You could probably do that, but Chrome is not open source.
You say that as if people care about "open source".
They don't. At all.
All normal people see (and say) is "the Cool New Video Site is broken in firefox, which obviously must be firefox's fault. So I'll just use Chrome/IE/whatever".
What all the anti-H264 people are missing is that not supporting H264 will drive people away from Firefox. I fail to see how driving people to the non-free browser is a "win for open source".
I loved those books. I was quite surprised a year or so ago to find that not only have most of the books been preserved online as Project Aon, but someone actually ported the first couple books to the nintendo DS, with enforced gameplay, an inventory screen, managed battles, etc!
It only uses more memory if your OS is decades out of date and doesn't support copy-on-write for all memory pages after the fork(). The fact that windows sometimes falls into this category is a problem for MS, not Firefox...
The so-called "software emulation" was only for the Emotion Engine chip (ps2's CPU). It still required the Graphics Synthesizer chip (video), which was never software-emulated, and is missing in newer PS3s.
NVidia hardware plays High Profile stuff just fine, at like 0.1% cpu usage on my system, even with the crazy-extreme b-frame settings I use.
In practice, though, yes, we me Baseline profile with most of this argument. That is, the "I want to play it on my iPhone/other-mobile/netbook/micro" requests, that are only getting more numerous as time goes on.
So prove me wrong. Show me mobile devices that play Theora. Show me any little bit of a trend that firmware is magically being written for this hardware.
Managers don't care, as MPEG is popular and "official sounding", while Theora is "just noise from those free-software hippies".
Which is why I stake the stance that Mozilla shouldn't sacrifice all of those other cool new features in an effort to make a moral stand about video. Ignoring the codec issue by punting it outside the browser is a pragmatic solution, that is still a huge win because they get to entrench all the cool new features like Canvas, new DOM manipulation, SVG (?), etc.
That said, SVG+Canvas+Javascript/etc isn't feature-complete yet, when compared to Flash. It's missing some notable things. But that probably doesn't matter, as those features can be added later as HTML5 gets more popular.
They won't define every user of Facebook as a non-End User, as the average person is not hosting video content. The average person is getting Facebook (or youtube, or whomever) to host it for them, by contract.
With web 2.0, even fewer people actually pay for their own hosting, and instead use these Walled Garden services to do it for them.
It is a forgone conclusion that H.264 "won", because hardware manufacturers have come to that conclusion and are building all the new hardware with H.264 support. They are not developing Theora players. Those manufacturers are so certain of that bet, that they are committing a very large sum of money to R&D in the form of all these new mobile devices that play H.264.
As I recommended up-thread, the side-by-side method is far better, much like PNG vs GIF. That doesn't change the fact that not supporting H.264 is to take yourself out of the running, as H.264 already has enough inertia to have "won".
It is the height of hubris to think mozilla has the power to order around IE, Chrome, Safari, etc, with only ~47% (or is it only 25% and already falling?)
No, because that is only for (last I saw) the Fennec mobile-branch. It's explicitly removed from the normal Firefox branch because of the moral issues.
Which to me, amounts to Mozilla saying that they support flash and people should keep using it, as that's what people will do.
Yes, I am well familiar with the mess that makes up the technical features of "H.264", or more precisely, "MPEG 4, Part 10 AVC", the Part 2 variants ("XVID").
None of these technical features matter, as most people won't have any idea what you mean. What does matter is that people are currently buying cameras that capture video in Baseline profile, that magically works on a surprisingly number of devices. What matters is that many current devices, and most future devices support High Profile in hardware.
At no point does Theora enter into it. No devices make it, and no* devices play it (in hardware).
[*] Almost none. Exception are minimal and not significant enough to matter.
The multi-pronged approach is a very good idea, and you achieve that by separating the issues.
Promote HTML5 as an alternative to propriety Flash video. Promote Gnash (others?) as an alternative to flash itself for games, maybe? Promote Theora as an alternative to H.264. Promote general software patent reform, etc, by just using all of the above and accepting the consequences as Civil Disobedience.
By binding them together, a failure in one area also means a failure in the others.
You act like H.264 and Theora are both new, and therefore one equal footing, and so there is a choice.
