser on a non-Windows platform, or a browser that was more secure. Comparing this to the current H264 fiasco is apples and oranges. H264 is still technically superior to open alternatives. What they are trying to do is shove their ideology down their user's throats.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[Anonymous Coward]

The death of trolling on Slashdot is . . . oh, wait, it's not dead yet.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[arose]

Some people needed a modern browser on a non-Windows platform

Some people were being ideological about their OS yes.

What they are trying to do is shove their ideology down their user's throats.

The source is over there. Don't try to shove your decisions down the developers throats.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[inglorion_on_the_net]

The death of FOSS is going to be when people stop using it. Or, in the case at hand, refuse to start using it. WebM may or may not be as good as H.264 technically, but if we always dismissed every free solution on that basis, we would never have gotten GNU, or Linux, or Firefox, or KHTML/WebKit/Chrome, etc.

Which is not to say we should adopt every free project, inferior or superior, just because they're free, but we should recognize which ones have potential and run with them where this makes sense. That way, we will bring the next free success to fruition, rather than letting it wither.

The truth is, commercial interests are pushing the options that they expect to make them money, because that's what they are in business for. If we want open standards to succeed, we are going to have to put in effort. We're swimming against the tide of old boys networks and marketing. Having said that, history shows that the more open options often win in the long run, so, even though major forces oppose freedom, it's a battle that those who fight for freedom can win.

The question you will have to answer for yourself is: Would you rather push for open standards and a world in which everybody is free to participate, or are you happy with the shiny stuff that is pushed by the commercial powers who will limit freedom, and the new shiny stuff they will be replacing it with in a few years? Both have their merits, both will make the world a better place, and both will give you shiny new tech to play with, so, in my opinion, both answers are right. I do, however, prefer the former. Let's get the open tech now, and then make it shinier, rather than going with the shinier tech now and having the same status quo next year.

W.r.t. your appeal to pragmatism: that works both ways. Both H.264 and WebM are here now, so adopting either is a pragmatic choice. Going with the one that has is currently most widely supported (H.264) is a pragmatic choice. Going with the one (WebM) that doesn't put up barriers in the form of royalties that need to be paid is a pragmatic choice. If you pick one today (which would be the pragmatic way to move forward), and later find out you would rather have had the other, you can always change direction then. On the other hand, why pick one if you can have both? Certainly you can implement WebM everywhere. It's royalty-free, after all. And if the user installs codecs for H.264, or whatever other codec really, why not use them? I've always found the discussion about what codec to support in the browser rather silly. My answer: none. It's going to be obsolete in 10 years anyway. Let plugins handle it. As for mandating support for a format in the standard, I really only want to go with an open standard there. Let's not go force some royalty scheme on users of the standard - that wouldn't be pragmatic.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[shutdown -p now]

BSD license = We take your code and use it for free and we do not tell anyone about it

2-clause BSDL:

Copyright (c) ,
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[not already in use]

W.r.t. your appeal to pragmatism: that works both ways. Both H.264 and WebM are here now, so adopting either is a pragmatic choice.

Overall, you make good points, and I agree with you except the quote above, which is the meat and potatoes of the argument.

The reason adopting H264 is the pragmatic choice is because the vast majority of mobile devices have hardware support for encoding/decoding H264. How many people are going to adopt FireFox mobile if it can't decode H264 video? Software decoding WebM would not only be absurdly slow, but drain the battery extremely quickly. H264 has become a defacto standard because of its technical superiority. In order for some open standard to even begin to supplant it, it will need to be superior in some fashion, beyond just being free of patents.

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[Randle_Revar]

Phoenix was and is bad, compared to the real incarnation of Mozilla, currently named SeaMonkey

Re:Cmon FOSS, shave your neck

[arose]

Whether or not it's bad isn't the question, the pragmatic solution was to install Windows and use IE.

either way

[alienzed]

I'm sure it'll be implemented in Firefox 19, due to be released next week.

Re:either way

[NatasRevol]

Pretty soon the naming convention will have a timestamp built in.

