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Mozilla To Support H.264

Posted by Soulskill on from the lost-the-battle-but-not-the-war dept.

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."

8 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Good move by vivek7006 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    better live to fight tomorrow, rather than become irrelevant

  2. Will Googorola sue them? by recoiledsnake · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    This space for rent.
    1. Re:Will Googorola sue them? by CharlyFoxtrot · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
    2. Re:Will Googorola sue them? by Tridus · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
    3. Re:Will Googorola sue them? by RebelWebmaster · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. Re:Hardware Acceleration by XanC · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  4. OSS advocacy or maybe zealotry by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Yes, that's the point of the pool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)