I think I'd be more positive to Apple if they would at least attempt to integrate X apps, however as it stands many useful open source applications are so close, yet not quite there. I understand there is Photoshop and a whole bunch of half-featured graphics apps, but to this day we haven't found something that can do rotation, cropping and color correction in a consistent manner without putting down under $20 dollars. So my wife continues to suffer with poorly integrated GIMP, that does all of that and far more for $0. And that's just one example.
Without open source software, there would be no OS X, no Google, and probably not even an Internet.
Certainly not the internet as we know it, it would probably be more akin of a Compuserve/AOL/FidoNet frankenstein.
They know there's not going to be any more people asking for extra fees for H.264 - Theora simply isn't deep enough in the water for the subs to prepare their torpedos.
Suspect or hope, they can't know this. And Google is a pretty big target and was On2 back in the day (VP3 has been around). If someone in the business had wanted to flex their patents, why wouldn't they have gone after a big codec developer?
Easy? So I take it that you have never written any software I take it? I've been working as a software developer for over a decade. It all appears deceptively easy to the uninitiated.
We are talking about yet another encoder module, not an architecture overhaul. You have been a software developer, would you use modules for import/export functionality if you were developing an application that needs to deal with multiple file format? I'm not a professional developers, but I'm not completely clueless to the process either.
A lot of people use tools like Quicktime, iLife or Movie Maker to quickly edit and upload their videos to places like Youtube.
Will they even care enough to choose Theora when the default might be H264?
If they don't care, they will not encode H.264 with just the right settings for youtube to pass it through without trans-coding. So the answer is, it doesn't matter if their high-bitrate H.264 export gets trans-coded to a lower bitrate H.264 or Theora video.
Thank you for proving my point. People expect their software to "just work". Without content in Theora format, they will have nothing to watch.
Except that that wasn't the point you were making (I cannot vouch for what you attempted to make). You said that people wouldn't know how to playback Theora and encode it, basically they wouldn't know what to make of these odd.ogg files. I don't see a way of reading "Most people don't even know what software is out there that allows you to play back Theora [..]" as "Firefox might play back Theora transparently, but since no one publishes Theora videos it doesn't actually 'just work' even if in reality it does as seen by the few people who actually do publish Theora vidoes". I might also add that the latter doesn't make much sense, so I might be completely misreading and would prefer clarification if I am.
As for creating and publishing in H264 format, there is Quicktime and iMovie which now support uploading in H264 to Youtube from within the application.
There is also Windows Movie Maker for XP, digital cameras that can capture videos in MJPEG and all sorts of other sources outside of the (still relatively small) Mac ecosystem. Youtube still accepts and trans-codes videos from these people, if they switched to Theora today the effect would be minimal.
In case Quicktime and iMovie has a special mode that allows the video to avoid trans-coding there might be a slight quality loss as they would be trans-coded due to the format change. At least until someone gets around to implement it (or they'd insist in continuing to push a format they have for which they have patent in the pool and point fingers at Google).
In the end however, web video is bigger then youtube and what I personally care about is the ability to put my videos on my site without paying a format tax in one way or another. If I have to point to a third party with a flash player for fall back for browsers other then Firefox, Chrome and Opera, then that's still better then having to rely on a third party exclusively. For Firefox to try to support me, more then they try to support Apples video editors is no surprise given their history.
I guess one of those 4 guys must have been an OS X developer... Or OS X developers just decided to randomly take a piece of useless code and base their OS on it, to appeal to the 4 guys... Yeah, makes sense.
I love this site. Pretty sane most of the time, but when it comes to Apple... it's like they were tea partiers talking about Obama.
You must be on the other slashdot, the one that doesn't have a large number of Apple fanboys.
So I bought a computer that just works, the OS stays out of my way, and I can get things done with it. A tool. A means to an end.
Unfortunately no everyone shares this attitude. They promote it as the holy grail, and you better not point out the shortcomings.
But then I have an MSI Wind U210 netbook which I cannot get wireless to function reliably (the Ralink 3090 only got a staging driver in 2.6.32), TuxOnIce works half the time, suspend-to-RAM tends to reboot the machine on wake, Ubuntu simply hates it, and Netbook Remix has no idea what to do with it because it's a non-Atom netbook.