The Firefox of right now:

Firefox2012.03.13.16.07.53

Re:either way

[MrKevvy]

Pfft... .53 is so last-second. Why can't you splitters update to .54 like the rest of us?

too bad google owns youtube

[FudRucker]

and adobe flash is going to be supported only in google chrome, leaving firefox on linux out in the cold, - anyone else see a conspiracy theory brewing in that niche

flash needs to be made obsolete!

Re:too bad google owns youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

flash needs to be made obsolete!

Or the flash platform needs to be open sourced or open spec'd like was done with PDF. There are things that flash is a better tool for (e.g. RIAs) than HTML5.

Re:too bad google owns youtube

[Lennie]

Actually, new features to be added to Flash will only be support on Google Chrome. The old plugin will still get security updates. Well, only the newer plugin-system currently only supported by Chrome. Other browsers could support the same plugin API.

But yes, it isn't pretty.

Hypocrits!

[pesc]

Mozilla already plays H264 video embedded in flash contents through an external flash plugin. Today.

So why would it be controversial to allow another plugin to do the same?

Re:Hypocrits!

[Yvan256]

Stop trying to make sense, the Firefox developers aren't listening!

Mozilla is becoming irrelevant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Realistically, Mozilla's only real "product" is Firefox. Thunderbird is a pretty minor email client these days, and Bugzilla isn't used as widely as it once was. The rest of Mozilla's software is virtually unknown and/or unused.

Now that Mozilla has decided to have Firefox look and behave almost exactly like Chrome, but without being as fast or memory-efficient as Chrome, there's little reason to use Firefox these days. If you want the Chrome-like experience, you may as well just use Chrome, rather than getting the inferior Chrome-like experience of Firefox.

I don't think it really matters what they do with regards to these codecs. As the market share of Firefox continues to drop, Mozilla as a whole will become irrelevant. When the majority of people are using Chrome, IE, Safari or Opera, the codecs that are or aren't supported by Firefox just won't be a factor at all.

Re:Mozilla is becoming irrelevant.

[viperidaenz]

bugs.eclipse.org still uses Bugzilla... Comparing that with what I have to work with - HP Quality Centre, its miles ahead.

Re:Mozilla is becoming irrelevant.

[nonicknameavailable]

Chrome is for those that loves to tell google what they are doing on the net and what they are downloading and where they are ..

Re:Mozilla is becoming irrelevant.

[theweatherelectric]

Now that Mozilla has decided to have Firefox look and behave almost exactly like Chrome, but without being as fast or memory-efficient as Chrome

This is correct. Firefox isn't as memory-efficient as Chrome. In fact, Firefox is more memory efficient than Chrome: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-14.html

Re:Mozilla is becoming irrelevant.

[flimflammer]

Nice bit of FUD there.

Re:Mozilla is becoming irrelevant.

[Lennie]

Chrome/Chromium is actually build on quiet a few parts which come from Mozilla and they work together closely on that code.

But it's OPEN!

[Anonymous Coward]

Open always equals better! Right? Right??

The solution is simple

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Find out who owns H264, and feed them to your pets.

Don't make it about H.264

[Sloppy]

They shouldn't "support H.264" but rather, they should support any unknown (to the browser) codec by trying the OS.

There are two different issues going on here, and the Mozilla team got one of them right and one of them wrong.

1. The don't want to implement something that is illegal to implement (or even use!), e.g. patented codecs without permission. Mozilla made the right call on this, all along. Free Software can't implement H.264 without "going underground" (which is itself a loss of freedom, romantic though it be).
2. They want all Mozilla users to have the same experience, so they define it as "intolerably bad" if one Mozilla user can play codec x and another Mozilla user can't. Mozilla got this wrong; it's not "intolerably bad" ; it's "regrettably bad." It's something to be angry about, but the decision is out of your hands. There isn't anything Mozilla can do that will cause it to be, that all users can play all codecs. That battle is over until we have patent reform (or until patents expire in a decade or two). Until then, a balkanized web is something we simply must live with. That's the political world you live in.

