The issue is that H264 cannot be used without paying protection money to MPEG-LA. No amount of technical or commercial metrics are going to make this legal issue go away.
So, you're completely right, but Mozilla is playing tactics, not strategy.
If Mozilla doesn't support h.264 then people will switch to Chrome (or IE8, gah). When the -2010 license expires, the only option will be to pay up to MPEG-LA.
On the other hand, if Mozilla allows free competition in codecs, and does everything possible to make the Free version better, then when 2011 rolls around, they can heavily market to users that there's a Free/free solution already installed. And, perhaps, just because the option exists, the license will keep getting extended, at least until in Re: Bilski is settled.
The hope is that a better codec than either will appear with more suitable licensing terms
Hope is an excuse for inaction.
Doesn't MoFo have a fair amount of Google revenue to invest? If this is really such a critical issue, why not drop a team of image processing PhD's on this for a couple years (and some engineers, of course)? There's nothing saying Mozilla efforts can't have broad applicability outside of Firefox.
Just bind to ffmpeg/ffdshow/CoreVideo. They all support H.264, and your responsibility is zero.
Their legitimate complaint is fear of compromise through buggy plug-ins.
But the solution is to sandbox the plug-ins, not restrict the plug-ins artificially. Oh, wait, that's hard with the 1990's application architecture Firefox is built on.
You pretty much have to be in a deep cave to not have a Verizon cell phone signal here.
Oh, just keep driving north another hour, we've got plenty of VZW deadzones here.:) But they're still an order of magnitude better than AT&T. I've been known to mock before, "A mobile phone that can't make phone calls... fascinating."
I take issue with the name itself as well; "homeland" puts pictures of Nazi Germany in my head. Maybe thay did that on purpose?
I'm not going to Godwin you, but you do get a citation for 'ignoring a common cause'. The US has increasingly trended towards fascism (the actual political system, not the angsty high school usage).
Because those players tend to be security hellholes. Passing unsanitized data to them is a good way to get exploited...
That bridge has already been crossed - Firefox will already happily embed, say, a QuickTime Player object for you with other tags. The only difference would be enabling that functionality for the VIDEO tag. Nothing's going to stop the bad guys from using an object or embed tag if they want to get you!
We all want to own a slave. We all want to be able to say "get me a beer from the fridge" and have something that doesn't look like a fridge do it. Every time. With no back talk.
On the short income we get to actually keep.
Servants fit the bill nicely, but they've been priced out of the market.
That's why the General Government is so severely limited to a handful of enumerated powers and all other powers are delegated to the States and the People.
Unfortunately, the design looks good on paper, but in the field the implementation has proven buggy. Patches welcome.
Tivo's lawsuit against AT&T gave Microsoft the groundwork necessary to compare how Tivo's system works in comparison to Microsoft's system.
Given Microsoft's history of courting partners, looking at their IP, re-implementing it and walking away, this may be a novel new approach to skipping the whole courting process, or doing it to a company who rebuked such advances.
.Some of us are deaf, and would much rather Youtube caption their videos. You don't HAVE to watch it. That's why it's called CLOSED CAPTIONING. Don't like it? TURN IT OFF.
YouTube has closed captioning? I thought all they had were stupid popup captions that are manually added by video uploaders. Google Voice has quite a bit more training to do before closet captioning is anything like automatic or pervasive on YouTube.
But I bet they will bitch and scream again, mentioning some "non-freeness" of H.264, despite nobody having cared about GIF support or anything, and ffmpeg being free and with H.264 support.
In many jurisdictions, ffmpeg is only Free as in Beer, not Free as in Speech. Firefox doesn't want to give up broad international distribution or its corporate status.
So the migration path from DVI to DisplayPort is for graphics cards to be able to produce both kinds of signal and for monitors to be able to accept both kind.
I have an HDMI monitor on my desk here, but I'm not terribly wed to it. If I replaced my monitor and the new one was DisplayPort I'd get a graphics card that supported it. Oh, wait, I think my mobo already has one, but either way.
The point being that computer gear turns over pretty quickly. HDMI was defined for televisions which are not a moving target. HDTV will be fixed for decades, probably - the bandwidth doesn't need to get better (though for 3D and the like it will - what will they use?).
On the other hand, the computer industry will rapidly eclipse TV once OLED and its ilk are really ready to roll (on large displays), so we're going to need something that can handle it. Both DisplayPort and LightPeak are interesting and similar in concept - I hope the standards merge to form LightPort (aka DisplayPort v3). Then we'll have a real peripherals bus again, something I've been occasionally fortunate to use (C=64, LocalTalk, Firewire).