So you bought a machine to run a non-latest-windows operating system and didn't check for compatibility? And then you blame the OS? Does it run OS X any better? But then again, you never expected it to, did you? I think this expectation of Linux to just work on any random computer tells more about how well Linux actually supports a wide range of hardware, then how horribly broken the hardware support is. It generally works well enough that even people who should know better (self professed Gentoo users definitely included) just don't bother to check for compatibility.
I use Ubuntu and I don't think there is any significant amount of open source software from Apple that I use day-to-day.
There is low level stuff that some of the hardcore BSD people drool over because they see it as a validation that their approach of proprietary-friendly approach is paying of, sometimes I wonder if Apple is practicing selective reinforcement and giving just enough interesting stuff to be able to guide BSD developers in "the right direction".
Apple's biggest contribution to FOSS is probably their KHTML improvements (aka Webkit), which is nice, but not exactly "enormous".
And to think what kind of pain it was to get Apple to follow the spirit (and arguably the word) of the LGPL... However seeing that Apple actively works on some legitimately useful stuff like CUPS, it was probably a case where they considered they didn't need any stinking community help. In other words, it seems that Apple only effectively interacts with the community when they see a direct benefit in doing so. Companies like Red Hat and Canonical, on the other hand seem to have a less short-sighted approach.
Name some mainstream consumer video editing packages that support Theora encoding. A large proportion of video content on the web is produced on the mac and Apple is one of the major supporters of the H.264 standard.
You are changing the subject (cameras vs editors). But anyway.
You found a chicken and egg problem with a proposed standard, congrats.
Editors are software, easily patch-able if there is demand.
Editors can output uncompressed and/or MJPEG which can be used by a dedicated encoder. It's possible to do Theora now, no question about it.
Most people don't even know what software is out there that allows you to play back Theora let alone encode in that format.
Most people don't know about any of it for H.264 either, or for JPEGs or PNGs for that matter. They just go to a site with Firefox or Chrome and Theora video "just works". As far as encoding is concerned, anyone who knows enough to write HTML5 should be able to google for it. It's not obscure enough that there is no info out there, just that many people haven't heard about it.
In short, the tools will come, and rather quickly if anyone wants them, the groundwork has been laid, the user friendly front ends are not that big of a deal.
I think the open source community is wasting its time with this battle when they could be concentrating on developing their server service standards like Open Directory to compete with Active directory and develop a robust replacement for Exchange server.
I think that, unless you expect Firefox developrs to just randomly drop developing a browser and start on random server side projects, you are off topic there.
However, the format of DVDs do not really affect the web in any meaningful way.
Well, thanks for restating what I've been saying all along. What non web-enabled devices use is not relevant. I remind that you argued H.264 should be used because "it's used everywhere", without specifying the everywhere.
I doubt anybody is content with h.263.
So we should all adopt H.264 and pay the MPEG LA through the nose because what you personally believe other people are content or not content with?
Said explanation will probably not be necessary on big sites that would be out of their mind to drop flash support. However trying and failing to load an appropriate system codec might lead to breakage and reflect badly on Firefox even if it wasn't their bug.
Since Firefox users already have to install lots of addons to use their browser, how bad would be to have one extra one?
No one has to install anything to just view websites, you need to install the Flash plugin (which is not a Firefox add-on as such) to play certain games and watch videos. Mozilla wants to bring the videos back into "no additional installation" land, not into "install Flash and a, possibly shady H.264 codec, unless on Win7" land.
Not to mention giving people like me the ability to actually take advantage of the video tag without paying for the rights to encode H.264 and god knows what else after MPEG LA modifies the terms.
MPEG-2 is widely used because of legacy devices. It's not used in new systems.
Theoretically that is the case for MP3 as well, nonetheless no one in their right mind will claim that AAC is "used everywhere" which was the point. MPEG-2 rules, because the DVD isn't going away quite yet. None of this directly relevant to web video.
And Flash is probably more often paired up with h.264 than h.263 these days.
For people who are content to ignore anything but Flash 9 maybe.
And if it isn't yet, it will very soon be.
And Firefox will be paired with Theora if it isn't yet. Or maybe people who are content with Sorenson Spark will see no reason to shell out for H.264, unless you have a crystal ball you can't know what MPEG LA will do at the end of the year.