There isn't. MPEG video is already entrenched. It won so long ago, that hardware manufacturers are now assuming H.264 in most every device. Your "choice" is that we should somehow make the entire hardware and software industry magically switch away from the last few years of work they did, all the current and upcoming products they are releasing, etc.
Yes, I wish this wasn't the case, and I wish that a patent-free format was used instead. But wishing for things that fly in the face of reality is the attitude of religious nuts, not engineers.
My argument is that any patents in any of these formats, and all technical features, are 100% irrelevant. Normal people don't care. What they do care about is if they go to the local electronics Big-Box retailer and buy a camera, that they can post the video on the net. And that video will be in H.264 format. They care about watching youtube/etc. Which is H.26{3,4} format.
If a moral stand is desired, which it should be, it should be done by:
1) Promoting the proper solution, patent-free, as an alternative
2) Dodging the problem so you don't drive people away from your cause. ("make the codec separate from the browser")
3) Use H.264 anyway, and accept the patent lawsuits as a proper form of Civil Disobedience, and get patent law changed.
The path Mozilla is taking is to going to cause normal users to say one thing and only one thing:
"Hmm. I browse to $cool_new_video_site and it doesn't work. It does work in IE and Chrome. Firefox must be broken, so I'll use IE instead."
How is driving people away a win? The scope here is greater than a video codec.
You host HTML5 video encoded H.264 video on your own website.
That makes you a Content Provider in the eyes of MPEG-la and most of the "intellectual property" industry, not an End User, who is a passive consumer by definition.
The thing is, I am one of those moralistic "hardcore OSS crowd" people. And what Mozilla and the Theora-or-nothing crowd are missing is that even staying with Evil H.264, the video-tag/HTML5 is still a huge moral win over Evil Proprietary Flash.
And what will you do, when Firefox use starts dropping because IE and Chrome and Safari can all play CoolNewVideoSite's stuff in high-quality full-screen, on many devices because the hardware-support is there? Normal people don't ask about codecs and Free Software issues. They want youtube, hulu, etc to work. They want the videos they captured off their cheap H.264-only camera to play without extra effort, like it will in other browsers.
People won't see that problem and say "oh, my videos are in a bad format, let's convert" - they will say "oh, Firefox is broken, so I'll use Chrome/IE/Safari/etc"
None of what I just said should be taken as a reason to not use Theora in addition to H.264. Push the Free solution, of course, but in parallel like what happened with PNG.
I love Free Software. I really do. I normally piss-off people with my fairly hard-line GNU/RMS attitude towards software. In most cases, I will drop features so I can run the Free version of something, and all of my code is GPL3.
But in this case, the so-called Free solution is the wrong choice to make. H.264 has won, and it won years ago. Now, an argument can be made that making a stand is important. But in this case, there is a pragmatic and strategic reason not to: taking a moral stand with Theora will damage other things, namely HTML5 and potentially Firefox itself.
PNG won out in the end over GIF, mostly, because it had better features. But what enabled that win was that they could both be used at the same time. If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water. Nobody would use it, because the images people already have were in GIF format. Only because both formats were supported could Mozilla be even considered by most people.
Today, people have data in H.264 format. A lot of data. A long list of hardware devices are made that support it directly. This data is not going to vanish, and people will want to play it. Firefox can choose to support that, or they can choose to become less relevant over time. Chrome is getting surprisingly strong uptake, and IE (ack) is getting much less offensive as time goes on. (aside: this competition is pretty awesome - browsers were starting to stagnate for a few years, and the rush for new features has been revived)
Playing people's data and being compatible with most modern and future hardware is the pragmatic reason to support H.264; the strategic reason is that the moral stand is not about video codecs! It's about removing Flash and related proprietary solutions. Playing the SAME video stream (a.mp4 in H.264 format) in flash or the <video> tag is neutral as far as codecs go, but it opens up the idea of a Free player.
The battle over codes needs to be left for another day.
As for how to actually implement it, Mozilla et al needs to take a cue from how distros handle MP3 and other patented codecs - foreign "non-free" repositories. The details on how you do that are highly flexible. Mozilla seems to like over-engineering things, so I'm sure they can come up with a Clever Codec Plugin Scheme to automate this, as long as the actual codec is 1) a separate project, and 2) developed outside the org.