Let VDPAU/VA-API/whatever deal with it. All of it, and Mozilla won't have to maintain Theora or WebM code, either. Then they can get back to hunting for memory leaks. ;-)

how will Web developers know when they can and cannot count on system codecs?

They won't, just like they don't know that now. Stuff will fail. And if when does, maybe the browser can tell the user to get off their ass and go vote for a change.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[AndrewStephens]

They shouldn't "support H.264" but rather, they should support any unknown (to the browser) codec by trying the OS.

No, no, no. That will lead to the bad old days of having to install a different codec for each web site. Remember when we had Real, various MS codecs, Quicktime, and Flash, and various others I have forgotten all competing for memory? It sucked.

In a perfect world the video tag would define a small list of codecs that are broadly supported by OSes and mobile devices. The list of codecs can be revisited every 5 years or so as technology improves but should be fairly static. The browser can chose to implement the codecs themselves or let the OS do it, but should not attempt to pass every unknown codec onto the OS. H264 is the industry standard (like it or not) and if Firefox can't implement it itself (for good reasons) then I think using the OS is a fair enough compromise.

I wrote about this 2 years ago when this issue first came up. At the time one of the Mozilla devs explained that they didn't really trust the OS codecs from a security point of view, but time has moved on and I would expect that most H264 codecs are pretty secure now.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[markdavis]

>"They want all Mozilla users to have the same experience, so they define it as "intolerably bad" if one Mozilla user can play codec x and another Mozilla user can't. Mozilla got this wrong; it's not "intolerably bad" ; it's "regrettably bad." It's something to be angry about, but the decision is out of your hands. "

And we ALREADY have that situation. I will point to the fact that I cannot watch Netflix on Firefox + Linux; yet it works under Firefox + MS-Windows.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[ratboy666]

Tough.

Firefox should go to gstreamer -- and should for video and audio.

Same deal with fonts... if a web page calls for "Comic Sans", and I've got it, great. If not, pick something else, or give an error.

Well, with fonts, pick something else is best -- and I hope that Firefox chooses a complete unicode font.

If Firefox insists on using its own codecs and players -- that would be a serious mistake. Hardware acceleration would be very difficult to implement (just the first issue). It would be difficult to impose audio and video controls (for example, video and audio equalizers). It's just not Firefoxs' job. And, if Firefox TRYS it will always be behind.

Now, on to the issue of limiting codecs. On the surface, this seems perfectly reasonable... Except that Firefox application is immediately limited. For example, I may want to use Firefox to front-end a security setup with multiple video feeds. In order to save money, I may not design in (Firefox choosen) codec hardware, but may want to use something like motion jpeg, or even simpler formats (RLE frames). In this case, I may be inclined to produce a custom codec. If Firefox limits the codecs in use, I couldn't introduce this... easily.

I COULD modify Firefox, but then I can't automatically avail myself of upstream patches.

My codec would, naturally, be rejected.

I COULD write my own custom application, but that would be more effort than simply using Firefox as an application support layer.

In conclusion, the only reasonable thing is for Firefox to use the "OS codecs", and not to limit the codecs in use.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[AndrewStephens]

Video codecs and fonts are similar in that they are both complex binary formats whose readers have until recently not been exposed to the cesspit of exploits known as the internet. Both font rendering code (on all OS's) and base video codecs have had patches to fix security holes (mainly buffer overflows) in recent years. Mozilla does not want to be in a position where they know there is an exploitable hole in a video codec that the vendor won't quickly fix (which has happened in the past).

What are they supposed to do in that situation, disable the feature? Ship a product they know is insecure? At least with their own codecs, they know they can always ship an update immediately if a problem is found.