When I say "good enough", I don't mean good enough for postmark size. Thusnelda is good enough for anything you could realistically stream (bandwidth for full HD is not there yet by a long shot, no matter what the numbers in the ads say). There is a reason why JPEG 2000 hasn't gone anywhere even with digital cameras commonly being over 10 megapixels, JPEG is good enough and not a patent minefield.
Theora is the best we can do right now if licensing issues are not ignored. In a few years the average computer might be able to handle Dirac, but we aren't there yet.
Flash can be H.264, but that's only true for Flash 9. If you want to support Flash 6 and 7 you need Sorenson Spark. If you are content to just support Flash 8 you still need On2 VP6. In short, Flash is Flash, but might play some video formats, Flash 9 and up will play H.264, older versions will not.
So Google, Apple and all the rest who are implementing the video tag are just dumb? Someone enlighten me please.
As far as I'm aware Google and Apple are the only ones implementing the video tag with H.264. Mozilla and Opera along with Google are implementing it with Theora. Who are "all the rest"? Enlighten me please.
The first is a silly argument: Is it somehow better to play on NO computers, than to play on only SOME?
Yes, consistency is better then (from the users point of view) random breakage. If you are dealing with a large number of technically unsophisticated users then having youtube work on one computer and not another without being able to transparently fix it (as opposed to "Click here to install Flash") is worse then it consistently not working with and explanation.
Chrome and Safare is only "everyone else" in the sense that they are a small minority. IE and Firefox have most of the desktop market and Opera is still the mobile leader outside of the iPhone.
At least other browsers would have a standard and didn't need to rely on flash.
Did you just reply without even trying to understand the point? Flash became the de-facto web video standard *because* you couldn't rely on having RealPlayer, Windows Media or Quicktime being installed and have the codec in question. Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
Firefox already kind of is addon hell, where you have to try to find all the plugins you would want from a browser and some of them aren't really that up to par with quality.
Browser extensions and content plugins are completely unrelated, web sites don't rely on extensions, so whatever problems you personally have with those is irrelevant to the discussion.
I hate to break it to you but almost everyone is already using H.264 to distribute video whether it be directly or embedded within a flash video file.
Only "everyone" who is already distributing video on the web, that is to say, a small minority of web sites. Nd even then, not all flash video is H.264 a huge chunk (if not most) is Sorenson Spark as it is has been supported longer in Flash. People who do not yet stream videos are more likely to be affected by what MPEG LA decides to do about distributors. Support in HD video cameras is irrelevant, unless you plan to post full resolution, un-edited videos from them.
It's used everywhere. Most importantly, Flash already uses it. You're most likely watching h.264 video every day.
Not even close. MPEG-2 is more widely used in general and on the web flash is more often paired up with Sorenson Spark. Only Chrome and Safari support H.264 for HTML5 video tags.
Only cell phones are dominated by H.264 and the lifetime of the average cell phone is short enough to upgrade in a few years if MPEG LA really starts going after content providers.
Theora is kinda there, but it misses many features, is more heavy on hardware and requires a larger bitrate to get the same results.
Any benchmarks out there comparing Theora and H.264 CPU only encoding and decoding? Visual quality for web video only need to be "good enough".
It also completely misses support for B-frames, variable frame rates, interlacing, and larger than 8-bits bit-depths.
True, completely false and the last two are irrelevant for web video.
Another thing that manages to create more support for H.264 is that blu-ray, PS3, DVB (digital television in europe, including cable) and several other services and devices already support it.
Again, mostly irrelevant for web video. If you are going to talk about hardware support you talk mobile phones, many of which have hardware H.264 decoders. That is the biggest advantage H.264 has over Theora for web video, but if MPEG LA decides to charge content providers and actively enforce it, then even that can't make enough difference for smaller players.
Since Firefox already has it's Gecko engine and wide range of plugins, why don't they make themself more reasons to forget about Flash and start using open standards?
They are. H.264 is not open enough to be shipped with a FLOSS product that is playing strictly by the rules. The question is why Apple and Microsoft are not supporting open standards, because Theora support is in Chrome and pre-release versions of Opera.