Please - I love firefox, and this video issue is the one issue that could break them in the long-run. People like their YouTube.
the hacked game part is separate from the firmware, but it's exceedingly trivial to download it and copy it to the micro-SD. You typically want to download and install the 3rd-party AKAIO firmware anyway, so the "extra difficulty" for the end user isn't really any different.
In practice, though, none of that will matter in any lawsuit, as all the court will care about is "it enables lots of Stolen Game playing". Any technical details there aren't really important.
to get that working is almost as cumbersome as old-school PassMe
What the hell are you talking about?
I have had an Acekard 2i for many months now, using the standard AKAIO loader/firmware. I have never hard to do anything else to besides copy the firmware onto the card. Yes, the loader is using a rom-hack to load, and shows up on the DSi menu as a different game, but it works trivially and has never failed to load a game.
Re:Smalltalk and LISP for the History Major
on
Metaprogramming Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ruby has its (serious) faults, but the multi-paradigm nature of it is not one of them. It's probably the main reason I like the language. Yes, it's not perfect in any given programming style, but the mix of styles is a huge convenience. It's nice to be able to use LISP-like features at times, but still be able to bank out quick, traditional imperative-style code when it's appropriate.
This isn't to say they shouldn't take more from Smalltalk and LISP. Those rough edges are just slightly bad enough to bet in the way. I have high hopes that these problems will be fixed in the future, though.
What's particularly nice about Ruby, over the theoretically nicer LISP/Smalltalk/etc, is that Ruby is actually used fairly often...
I do the same the with the R4+NDS (well, Acekard 2i, but whatever). Most of the games, though, I have purchased. The thing about the DS flashcards is that they are INCREDIBLY convenient. I used to carry around two large cases full of DS games, swapping them out all the time. Now, that's all in the closet and I only have to carry around the DS itself. The convenience factor here is important here, because it's a portable system, and needs to fit in a pocket.
While this is likely an issue in the general case, I suspect that in common use we already do have a good idea of what the "answer" looks like. You likely know what software did the encryption, and therefore what structures in the data to expect. Knowing where the data came from tells you a lot before you even start any of the brute-force math.
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You could probably do that, but Chrome is not open source.
You say that as if people care about "open source".
They don't. At all.
All normal people see (and say) is "the Cool New Video Site is broken in firefox, which obviously must be firefox's fault. So I'll just use Chrome/IE/whatever".
What all the anti-H264 people are missing is that not supporting H264 will drive people away from Firefox. I fail to see how driving people to the non-free browser is a "win for open source".
I loved those books. I was quite surprised a year or so ago to find that not only have most of the books been preserved online as Project Aon, but someone actually ported the first couple books to the nintendo DS, with enforced gameplay, an inventory screen, managed battles, etc!
It only uses more memory if your OS is decades out of date and doesn't support copy-on-write for all memory pages after the fork(). The fact that windows sometimes falls into this category is a problem for MS, not Firefox...
ahh, the one day I need to remember to NOT visit /.
The so-called "software emulation" was only for the Emotion Engine chip (ps2's CPU). It still required the Graphics Synthesizer chip (video), which was never software-emulated, and is missing in newer PS3s.
NVidia hardware plays High Profile stuff just fine, at like 0.1% cpu usage on my system, even with the crazy-extreme b-frame settings I use.
In practice, though, yes, we me Baseline profile with most of this argument. That is, the "I want to play it on my iPhone/other-mobile/netbook/micro" requests, that are only getting more numerous as time goes on.
So prove me wrong. Show me mobile devices that play Theora. Show me any little bit of a trend that firmware is magically being written for this hardware.
Managers don't care, as MPEG is popular and "official sounding", while Theora is "just noise from those free-software hippies".
Which is why I stake the stance that Mozilla shouldn't sacrifice all of those other cool new features in an effort to make a moral stand about video. Ignoring the codec issue by punting it outside the browser is a pragmatic solution, that is still a huge win because they get to entrench all the cool new features like Canvas, new DOM manipulation, SVG (?), etc.
That said, SVG+Canvas+Javascript/etc isn't feature-complete yet, when compared to Flash. It's missing some notable things. But that probably doesn't matter, as those features can be added later as HTML5 gets more popular.
They won't define every user of Facebook as a non-End User, as the average person is not hosting video content. The average person is getting Facebook (or youtube, or whomever) to host it for them, by contract.