On your second point, I am not sure it is Firefox's job to be all things to all people. It is a web browser, not a security console. If you want a web enabled security console then you would use a web-ready video codec. Besides, Firefox still supports plugins for additional behavior if you really need something non-standard. You could even make a plugin that forwarded everything onto gstreamer (or DirectX, or Quicktime) if you really want to - just don't expect me to install it.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[AndrewStephens]

I don't really have anything to add except to say the Netflix and similar products will never use the standard video tag to stream video, since it doesn't offer the flexibility and DRM that they need. Netflix isn't really a web-based product anyway, all the heavy lifting is done outside of the browser.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[Yvan256]

AFAIK Netflix uses Microsoft Silverlight.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[Randle_Revar]

>Let VDPAU/VA-API/whatever deal with it.

Those are acceleration APIs, not media codecs or media frameworks

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[markdavis]

And some sites use Flash. And others use JAVA. But those *do* work under all platforms, unlike Silverlight.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no Flash or Java on iOS.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[Lennie]

Well, Netflix already build many things in HTML5 and they would support the-video tag if it supported DRM.

They are one of the parties involved in a proposal to add DRM-support to the video-tag.

So to me it seems, they are very much willing to use it.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[Sloppy]

Remember when we had Real, various MS codecs, Quicktime, and Flash, and various others I have forgotten all competing for memory? It sucked.

On the flip side, I remember installing a PNG datatype and then suddenly every single browser could display PNGs, whether the browser author cared (or even knew about) PNG or not.

As for remembering the actually-bad problem you talk about, it happened more recently than you might expect.

Earlier this week, I wanted to give someone a larger-than-4GB video file on a flash drive and suddenly was thrown into a world I don't think about much, where the filesystem typically used on flash drives (FAT32), can't hold files that large. I researched a little and came to the conclusion that the recipient's system (WD Live TV) could read NTFS (and also HFS+ but the recipient also owns a Windows machine so I figured NTFS would be a better choice this time), so I used ntfs-3g to format the partition, and the file appeared to copy onto there just fine.

The problem was, I wasn't really sure I had correctly NTFS formatted the flash drive; how well do these userspace filesystems really work? Do people who use NTFS typically use old "fdisk"-style partition tables, or something newer, or just format the whole device? I just didn't know for sure, and had never used ntfs-3g specifically. So I took the flash drive to work where we have a Windows 7 machine for MSIE9 testing, because I wanted to see a native Windows installation see the files; then I'd know I had a real NTFS system, and could hand it to the recipient without worries.

It read the drive just fine and saw the file. Success. ntfs-3g is solid. Things work just fine and I had been worried about nothing. Then just for giggles, I clicked the file; how well does Windows play it?

It doesn't fucking work. This isn't some ancient Windows 98 on Pentium 4; it's a shiny new machine with very capable video hardware and Windows SEVEN (you know, the latest release) and the built-in Windows Media Player (it has "media player" in the damned name!!) doesn't know WTF a Matroska file is. I shit you not. Windows Media Player in the latest version of Windows, doesn't know Matroska, one of the most commonly used containers in the world (probably #2 right now and still gaining ground). The next time you complain about about your beer being flat, remember there are starving people in India running Windows 7.

I don't really think Windows users can't play Matroska files. I know they can. But a stock Windows 7, which I guarantee many millions of people have, is a crippled anachronism from another planet. It might be ok for a server, but it's not ready for the desktop. ;-) This is probably sounding like another Microsoft (*) flame, but that's not really my point.

What does this situation tell you? It tells me that mainstream users are used to having to go find and install a bunch of shit just to make video work. In the real world, it's not just "aptitude install mplayer" and then everyone lives happily ever after. Users are already doing an equivalent thing to installing Real, Quicktime, Flash, whatever -- you're not talking about the old days; you're talking about today, now. I think a majority of people in 2012 are living your 1990s nightmare.

Sure, it sucks, but all it is, is a lack of advance. With lack of a video standard, we're not losing ground, we're merely not gaining yet. That's regrettable, not intolerable. I can't help but think that by the time proprietary mainstream OSes come ready-to-use for playing media, the H.264 patents will have expired and the whole codec situation will be moot.

(*) Really, this isn't about Microsoft. Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" (the latest version, more recent than Windows 7 in fact) also comes with a media player (Quicktime Player), and it also can't play Matroska files. A consumer OS released in 2011! People who run Linux all the time have no idea what a crazy world it is, out there.

