They have a Java fallback. I Even without a fallback Theora will play on more machines then HTML5 only H.264 would (supported by Safari, Chrome and Opera, where the user cares to add the codec, as opposed to Firefox, Chrome and Opera).
But it did, that's the problem. Google specifically cites an existing catalog of materials in H.264 on YouTube as a factor affecting their decision to go with it.
Google does not a standard make. Just because Netflix streams only with Silverlight doesn't equal widespread adoption.
Who decides that they are of "secondary importance"?
The users themselves by only using phones for secondary browsing. Carriers who can't provide enough bandwidth (I'm looking at you AT&T).
Yes, phones do not support the more advanced forms of H.264 compression. But for the baseline, they support hardware accelerated decoding - unlike Theora.
This is a very important point actually. Exclusive usage of H.264 is often justified by the prohibitive resources required for transcoding and storage, the "you only need one copy" angle. This only holds true if you are happy with the baseline profile and a resolution the iPhone can actually play (640x480 or under), thus if you want to provide HD you have to transcode and store two versions. Hardware accelerated decoding isn't as important with Theora (H.264 is more complex), but it's been shown to be doable on existing hardware (most of it isn't H.264 specific). Support isn't there because device manufacturers haven't bothered, not because it can't be done with the hardware they have.
However, the only browser vendor which steadfastly refuses to give users a choice on the matter is Mozilla.
...and every device vendor, hardware acceleration of Theora is doable with existing hardware, but no one is putting pressure on them, Mozilla on the other hand is held up as some bogeyman. Apple could support Theora on the iPhone, but why fuck with their patent royalties. Mozilla can only "support " H.264 by putting the burden on the users (to install their own codecs from god knows where) and content providers (to worry about licensing).
Netscape and IE, even without full alpha channel PNG did everything non-animated GIF did, and did it better. I guess it wasn't exactly "long before Mozilla was open sourced", just long (a few years, but it's internet time we are talking about) before it went anywhere.
Even that isn't "adopting as a de facto standard", though - I'd only count it as happening when all mainstream browsers had full support.
So you'd say that H.264 isn't a de facto standrard on mobile and embedded devices, since only reduced profiles will play there?
What I'm trying to show is that technical superiority (the nerds reason to push H.264) doesn't mean the web will actually adopt a format, hence de-facto standardization of PNG taking forever is supporting evidence. The point was that people didn't use it even though it was supported (in a form equivalent to GIF) for quite a while.
I like how you cite technical superiority as the reason for PNG adoption while mentioning MP3 and Vorbis.
Technical superiority doesn't matter. PNG got adopted more by diffusion then anything else, it was better for still images then GIF long before IE finally added alpha channel support. Napster made MP3 big, and that was the end of it.
HTML5 video, on the other hand, has not been decided yet, H.264 did not have a head start in the area, set top boxes are not relevant, cell phones are of secondary importance (and don't support full H.264 anyway). As it stands more browsers supporting the video tag play Theora then H.264.
PNG was adopted alongside GIF long before Mozilla was open sourced. It took forever to get anywhere, even though it had superior compression and supported all features of GIF, except for animation, but including 1 bit transparency on both Netscape and IE. Goes to show that technical superiority is not everything on the web.
Just because doing it 'perfectly' is hard, is no excuse not to do it 'well'. I've had catastrophic data failure wiping 2 years of pictures, a regular backup to DVD would have saved 23 months back then.
Which part of "assume hostile agents, agencies and goverments already have it" was unclear or questionable. The cat is out of the bag, if you weren't specifically hiding from your own people then keeping things quiet is only good for PR. Neither is a good reason to arrest someone.
The leakers and Wikileaks personel are separate groups, rhetoric about the need for secrecy and irresponsibility of leakers does nothing to actually justify curtailing the speech of a third party. If you have a problem keeping your information in your organization then that is what you need to fix. The information is already out, assume hostile agents, agencies and goverments already have it, Wikileaks is just a PR problem that shows to your taxpayers that you are not doing your job keeping it secret, it is not a security problem unless the only people you want to keep in the dark is the general public.
As a rule brands have little to do with innovation, ingenuity or creativity. Trademarks should be backed by quality and expertise, not by fuzzy feelings associated with the brand, otherwise they are of no benefit to customers and not worth protecting.
There are LCDs that are basically indistinguishable from e-ink (they mainly lack the refresh flicker), but for some reason no-one is talking about them. I guess major improvements in existing tech are not sexy enough.
