Mozilla To Support H.264

suraj.sun writes with a followup to last week's news that Mozilla was thinking about reversing their stance on H.264 support. Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker and CTO Brendan Eich have now both written blog posts explaining why they feel H.264 support is no longer optional. Eich wrote, "We will not require anyone to pay for Firefox. We will not burden our downstream source redistributors with royalty fees. We may have to continue to fall back on Flash on some desktop OSes. I’ll write more when I know more about desktop H.264, specifically on Windows XP. What I do know for certain is this: H.264 is absolutely required right now to compete on mobile. I do not believe that we can reject H.264 content in Firefox on Android or in B2G and survive the shift to mobile. Losing a battle is a bitter experience. I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance." Baker added, "Our first approach at bringing open codecs to the Web has ended up at an impasse on mobile, but we’re not done yet. ... We'll find a way around this impasse."

Comments

Good move

[vivek7006]

better live to fight tomorrow, rather than become irrelevant

Will Googorola sue them?

[recoiledsnake]

They have recently declined to pledge that they won't sue over standards essential patents like H.264, instead of demanding 2.5% of proceeds of devices(ad revenues in this case). Apple and Microsoft have pledged this.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/regulators-to-google-you-can-buy-motorola-but-we-still-dont-trust-you.ars

Interesting to see Google becoming the patent trolls over H.264 that it previously warned others over and recommended WebM.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[ZorinLynx]

Given that Firefox is free, 2.5% of revenues from Mozilla would be $0.00, and still satisfy the agreement. Right?

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[SuricouRaven]

Key patents are also held by... actually, there's a list. A long one. Will all of them agree not to sue too?

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[tlhIngan]

Or better yet... why doesn't Firefox on Android use the standard, pre-licensed, OS library to play back h.264?

All Android devices support h.264 playback these days and it's baked into Android's media playback architecture, so it's prelicensed by the device manufacturer.

I don't think an app needs to pay in order to use h.264 playback if it's already been paid for and provided for everyone else to use.

Heck, Firefox on regular PCs can do the same - Windows 7 supports it, and I'm sure Firefox could leverage other plugins like QuickTime to support h.264 playback on other OSes (really, Apple's giving away a h.264 decoder, for free. Licensed that they have to pay for! Each download costs Apple money!)

Not sure what they want to do with Boot 2 Gecko though, since there won't be a pre-licensed library already.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[mystikkman]

Because Motorola is suing Apple and Microsoft over standards essential patents with exorbitant fees, in the classic way of bait-and-switch once the standard is in place.

And Google specifically declined to make the same promise as Apple and Microsoft about this issue.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Firefox is free to final users, but someone (Google at least) is definitely footing the bill.

Google is paying for access to Firefox users through search bar and default home page. They are not supporting Firefox out of kindness.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Yes, yes - because Google has a long patent trolling history and Mozilla is obviously at the top of their "To sue" list.

Yahoo wasn't a patent troll either, until it was. And Mozilla would very quickly become enemy no1 at Google if they ever switched to Bing or another search engine. It'd be all-out war.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[Tridus]

Firefox isn't implementing h.264 though. They're simply going to call the system codec if the OS has one. Typically the OS vendors that do that also offer patent indemnification for their users, so if someone sues you for using h.264 in FIrefox on Windows, Microsoft would get involved because they already paid to license it to Windows users.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[Tridus]

That's exactly my understanding of what they're doing. They're not licensing it themselves, they're just going to rely on the OS implementaiton where one exists.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[RebelWebmaster]

Exactly, which is also why they brought up Windows XP, which does not have a built-in H.264 decoder.

Re:Will Googorola sue them?

[tibman]

Oh geez, this was not an easy one. So it reads that WebM is just a container anyways but VP8 is the only video codec it currently uses. VP8 sounds equivalent to or only slightly inferior to H.264 (which could change in WebM's favor as encoders improve). One critical thing that jumped at me was the WebM container doesn't appear to support subtitles at all. That could also change in the future.

So WebM is a container only for VP8 video and vorbis audio. H.264 is a video codec that can be used in another container like MKV.

I don't understand the opposition

[cpu6502]

We currently use MPEG1, MPEG2, and JPEG in our browsers (and TVs) but the world has not collapsed, or our personal savings wiped out.

I don't see any problem with moving onward with MPEG4 audio and video (AACplusSBR)(h.264)(ATSC 2008).

Re:Hardware Acceleration

[XanC]

It's critical, even with multi-core, if for no other reason than battery life.