Re:Don't make it about H.264

[AndrewStephens]

On the flip side, I remember installing a PNG datatype and then suddenly every single browser could display PNGs, whether the browser author cared (or even knew about) PNG or not.

That's great, but what are websites supposed to do? Start serving up PNGs (or whatever modern equivalent) and hope that users have the correct plugin? Or do they stick with something not quite as good that they know will work? That is why having a small list of supported codecs is important (leaving aside the fact that many users simply cannot install additional software).

Nobody cares about Matroska files except for pirates (which is a shame, because it has nice features). Neither Windows or MacOSX are interested in supporting every single codec under the sun. You can install additional codecs for both Windows and Quicktime if you want to, but if you are distributing files it is better to just use an industry standard like h264. This is exactly my point.

2030 is soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Er. The very first patent listed in the h264 list of patents (an apple one) doesn't expire until 2030 (after adding in the administrative extensions).

Who are you coding for?

[RenHoek]

While I'm fine with coders having their own ethical convictions, (I have a few of my own), you should keep in mind that coders are not your audience. It's the people who use your product that you should be listening too.

Say Firefox would introduce some kind of iTunes support, just some random crazy nonsense feature. As a coder I have moral objections against anything related to Apple, mainly due to their business practices. But I could see it being useful to a portion of the users of Firefox. The responsible thing to do would be to include the feature even though as a coder, I'd be against it. Simply because the user should be king.

Withholding features, be it due to moral objections or (more often) marketing, is the main reason why a lot of other commercial products suck. It's the reason why you can't have anything like an interpreter or emulator on the iPad. It's the reason why IE doesn't support web standards (although they got a lot better lately). It's the reason why a lot of software sucks. So write for your users!

Re:Who are you coding for?

[BZ]

The thing is, Mozilla's purpose is not to write software or get people to use its software. Its purpose is to create and promote and open web.

In many cases this involves writing software, and good software at that. But that's not strictly necessary, and it's definitely not sufficient to accomplish the main goal here.

Piracy drives technology

[Snowlock45]

In this case, I would be willing to be that the reason is that the pirate groups have now made x264 the defacto standard for standard definition TV. AVI is falling by the wayside, and therefore Mozilla is just keeping up with the tech savvy of the interwebs. http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-pirates-go-nuts-after-tv-release-groups-dump-xvid-120303/

Re:Piracy drives technology

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, I would be willing to be that the reason is that the pirate groups have now made x264 the defacto standard for standard definition TV.

You've never heard of free-to-air television? In many parts of the world, DVB-T is broadcast using H.264.

Re:Piracy drives technology

[Anonymous Coward]

AVI is failing against x264... because AVI is no codec ;)

AVI is just the container and you could, in fact, put a x264 video inside an AVI :D

NO

[danielt998]

If Mozilla doesn't support it, it will hopefully never become a standard, which should be good for the open web. If they do choose to, we will be stuck with an evil proprietary video standard forever. I like HTML5 video because it prevents the needs for proprietary software and standards and FREE software codecs can be used. If companies decide to use proprietary codecs then we are back to square one...

Re:NO

[Anonymous Coward]

I like HTML5 video because I can show H.264 videos without that stupid Flash plug-in.

FIY, H.264 already IS the standard and has been for many years. Get your head out of your butt.

Re:NO

[shutdown -p now]

If Mozilla doesn't support it, it will hopefully never become a standard, which should be good for the open web.

That's very unlikely. Right now Firefox is the only browser that does not support it (well, there's also Opera, but with 1% of the market they have, they may just as well be ignored entirely). Furthermore, Firefox is rapidly losing market share to Chrome, which does support H.264. So, the most likely long-term effect of Firefox refusing to support it will be even faster migration to browsers that do - notably, Chrome.

In the meantime, 99% of the users don't care about FOSS codecs, but do care about being able to view things on their iDevices. Which, in turn, drives content providers to use H.264 rather than anything else. Firefox is not a big enough factor to change that - if they persist, they'll just get H.264 wrapped in Flash.