With web 2.0, even fewer people actually pay for their own hosting, and instead use these Walled Garden services to do it for them.
It is a forgone conclusion that H.264 "won", because hardware manufacturers have come to that conclusion and are building all the new hardware with H.264 support. They are not developing Theora players. Those manufacturers are so certain of that bet, that they are committing a very large sum of money to R&D in the form of all these new mobile devices that play H.264.
As I recommended up-thread, the side-by-side method is far better, much like PNG vs GIF. That doesn't change the fact that not supporting H.264 is to take yourself out of the running, as H.264 already has enough inertia to have "won".
"Pride comes before a fall"
It is the height of hubris to think mozilla has the power to order around IE, Chrome, Safari, etc, with only ~47% (or is it only 25% and already falling ?)
No, because that is only for (last I saw) the Fennec mobile-branch. It's explicitly removed from the normal Firefox branch because of the moral issues.
Which to me, amounts to Mozilla saying that they support flash and people should keep using it, as that's what people will do.
Yes, I am well familiar with the mess that makes up the technical features of "H.264", or more precisely, "MPEG 4, Part 10 AVC", the Part 2 variants ("XVID").
None of these technical features matter, as most people won't have any idea what you mean. What does matter is that people are currently buying cameras that capture video in Baseline profile, that magically works on a surprisingly number of devices. What matters is that many current devices, and most future devices support High Profile in hardware.
At no point does Theora enter into it. No devices make it, and no* devices play it (in hardware).
[*] Almost none. Exception are minimal and not significant enough to matter.
The multi-pronged approach is a very good idea, and you achieve that by separating the issues.
Promote HTML5 as an alternative to propriety Flash video.
Promote Gnash (others?) as an alternative to flash itself for games, maybe?
Promote Theora as an alternative to H.264.
Promote general software patent reform, etc, by just using all of the above and accepting the consequences as Civil Disobedience.
By binding them together, a failure in one area also means a failure in the others.
You act like H.264 and Theora are both new, and therefore one equal footing, and so there is a choice.
There isn't. MPEG video is already entrenched. It won so long ago, that hardware manufacturers are now assuming H.264 in most every device. Your "choice" is that we should somehow make the entire hardware and software industry magically switch away from the last few years of work they did, all the current and upcoming products they are releasing, etc.
Yes, I wish this wasn't the case, and I wish that a patent-free format was used instead. But wishing for things that fly in the face of reality is the attitude of religious nuts, not engineers.
My argument is that any patents in any of these formats, and all technical features, are 100% irrelevant. Normal people don't care. What they do care about is if they go to the local electronics Big-Box retailer and buy a camera, that they can post the video on the net. And that video will be in H.264 format. They care about watching youtube/etc. Which is H.26{3,4} format.
If a moral stand is desired, which it should be, it should be done by:
1) Promoting the proper solution, patent-free, as an alternative
2) Dodging the problem so you don't drive people away from your cause. ("make the codec separate from the browser")
3) Use H.264 anyway, and accept the patent lawsuits as a proper form of Civil Disobedience, and get patent law changed.
The path Mozilla is taking is to going to cause normal users to say one thing and only one thing:
"Hmm. I browse to $cool_new_video_site and it doesn't work. It does work in IE and Chrome. Firefox must be broken, so I'll use IE instead."
How is driving people away a win? The scope here is greater than a video codec.
You host HTML5 video encoded H.264 video on your own website.
That makes you a Content Provider in the eyes of MPEG-la and most of the "intellectual property" industry, not an End User, who is a passive consumer by definition.
The thing is, I am one of those moralistic "hardcore OSS crowd" people. And what Mozilla and the Theora-or-nothing crowd are missing is that even staying with Evil H.264, the video-tag/HTML5 is still a huge moral win over Evil Proprietary Flash.
And what will you do, when Firefox use starts dropping because IE and Chrome and Safari can all play CoolNewVideoSite's stuff in high-quality full-screen, on many devices because the hardware-support is there? Normal people don't ask about codecs and Free Software issues. They want youtube, hulu, etc to work. They want the videos they captured off their cheap H.264-only camera to play without extra effort, like it will in other browsers.