OSS advocacy or maybe zealotry

[Sycraft-fu]

They wanted a completely patent and royalty free standard. Now I can accept that is the preferable way to go but it wasn't very practical. The problem was nobody in the open and unpatented world wanted to get their shit together and develop a next gen video format in a timely fashion. So AVC got standardized and started to get implemented everywhere since it gives quite good quality/bit. Once it was huge and implemented in near everything, there was movement to create an open standard but too little, too late. When standards get entrenched, they get entrenched hard. GIFs are a great example, people still use them all over despite PNG being more or less in every way superior.

Well FF wanted to fight back against that and so said "No AVC evar!" They backed WebM, which had Google gotten done 3-5 years earlier, might have had a shot, but they are finding it just isn't feasible.

So AVC is what we have now, and probably will for a long, long time. When the next better standard comes out, it'll be hard to get people to switch because AVC is "good enough". We finally have a "good enough" video streaming solution, meaning it offer the kind of quality we want and can do so in bandwidth we have.

Re:OSS advocacy or maybe zealotry

[Daniel Phillips]

This was just Google's play to push a standard they define over a standard defined by their competitors.

Utter nonsense. WebM/VP8 are fully open and free of patent license fees. Defined by Google perhaps, but controlled by Google, no, that is the whole point of a patent-free standard.

Re:Failure?

[jellomizer]

You are are becoming the minority.

The Mobile Smart Phone popularity is due to the face that you can bring it with you almost anywhere. Even an Ultra Portable Laptop has places where you would be looked at kinda funny if you took it with you, and the extra power of the laptop comes at a cost of battery life. A Smart Phone under moderate use gives you about 16 hours a day. A Laptop under that use gives you 3-5 hours. Also the Mobile Network is handy to get data when you are not near any other hot spots. Which does happen more often then you think. I got a smart phone figuring that it would be a fun toy... But I found it more useful then I thought.

Re:H.26x

[93 Escort Wagon]

Oh no! And I just spent my weekend encoding 100 TB of movies in H.265...

You should have went with h.266 and used the --backward-compatible flag.

Re:not a troll

[Tumbleweed]

So, Mozilla copying Google's version numbering scheme and release schedule made Firefox *worse* than Chrome? Okay, then...

Actually yes. Version upgrades in chrome are transparent to the user. I don't care if chrome updates to version 324...I don't know even know what version of chrome I'm running.

When firefox updates, it make you go through a huge hassle of clicking approve on update boxes, checking to see if your extensions are broken, realizing half your extensions ARE broken, looking for new ones, etc. If they made their upgrades as transparent as chrome does, it wouldn't be a problem. But a rapid release schedule is a terrible idea when upgrading is a hassle.

Many people aren't thrilled with the idea of silent updates, for sure, the hassle of updating past versions was horrible. Fortunately, it's pretty easy now, and I haven't had any add-ons break since v8 or so. v13 will bring silent updates.

Re:Failure?

[Hadlock]

I am pretty sure my mom uses her phone for web browsing more than she does her desktop. She always had a hatred for desktops, but she finds her slow, 2nd gen 2.1 crappy android phone rather likable for some reason.

Re:What makes Chrome better?

[i_ate_god]

Firefox has become my webapp IDE these days. Firebug (and things that let me log to firebug from the server-side code) + SQLite manager + a variety of tools for mangling http requests and responses + a variety of tools for creating your own requests, all in one tabbed application. It's perfect!

Chrome has become my web browser though.

IT's like comparing Eclipse to say, Notepad. Eclipse is useful because of everything that it CAN do. Notepad is useful for everything that it can't do (and thus doesn't get in your way when you're not doing it).

Yes, that's the point of the pool

[Anonymous Coward]

Key patents are also held by... actually, there's a list. A long one. Will all of them agree not to sue too?

By joining the pool, the ones on that list have put their patents under a common license. So as long as you buy a license from the pool, then yes, they have agreed not to sue you.

(That's no help against Google/Motorola, or patent trolls that aren't in the pool, however.)

Re:Hardware Acceleration

[jedidiah]

You're funny.

A specialized part is always going to trump the "jack of all trades". That's rather the point of having the specialize part.

Claims of this kind are especially funny considering that ARM CPUs simply don't have the ability to deal with the vast bulk of video content already out there. That's why these SoCs have special GPUs to begin with.

An ARM would be dead in the water without special purpose silicon for video decoding.

Re:Glad to see it

[roca]

It's not really about self-interest at all.

If not supporting H.264 isn't reducing H.264 usage, but reduces the influence of Firefox by turning users away from Firefox, and increases the usage of Flash vs HTML5 video, then not supporting H.264 is a net lose for freedom and standards on the Web and supporting H.264 is the right thing to do for our mission.