Any system Apple comes up with is going to have to be transparent/intuitive if it isn't going to be a misfeature for the ~90% of the iPhone (etc.) user base that aren't geeks like us.
One can only suppose that unintentional roaming charges are not a misfeature.
By that logic they chould have something better then a virtual keyboard to input text, since normally it's done with a keyboard and the iPhone doesn't have one. Virtual keyboards suck, if they wanted to do it right they should start with major features, not hold back trivial ones.
From the public, perhaps, but if you are a private company and your competitor is more efficient than you, you lose profitability and may go out of business.
If there is a real competitor. If they are more efficient. If everything else is equal.
That's a lot of ifs, 3 is a particularly uncommon and is in fact undesirable for investors. 1 is horrible for customers if the entry barriers are high.
And even if all of the above holds true, sort term efficiency is easier to gain by underpaying and overworking employees, not reorganizing to avoid bottlenecks. Reorganization by virtue of new players without encrusted processes bankrupting older players can be hardly called efficient either...
The difference being, my friend, is that if the private sector continues those practices, the people responsible for the practices get let go or they go out of business, and then the only people who pay for it are the shareholders, not the tax payers.
If that was actually true corporate waste would have been eliminated by now. Corporate waste, however, continues and it's customers who pay for it in the corporations that magically* survive, not shareholders.
* Or so it would appear to someone who has read up on the benefits of a perfect market and for some ass-backwards reason expects a free or mixed market to work the same way.
Lack of reading comprehension is up there as well. Ogg Theora has been done, it doesn't matter if Ogg would not make a good general purpose container when all you want to use is Vorbis and Theora.
Theora is having difficulty competing for mindshare with H.264/AVC, while when the project was started, H.264/AVC didn't yet exist...
If it's willful ignorance you have a problem with, then you should at least check your dates.
Work on Theora started in 2002, work on H.264 started as early as 1998, with a first draft in 1999 and MPEG involvement since 2001. H.264 has been in the works for a long time and the patent holders had a long time to drum up support. They wanted a piece of the pie for MPEG 2 successor, so they made sure H.264 would be it.
It would be impossible to play Ogg Theora, H.264, or probably even MPEG-1 on most small device hardware directly, but using the OS-level H.264 CODEC, you get many hours of full motion video.
It would have to be a low-powered device indeed not to be able to play MPEG-1 in software considering it was done on pre-Pentium CPUs. Theora isn't quite as light, but it's certainly not as heavy as H.264.
I can play a full 1080/60p video (about twice the normal "full HD" requirements) using about 12% CPU on my desktop under Windows 7, using plain old ugly Windows Media Player. Running that same video in VLC, I get a very choppy playback, and 60%+ CPU used. This is a high-end PC (well, a high-end Core2 quad machine, not so high-end by 2010 standards) and sure, I could play a Blu-Ray without worries, even without the GPU-based acceleration.
Are we still talking about web video, unless you are planning on embedding a rip of that Blu-Ray on a website we are not. 720p is about where big players are comfortable, small sites will have less than that.
Besides, GPU acceleration isn't that hard to do these days, so I'm quite confident that if Theora was in fact the mandated baseline codec in HTML5, or if Youtube had decided to use it instead/alongside with H.264 there would be blazing fast GPU implementations by now. Unfortunately we are stuck with a chicken and egg problem and popularity seeking developers will not help out. Portable devices are harder, but still mostly use programmable accelerators, again, few have bothered to make Theora run on
them, but the experiments are promising.
I have little problem with Mozilla or anyone else fighting the good fight, when it's a real good fight, based on technical merits.
If you only consider a technical merit fight to be a good fight, then you won't find any big players on your side. Apple is playing to their patent and fuck you if you want to use something more then baseline 640x480 at 30fps in your video tags, the iPhone can't play it, sorry.
Google at least lets you use Theora with Chrome, even if they don't use it themselves. That means that the only browser supporting video tags, but not playing Theora by default is Safari. The fight is not lost yet by far, as HTML5 video is still in the infancy.
Opera makes money from embedding browsers on portable devices which most likely have hardware acceleration for H.264.
Wrong, while mobile devices might be all the rage right now Opera also does all sorts of set-top boxes, the Wii and whatnot. Does the Wii have H.264 acceleration? Who knows. Can it handle a low complexity codec like Theora in software? Without doubt.
Aside from that, few devices have hardware decoding, just hardware that is good at assisting the CPU by accelerating operations heavily used in codecs like H.264 and Theora. I wouldn't be very surprised if Opera is working beyond the scenes to get Theora support for some of those.