Re:NO

[Lennie]

Actually last month Firefox gained market share and some reports say Chrome lost marketshare.

Although this month, for some reason, is probably an exception to the rule.

System video codecs

[Hatta]

Why shouldn't Firefox support every codec supported by the system? It shouldn't be much code.

Re:System video codecs

[arose]

Welcome to OBJECT, Flash was deemed to be a better way to do it. Those who don't learn from history, etc.

No, probably not

[Sycraft-fu]

For one there isn't anything better out there. There are better formats on the horizon, but nothing out there now. They are all still in development. However the bigger thing is h.264 is good enough. We have something that can provide good quality at a data rate that is easy to deal with on modern connections. Good. Done. The problem we had before is there wasn't a standard that was true for. Everything (well pretty much) supported MPEG-1 but that takes way too high a bitrate to look good and doesn't handle high rez. WMV works quite well, but is only supported by Windows out of the box. Realmeadia requires a garbage proprietary player.

Well H.264 is coming with pretty much all new OSes. It is part of OS-X, Windows 7, many mobile devices, etc. Everything supports it. It looks good too. A 1mbps stream looks pretty good, even at 720p and that is low enough bitrate to make most connections happy.

As such it is going to be with us for a LONG time. Once you have good enough and widely supported, people will use it, and keep using it. That's why GIF stuck around for so long. Good enough quality, and supported in all browsers. PNG is only starting to really displace it.

Remember it isn't like some evil agency can just force people to new formats. I'm sure they'd like to but that's not how it works. It is all in what people want to use.

H.264/AVC/MPEG-2 Part 10/whatever you want to call it is going to be entrenched for awhile on account of all devices supporting it, cameras supporting it (AVCHD cameras are quite popular) Blu-rays supporting it, and so on.

So if the patents are expiring soon (I don't know, I haven't looked) then life is pretty good in terms of implementing it.

Re:No, probably not

[Anonymous Coward]

>So if the patents are expiring soon (I don't know, I haven't looked) then life is pretty good in terms of implementing it.

The last patent expires on 29 Nov 2027. Not exactly soon.

Re:No, probably not

[Lennie]

The consortium will always create a newer codec, it would be stupid of them not to do so.

So long and thanks for all the fish

[xiphmont]

We had about six years where Linux wasn't the unsupported red-headed stepchild of the Web. It was nice while it lasted.

Firefox is losing market share, so it's understandable that they want to avoid the following: "We notice you have an unsupported browser. Please download Safari or IE to view this content". That wouldn't really serve anyone's interests.

Unfortunately, this just pushes the problem onto Linux as a whole: "We notice you have an unsupported OS. Please use Mac OS or Windows to legally view this content."

Re:So long and thanks for all the fish

[shutdown -p now]

Unfortunately, this just pushes the problem onto Linux as a whole: "We notice you have an unsupported OS. Please use Mac OS or Windows to legally view this content."

Fluendo sells properly licensed codecs for Linux, including H.264. I doubt they'd care about your OS so long as they get the fees one way or another.

By market share they are about even.

[pavon]

Okay, I just did some rough calculations on the support for HTML5 video codecs by browsers (source), weighted by browser market share (source via), including both desktop and mobile browsers. What I got was:
Theora: 41%
WebM: 37%
H.264: 41%
None: 40%
These numbers add up to more than 100% because some browsers support more than one codec. Looking at single codec support I get:
WebM and not H.264: 17%
H.264 and not WebM: 21%
What it amounts to is that FF + Opera(Desktop) have close to the same market share as IE9 + Safari (OSX & iOS), so they just about cancel each other out. IE9 market share is growing slowly (thanks to not supporting win XP), so there's still a couple of years for WebM to gain traction before declaring H.264 a sure winner for HTML5 video.

Re:By market share they are about even.

[shutdown -p now]

What your accounting forgets is that an H.264 stream can also be served by a Flash-based player - that's all those IE6/7/8 users out there, which account for a lot.