I hate to say "fast enough", but if you can handle dozens of streams of quad-rez/quad-rate HD/3D, that's pretty darn useful for a while. Compared to sticking with HDMI because it's common... well, the PanelLink technology is about 15 years old now and we're on the verge of it becoming incapable of satisfying market needs. I went through five separate display technologies in the 80's alone, so that's not a bad run!
This sounds like nothing more than a standard for a docking station cable.
Docking station cables are big bundles of wires, hooking up all manner of pre-determined gear. Its definition is fixed. DisplayPort and LightPeak offer packetized, addressable targets over simple serial connections.
since people tend to have the computer and the monitor within resonable distance (less than 5 meters), I don't see how fiber can be an advantage.
Ooh, a real instance of 'begging the question' on Slashdot!:)
I see no reason not to put all my AV gear down in a mechanical room in the basement. A 100' AV cable would make that quite feasible.
And it can be dirt cheap - no braided/grounded/twisted/shielded monster cable needed to prevent cross-talk. Or, um, glass-cheap. That 100' cable should be about $5 from an Internet retailer - most of the cost would be in the connectors and handling.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer to live in a world of Freedom than one ruled by expediency.
The freedom for there not to be choice and competition in VIDEO tag codecs?
The issue is that H264 cannot be used without paying protection money to MPEG-LA. No amount of technical or commercial metrics are going to make this legal issue go away.
So, you're completely right, but Mozilla is playing tactics, not strategy.
If Mozilla doesn't support h.264 then people will switch to Chrome (or IE8, gah). When the -2010 license expires, the only option will be to pay up to MPEG-LA.
On the other hand, if Mozilla allows free competition in codecs, and does everything possible to make the Free version better, then when 2011 rolls around, they can heavily market to users that there's a Free/free solution already installed. And, perhaps, just because the option exists, the license will keep getting extended, at least until in Re: Bilski is settled.
And lose all the extra optimisation and swish features [lca2010.org.nz] that are only possible for a decoder they have full control over.
Somebody's going to open a Can of Knuth on this this thread.
The hope is that a better codec than either will appear with more suitable licensing terms
Hope is an excuse for inaction.
Doesn't MoFo have a fair amount of Google revenue to invest? If this is really such a critical issue, why not drop a team of image processing PhD's on this for a couple years (and some engineers, of course)? There's nothing saying Mozilla efforts can't have broad applicability outside of Firefox.
Since 172 years [wikipedia.org] at least.
FYI, this doesn't actually parse. Suggested valid parses:
Since 1838 at least.
For 172 years at least.
Even better:
Since at least 1838.
For at least 172 years.
This usage must have poor mapping to other languages, it's a very common misconstruction.
Just bind to ffmpeg/ffdshow/CoreVideo. They all support H.264, and your responsibility is zero.
Their legitimate complaint is fear of compromise through buggy plug-ins.
But the solution is to sandbox the plug-ins, not restrict the plug-ins artificially. Oh, wait, that's hard with the 1990's application architecture Firefox is built on.
Thats what people do not get. If you want h.264 use IE or pay for a license.
If you have Windows 7 or OSX you've already paid the license fee.
Linking is just as liable as coding a patent.
Where do you get from from? Mozilla has been enabling the Quicktime Plug-In, since... let's see... forever. This isn't an accepted license like GPL.
Just research DVD Jon?
Huh? That's a matter of paying license fees.
Mozilla may even have to cripple their own browser. The MPAA lawyers are crazy enough to do this if you look at their past.
What does the MPAA have to do with this, I thought the MPEG LA was the governing authority?
And on top of that, he has zero accountability.
Reputations are very expensive to build and very costly to lose. Bruce rarely makes bad calls in his field.
You pretty much have to be in a deep cave to not have a Verizon cell phone signal here.
Oh, just keep driving north another hour, we've got plenty of VZW deadzones here. :) But they're still an order of magnitude better than AT&T. I've been known to mock before, "A mobile phone that can't make phone calls... fascinating."
but signing and key rollover are high-maintenance
Could you clarify the problems you faced here? I've not found those to be such high hurdles with BIND, but our experiences probably differ.
I take issue with the name itself as well; "homeland" puts pictures of Nazi Germany in my head. Maybe thay did that on purpose?
I'm not going to Godwin you, but you do get a citation for 'ignoring a common cause'. The US has increasingly trended towards fascism (the actual political system, not the angsty high school usage).
Worthy of research but the reporters should be sent into combat with dowsing rods to detect mines. In short, all hype, no substance.
Useful science != stellar results.