In the end it probably comes down to Opera not wanting half-baked video support, Theora can work with hardware acceleration, probably on hardware, once someone actually gets around to implementing actually implementing it. But it can also work in software on relatively modest hardware that could never support H.264 that way. I suspect Opera is trying to find a way to roll video out on pretty much everything they make a full browser for.
Last, but not least, the often proclaimed hardware support for H.264 is a smoke screen. Many devices can't handle the full spec, if you actually want those iPhones to see your video you better encode Baseline at 640x480. In other words, if you actually want to take advantage of the full power of H.264 you either ditch the iPhone or encode twice, yet for some reason not having to keep around two versions of a video is one of the biggest reasons people don't want any of this Theora crap that can run at full spec on modest hardware.
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Market share wise browsers with Theora support are actually ahead right now...
They have a Java fallback. I Even without a fallback Theora will play on more machines then HTML5 only H.264 would (supported by Safari, Chrome and Opera, where the user cares to add the codec, as opposed to Firefox, Chrome and Opera).
They have. HTML5 doesn't specify a codec, so Theora is as valid (as far as W3C is concerned) as any other.
Google does not a standard make. Just because Netflix streams only with Silverlight doesn't equal widespread adoption.
The users themselves by only using phones for secondary browsing. Carriers who can't provide enough bandwidth (I'm looking at you AT&T).
This is a very important point actually. Exclusive usage of H.264 is often justified by the prohibitive resources required for transcoding and storage, the "you only need one copy" angle. This only holds true if you are happy with the baseline profile and a resolution the iPhone can actually play (640x480 or under), thus if you want to provide HD you have to transcode and store two versions. Hardware accelerated decoding isn't as important with Theora (H.264 is more complex), but it's been shown to be doable on existing hardware (most of it isn't H.264 specific). Support isn't there because device manufacturers haven't bothered, not because it can't be done with the hardware they have.
Netscape and IE, even without full alpha channel PNG did everything non-animated GIF did, and did it better. I guess it wasn't exactly "long before Mozilla was open sourced", just long (a few years, but it's internet time we are talking about) before it went anywhere.
So you'd say that H.264 isn't a de facto standrard on mobile and embedded devices, since only reduced profiles will play there?
What I'm trying to show is that technical superiority (the nerds reason to push H.264) doesn't mean the web will actually adopt a format, hence de-facto standardization of PNG taking forever is supporting evidence. The point was that people didn't use it even though it was supported (in a form equivalent to GIF) for quite a while.
I like how you cite technical superiority as the reason for PNG adoption while mentioning MP3 and Vorbis.
Technical superiority doesn't matter. PNG got adopted more by diffusion then anything else, it was better for still images then GIF long before IE finally added alpha channel support. Napster made MP3 big, and that was the end of it.
HTML5 video, on the other hand, has not been decided yet, H.264 did not have a head start in the area, set top boxes are not relevant, cell phones are of secondary importance (and don't support full H.264 anyway). As it stands more browsers supporting the video tag play Theora then H.264.
PNG was adopted alongside GIF long before Mozilla was open sourced. It took forever to get anywhere, even though it had superior compression and supported all features of GIF, except for animation, but including 1 bit transparency on both Netscape and IE. Goes to show that technical superiority is not everything on the web.
Just because doing it 'perfectly' is hard, is no excuse not to do it 'well'. I've had catastrophic data failure wiping 2 years of pictures, a regular backup to DVD would have saved 23 months back then.
Exactly, a simple search would have confirmed that they don't care.
Notice that no one is demanding Firefox expose OS image decoding so that we can use JPEG XR on the net.
PNG was developed because of patent problems with GIF. Alpha channel, 24 bit color and better compression were just extra bonuses.
Which part of "assume hostile agents, agencies and goverments already have it" was unclear or questionable. The cat is out of the bag, if you weren't specifically hiding from your own people then keeping things quiet is only good for PR. Neither is a good reason to arrest someone.
The leakers and Wikileaks personel are separate groups, rhetoric about the need for secrecy and irresponsibility of leakers does nothing to actually justify curtailing the speech of a third party. If you have a problem keeping your information in your organization then that is what you need to fix. The information is already out, assume hostile agents, agencies and goverments already have it, Wikileaks is just a PR problem that shows to your taxpayers that you are not doing your job keeping it secret, it is not a security problem unless the only people you want to keep in the dark is the general public.
As a rule brands have little to do with innovation, ingenuity or creativity. Trademarks should be backed by quality and expertise, not by fuzzy feelings associated with the brand, otherwise they are of no benefit to customers and not worth protecting.