Re:By market share they are about even.

[Anonymous Coward]

A VP8 (WebM) stream can also be served by a Flash player.

Re:By market share they are about even.

[nine-times]

This isn't entirely an issue about browsers, though. When browsers are talking about standardizing on a video codec, the discussion must take place in the larger context of video standards in general. Either you have to accept that you'll be transcoding video in the "browser standard" before putting it online, which is a wast of time and resources and results in reduced video quality, or browsers will need to standardize on the same formats/codecs that other devices are using.

So what video codecs are supported in set-top boxes? What hardware support is there in smartphones and tablets, where battery life matters? What video codecs are likely to be supported in the computer that you buy, without installing additional software? What formats are well supported by common programs that handle video editing and encoding?

Re:By market share they are about even.

[KingMotley]

Nope, no released version of flash player supports WebM (Latest is version 11, released Nov 2011). Even if one was released today, how long would it be before that version was available on most platforms, and then how long before it was pervasive?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash
http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/release-notes-flash-player-11.html

Re:By market share they are about even.

[pavon]

Either you have to accept that you'll be transcoding video in the "browser standard" before putting it online, which is a wast of time and resources and results in reduced video quality, or browsers will need to standardize on the same formats/codecs that other devices are using.

All streaming video is currently recoded or transcoded before being put online. Most of the standard definition content is originally encoded in MPEG2 which is less efficient than modern codecs, and most of the high definition content, while encoded in H.264, has too high of a bitrate for direct streaming. Add on top of that the fact that most streaming services offer different resolutions of all videos to accommodate people with different bandwidth. While landline connections will improve enough to make this a non-issue over the next decade, mobile will always have to deal with limited spectrum.

So what video codecs are supported in set-top boxes? What hardware support is there in smartphones and tablets, where battery life matters?

Right now, H.264 clearly has more support since it has been around for longer. However, all the major hardware companies have pledged support for WebM, including Qualcom, Broadcom, Imagination Technologies, Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Marvell, ARM, AMD, and Freescale. Actual hardware is also starting to ship. The latest PowerVR video decoder VXD392 has hardware support for VP8. TI's OMAP4 has hardware acceleration for VP8 decoding. NVIDIA's Tegra 3 has hardware acceleration for both encoding and decoding of VP8. And there are several other smaller companies with shipping products like Rockchip, Chips&Media, & ZiiLABS.

Re:By market share they are about even.

[nine-times]

All streaming video is currently recoded or transcoded before being put online.

There's truth to what you're saying, but the point is that you'll be making things more complicated. It's really a logical thing, independent of whether your in favor of H264 or WebM: if web browsers "go their own way" and use a standard that's different from what everyone else is using in other contexts, then you're going to need to do more transcoding. So in a simple example, if I shoot a video in [format x] because that's what my camera or video editing software supports, and web browsers also support [format x], then I can basically just throw the video online. If my set-top box supports [format x] then I can stream that video to my TV without any work. If my mom's desktop OS supports [format x], then I can send it to her somehow and she can read it. I can do all this with the same file.

However, if my camera, video editing software, my mom's desktop OS, and my set-top box all support [format x], but my web browser only supports [format y], then it's kind of dumb. After I'm done recording, editing, and encoding the video, I then need to encode the video again (which if you don't have good source, you may need to transcode and lose quality) for the sole purpose of embedding the video in a web page. If desktop video software doesn't have good support for the [format y], then if you choose to download the video, you may have to transcode back to [format x] to view/edit the video.

Right now, H.264 clearly has more support since it has been around for longer.

Yes, and it may be that WebM is just too late to the party. Even if WebM were to provide slightly better compression/quality than H264 and were supported on all new hardware going forward, you would have to ask whether any necessary hardware/software purchases and production process/workflow changes were worth the improvement. From what I've read, WebM provides arguably worse quality, and meanwhile H264 has already become somewhat entrenched.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not too happy with patent-encumbered standards. I'm just pointing out that this is more complicated than picking your ideal format and programming a browser to decode it.