People won't see that problem and say "oh, my videos are in a bad format, let's convert" - they will say "oh, Firefox is broken, so I'll use Chrome/IE/Safari/etc"
None of what I just said should be taken as a reason to not use Theora in addition to H.264. Push the Free solution, of course, but in parallel like what happened with PNG.
I love Free Software. I really do. I normally piss-off people with my fairly hard-line GNU/RMS attitude towards software. In most cases, I will drop features so I can run the Free version of something, and all of my code is GPL3.
But in this case, the so-called Free solution is the wrong choice to make. H.264 has won, and it won years ago. Now, an argument can be made that making a stand is important. But in this case, there is a pragmatic and strategic reason not to: taking a moral stand with Theora will damage other things, namely HTML5 and potentially Firefox itself.
PNG won out in the end over GIF, mostly, because it had better features. But what enabled that win was that they could both be used at the same time. If early Mozilla branches simply removed GIF support, the browser would have been dead in the water. Nobody would use it, because the images people already have were in GIF format. Only because both formats were supported could Mozilla be even considered by most people.
Today, people have data in H.264 format. A lot of data. A long list of hardware devices are made that support it directly. This data is not going to vanish, and people will want to play it. Firefox can choose to support that, or they can choose to become less relevant over time. Chrome is getting surprisingly strong uptake, and IE (ack) is getting much less offensive as time goes on. (aside: this competition is pretty awesome - browsers were starting to stagnate for a few years, and the rush for new features has been revived)
Playing people's data and being compatible with most modern and future hardware is the pragmatic reason to support H.264; the strategic reason is that the moral stand is not about video codecs! It's about removing Flash and related proprietary solutions. Playing the SAME video stream (a .mp4 in H.264 format) in flash or the <video> tag is neutral as far as codecs go, but it opens up the idea of a Free player.
The battle over codes needs to be left for another day.
As for how to actually implement it, Mozilla et al needs to take a cue from how distros handle MP3 and other patented codecs - foreign "non-free" repositories. The details on how you do that are highly flexible. Mozilla seems to like over-engineering things, so I'm sure they can come up with a Clever Codec Plugin Scheme to automate this, as long as the actual codec is 1) a separate project, and 2) developed outside the org.
Please - I love firefox, and this video issue is the one issue that could break them in the long-run. People like their YouTube.
the hacked game part is separate from the firmware, but it's exceedingly trivial to download it and copy it to the micro-SD. You typically want to download and install the 3rd-party AKAIO firmware anyway, so the "extra difficulty" for the end user isn't really any different.
In practice, though, none of that will matter in any lawsuit, as all the court will care about is "it enables lots of Stolen Game playing". Any technical details there aren't really important.
to get that working is almost as cumbersome as old-school PassMe
What the hell are you talking about?
I have had an Acekard 2i for many months now, using the standard AKAIO loader/firmware. I have never hard to do anything else to besides copy the firmware onto the card. Yes, the loader is using a rom-hack to load, and shows up on the DSi menu as a different game, but it works trivially and has never failed to load a game.
Ruby has its (serious) faults, but the multi-paradigm nature of it is not one of them. It's probably the main reason I like the language. Yes, it's not perfect in any given programming style, but the mix of styles is a huge convenience. It's nice to be able to use LISP-like features at times, but still be able to bank out quick, traditional imperative-style code when it's appropriate.
This isn't to say they shouldn't take more from Smalltalk and LISP. Those rough edges are just slightly bad enough to bet in the way. I have high hopes that these problems will be fixed in the future, though.
What's particularly nice about Ruby, over the theoretically nicer LISP/Smalltalk/etc, is that Ruby is actually used fairly often...
I do the same the with the R4+NDS (well, Acekard 2i, but whatever). Most of the games, though, I have purchased. The thing about the DS flashcards is that they are INCREDIBLY convenient. I used to carry around two large cases full of DS games, swapping them out all the time. Now, that's all in the closet and I only have to carry around the DS itself. The convenience factor here is important here, because it's a portable system, and needs to fit in a pocket.
While this is likely an issue in the general case, I suspect that in common use we already do have a good idea of what the "answer" looks like. You likely know what software did the encryption, and therefore what structures in the data to expect. Knowing where the data came from tells you a lot before you even start any of the brute-force math.