Ok, let's take Metroid Prime Trilogy, you are left with a good game with a frustrating control scheme.
There are LCDs that are basically indistinguishable from e-ink (they mainly lack the refresh flicker), but for some reason no-one is talking about them. I guess major improvements in existing tech are not sexy enough.
One can only suppose that unintentional roaming charges are not a misfeature.
By that logic they chould have something better then a virtual keyboard to input text, since normally it's done with a keyboard and the iPhone doesn't have one. Virtual keyboards suck, if they wanted to do it right they should start with major features, not hold back trivial ones.
He didn't say that working with his Linux laptop was intuitive, just that working with OS X necessary isn't.
The reader is free to imagine another string of ifs, starting with "if there any other employers looking for employees with the given qualifications".
The reader is strictly advised against directly applying conclusions drawn from theoretical markets, including perfect markets, to real markets.
If there is a real competitor. If they are more efficient. If everything else is equal.
That's a lot of ifs, 3 is a particularly uncommon and is in fact undesirable for investors. 1 is horrible for customers if the entry barriers are high.
And even if all of the above holds true, sort term efficiency is easier to gain by underpaying and overworking employees, not reorganizing to avoid bottlenecks. Reorganization by virtue of new players without encrusted processes bankrupting older players can be hardly called efficient either...
If that was actually true corporate waste would have been eliminated by now. Corporate waste, however, continues and it's customers who pay for it in the corporations that magically* survive, not shareholders.
* Or so it would appear to someone who has read up on the benefits of a perfect market and for some ass-backwards reason expects a free or mixed market to work the same way.
Lack of reading comprehension is up there as well. Ogg Theora has been done, it doesn't matter if Ogg would not make a good general purpose container when all you want to use is Vorbis and Theora.
If it's willful ignorance you have a problem with, then you should at least check your dates.
Work on Theora started in 2002, work on H.264 started as early as 1998, with a first draft in 1999 and MPEG involvement since 2001. H.264 has been in the works for a long time and the patent holders had a long time to drum up support. They wanted a piece of the pie for MPEG 2 successor, so they made sure H.264 would be it.
It would have to be a low-powered device indeed not to be able to play MPEG-1 in software considering it was done on pre-Pentium CPUs. Theora isn't quite as light, but it's certainly not as heavy as H.264.
Are we still talking about web video, unless you are planning on embedding a rip of that Blu-Ray on a website we are not. 720p is about where big players are comfortable, small sites will have less than that.
Besides, GPU acceleration isn't that hard to do these days, so I'm quite confident that if Theora was in fact the mandated baseline codec in HTML5, or if Youtube had decided to use it instead/alongside with H.264 there would be blazing fast GPU implementations by now. Unfortunately we are stuck with a chicken and egg problem and popularity seeking developers will not help out. Portable devices are harder, but still mostly use programmable accelerators, again, few have bothered to make Theora run on them, but the experiments are promising.
If you only consider a technical merit fight to be a good fight, then you won't find any big players on your side. Apple is playing to their patent and fuck you if you want to use something more then baseline 640x480 at 30fps in your video tags, the iPhone can't play it, sorry.
Google at least lets you use Theora with Chrome, even if they don't use it themselves. That means that the only browser supporting video tags, but not playing Theora by default is Safari. The fight is not lost yet by far, as HTML5 video is still in the infancy.
Wrong, while mobile devices might be all the rage right now Opera also does all sorts of set-top boxes, the Wii and whatnot. Does the Wii have H.264 acceleration? Who knows. Can it handle a low complexity codec like Theora in software? Without doubt.
Aside from that, few devices have hardware decoding, just hardware that is good at assisting the CPU by accelerating operations heavily used in codecs like H.264 and Theora. I wouldn't be very surprised if Opera is working beyond the scenes to get Theora support for some of those.
In the end it probably comes down to Opera not wanting half-baked video support, Theora can work with hardware acceleration, probably on hardware, once someone actually gets around to implementing actually implementing it. But it can also work in software on relatively modest hardware that could never support H.264 that way. I suspect Opera is trying to find a way to roll video out on pretty much everything they make a full browser for.
Last, but not least, the often proclaimed hardware support for H.264 is a smoke screen. Many devices can't handle the full spec, if you actually want those iPhones to see your video you better encode Baseline at 640x480. In other words, if you actually want to take advantage of the full power of H.264 you either ditch the iPhone or encode twice, yet for some reason not having to keep around two versions of a video is one of the biggest reasons people don't want any of this Theora crap that can run at full spec on modest hardware.