Bowling for...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Camerabine

Firefox hates GNU/Linux users

[Boltronics]

I'm a Firefox supporter because I'm a free software supporter. All the computers I use run GNU/Linux, including my N900.

I believe a number of distributions do not support h.264 libraries for fear of patent litigation. My distribution does (Debian), but I think the distribution my wife uses does not. That means that GNU/Linux users may now be expected to go and source some library just to play video - since after all H.264 will be the web standard since it would be the only format that can run on all browsers on the two most popular platforms.

But as I understand it, Mozilla will need to white-list specific h.264 libraries that they trust (so as to keep the browser stable), and if that's something that's done at compile time, perhaps distributions that don't include h.264 won't include that white-list (or libraries you compile won't be on the white-list), so you'll have more headaches and potentially need to grab a different non-distro-provided Firefox version to get this working at all.

Then what happens when the MPEG guys decide "okay, time to sue these GNU/Linux distros that are infringing on our patents"? GNU/Linux users won't be able to playback video on the web any more - unless they have sufficient technical skills to look at underground websites to find these libraries and build/install them themselves - assuming they have no objection to infringing on patents for personal use...

I don't care if Mozilla is the only supporter of WebM - they need to make a stand on this issue. It's been a major reason why I'm a Firefox user instead of a Chromium user, because people such as myself really care about stuff like this.

Re:Firefox hates GNU/Linux users

[Lennie]

I would be very surprised if Debian supports h.264.

Are you sure you didn't download the codecs yourself ?

Re:Firefox hates GNU/Linux users

[Lennie]

I don't think Chromium supports H.264 either, that would be Chrome.

Re:Firefox hates GNU/Linux users

[Boltronics]

Yep. Debian gets them from the VLC website. I'm running Wheezy.

http://packages.debian.org/sid/libx264-118

Re:Firefox hates GNU/Linux users

[Boltronics]

You could be correct. Not sure. However, supporting Chromium indirectly supports Chrome, which I'd rather not do if I can help it.

VLC-Plugin?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just build a simple VLC-Plugin or something like this?

Free us from proprietary software

[Anonymous Coward]

In it's infancy weren't browsers viewed as the savior from proprietary, incompatible standards, and formats?

It isn't a matter of if they create it

[Sycraft-fu]

It is a matter of if people will give a shit. That's what you forget. Content online is 100% up to the people who post it. Well what is important there is something that does what you need, and works on all systems.

So let's say MPEG-5 comes out. It offers slightly better compression, but that's about it. MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka AVC and H.264) already does arbitrarily high resolutions, surround, can do 4:2:2 coding, and so on. It is supported by nothing. You can download a codec to teach Windows how to play it but that's about it. At the same time AVC works in everything, every OS, every browser, every mobile device. It's compression is enough that people have no trouble streaming the media (that is already the case).

You are putting video on a website, what format do you choose? AVC, of course. Using the new format would be stupid, people would not be able to see your content easily, if at all. You'd use what works.

Once people get something that works, dislodging them is hard. Notice that MP3 is still in heavy, heavy use. Why? There's better formats. Reason is because it works. It was the first compressed music format that was good enough so it is the one that got widespread support. As such, people keep using it. They may change eventually, but it'll be a long time in coming. The only real force behind any kind of change right now is Apple, they like AAC (the audio counterpart to H.264/AVC) for iTunes. However if you go to J. Random Website, it is MP3 in almost all cases.

AVC is taking off because we didn't have a good solution before it. Nothing game the quality, data rates, and so on and had the widespread support. It does so everything is using it (Youtube would be the biggest example). It is getting entrenched hardcore.

Cost of Government

[bill_mcgonigle]

There's a reason why VLC [videolan.org] can play basically anything, on any system, far better and more reliably then anything else on the planet.

Yeah, they're based in France which has a sane legal regime about this sort of thing.

Mozilla's problem is 100% a legal one, not a technical one (for those who don't like uncomfortable euphemisms, that means they have a government problem).