Because those players tend to be security hellholes. Passing unsanitized data to them is a good way to get exploited...
That bridge has already been crossed - Firefox will already happily embed, say, a QuickTime Player object for you with other tags. The only difference would be enabling that functionality for the VIDEO tag. Nothing's going to stop the bad guys from using an object or embed tag if they want to get you!
Guilty as charged. Still, it's already been working for other object types for, what a decade?
and firefox better swallow their pride and licence it.
Why should they license it when an embeddable player is available on every OS with noticeable marketshare?
They just need to enable the HTML5 video tag to use that. Oddly enough I couldn't find this bug at BMO with a quick search.
We all want to own a slave. We all want to be able to say "get me a beer from the fridge" and have something that doesn't look like a fridge do it. Every time. With no back talk.
On the short income we get to actually keep.
Servants fit the bill nicely, but they've been priced out of the market.
That's why the General Government is so severely limited to a handful of enumerated powers and all other powers are delegated to the States and the People.
Unfortunately, the design looks good on paper, but in the field the implementation has proven buggy. Patches welcome.
Tivo's lawsuit against AT&T gave Microsoft the groundwork necessary to compare how Tivo's system works in comparison to Microsoft's system.
Given Microsoft's history of courting partners, looking at their IP, re-implementing it and walking away, this may be a novel new approach to skipping the whole courting process, or doing it to a company who rebuked such advances.
They're clever, I have to give them that.
Windows has Directshow...
OSX has Quicktime...
Linux could use Gstreamer, mplayer, ffmpeg or several others...
Aren't these already supported by Firefox/plug-ins?
Maybe just the HTML5 video tag needs to get wired up? (or does that work already?)
Right, so corporate money hasn't been involved in politics in the past 20 years.
You have a choice between it being out in the open or behind closed doors. Choose wisely.
.Some of us are deaf, and would much rather Youtube caption their videos. You don't HAVE to watch it. That's why it's called CLOSED CAPTIONING. Don't like it? TURN IT OFF.
YouTube has closed captioning? I thought all they had were stupid popup captions that are manually added by video uploaders. Google Voice has quite a bit more training to do before closet captioning is anything like automatic or pervasive on YouTube.
But I bet they will bitch and scream again, mentioning some "non-freeness" of H.264, despite nobody having cared about GIF support or anything, and ffmpeg being free and with H.264 support.
In many jurisdictions, ffmpeg is only Free as in Beer, not Free as in Speech. Firefox doesn't want to give up broad international distribution or its corporate status.
So the migration path from DVI to DisplayPort is for graphics cards to be able to produce both kinds of signal and for monitors to be able to accept both kind.
I have an HDMI monitor on my desk here, but I'm not terribly wed to it. If I replaced my monitor and the new one was DisplayPort I'd get a graphics card that supported it. Oh, wait, I think my mobo already has one, but either way.
The point being that computer gear turns over pretty quickly. HDMI was defined for televisions which are not a moving target. HDTV will be fixed for decades, probably - the bandwidth doesn't need to get better (though for 3D and the like it will - what will they use?).
On the other hand, the computer industry will rapidly eclipse TV once OLED and its ilk are really ready to roll (on large displays), so we're going to need something that can handle it. Both DisplayPort and LightPeak are interesting and similar in concept - I hope the standards merge to form LightPort (aka DisplayPort v3). Then we'll have a real peripherals bus again, something I've been occasionally fortunate to use (C=64, LocalTalk, Firewire).
I hate to say "fast enough", but if you can handle dozens of streams of quad-rez/quad-rate HD/3D, that's pretty darn useful for a while. Compared to sticking with HDMI because it's common ... well, the PanelLink technology is about 15 years old now and we're on the verge of it becoming incapable of satisfying market needs. I went through five separate display technologies in the 80's alone, so that's not a bad run!
This sounds like nothing more than a standard for a docking station cable.
Docking station cables are big bundles of wires, hooking up all manner of pre-determined gear. Its definition is fixed. DisplayPort and LightPeak offer packetized, addressable targets over simple serial connections.
In short, it's a network/bus.
since people tend to have the computer and the monitor within resonable distance (less than 5 meters), I don't see how fiber can be an advantage.
Ooh, a real instance of 'begging the question' on Slashdot! :)
I see no reason not to put all my AV gear down in a mechanical room in the basement. A 100' AV cable would make that quite feasible.
And it can be dirt cheap - no braided/grounded/twisted/shielded monster cable needed to prevent cross-talk. Or, um, glass-cheap. That 100' cable should be about $5 from an Internet retailer - most of the cost would be in the connectors and handling.