Please review the thread of why h.264 without external packages is not viable. There is no way to "prepare" for Apple paying to their patent interest (they have a patent in the MPEG LA pool for h.264, which at the very least means they have a good legal backing in cases of submarines and probably royalties) any better.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly not the internet as we know it, it would probably be more akin of a Compuserve/AOL/FidoNet frankenstein.
Suspect or hope, they can't know this. And Google is a pretty big target and was On2 back in the day (VP3 has been around). If someone in the business had wanted to flex their patents, why wouldn't they have gone after a big codec developer?
We are talking about yet another encoder module, not an architecture overhaul. You have been a software developer, would you use modules for import/export functionality if you were developing an application that needs to deal with multiple file format? I'm not a professional developers, but I'm not completely clueless to the process either.
If they don't care, they will not encode H.264 with just the right settings for youtube to pass it through without trans-coding. So the answer is, it doesn't matter if their high-bitrate H.264 export gets trans-coded to a lower bitrate H.264 or Theora video.
Except that that wasn't the point you were making (I cannot vouch for what you attempted to make). You said that people wouldn't know how to playback Theora and encode it, basically they wouldn't know what to make of these odd .ogg files. I don't see a way of reading "Most people don't even know what software is out there that allows you to play back Theora [..]" as "Firefox might play back Theora transparently, but since no one publishes Theora videos it doesn't actually 'just work' even if in reality it does as seen by the few people who actually do publish Theora vidoes". I might also add that the latter doesn't make much sense, so I might be completely misreading and would prefer clarification if I am.
There is also Windows Movie Maker for XP, digital cameras that can capture videos in MJPEG and all sorts of other sources outside of the (still relatively small) Mac ecosystem. Youtube still accepts and trans-codes videos from these people, if they switched to Theora today the effect would be minimal.
In case Quicktime and iMovie has a special mode that allows the video to avoid trans-coding there might be a slight quality loss as they would be trans-coded due to the format change. At least until someone gets around to implement it (or they'd insist in continuing to push a format they have for which they have patent in the pool and point fingers at Google).
In the end however, web video is bigger then youtube and what I personally care about is the ability to put my videos on my site without paying a format tax in one way or another. If I have to point to a third party with a flash player for fall back for browsers other then Firefox, Chrome and Opera, then that's still better then having to rely on a third party exclusively. For Firefox to try to support me, more then they try to support Apples video editors is no surprise given their history.
I guess one of those 4 guys must have been an OS X developer... Or OS X developers just decided to randomly take a piece of useless code and base their OS on it, to appeal to the 4 guys... Yeah, makes sense.
You must be on the other slashdot, the one that doesn't have a large number of Apple fanboys.
Unfortunately no everyone shares this attitude. They promote it as the holy grail, and you better not point out the shortcomings.
So you bought a machine to run a non-latest-windows operating system and didn't check for compatibility? And then you blame the OS? Does it run OS X any better? But then again, you never expected it to, did you? I think this expectation of Linux to just work on any random computer tells more about how well Linux actually supports a wide range of hardware, then how horribly broken the hardware support is. It generally works well enough that even people who should know better (self professed Gentoo users definitely included) just don't bother to check for compatibility.
There is low level stuff that some of the hardcore BSD people drool over because they see it as a validation that their approach of proprietary-friendly approach is paying of, sometimes I wonder if Apple is practicing selective reinforcement and giving just enough interesting stuff to be able to guide BSD developers in "the right direction".
And to think what kind of pain it was to get Apple to follow the spirit (and arguably the word) of the LGPL... However seeing that Apple actively works on some legitimately useful stuff like CUPS, it was probably a case where they considered they didn't need any stinking community help. In other words, it seems that Apple only effectively interacts with the community when they see a direct benefit in doing so. Companies like Red Hat and Canonical, on the other hand seem to have a less short-sighted approach.
You are changing the subject (cameras vs editors). But anyway.
Most people don't know about any of it for H.264 either, or for JPEGs or PNGs for that matter. They just go to a site with Firefox or Chrome and Theora video "just works". As far as encoding is concerned, anyone who knows enough to write HTML5 should be able to google for it. It's not obscure enough that there is no info out there, just that many people haven't heard about it.
In short, the tools will come, and rather quickly if anyone wants them, the groundwork has been laid, the user friendly front ends are not that big of a deal.
I think that, unless you expect Firefox developrs to just randomly drop developing a browser and start on random server side projects, you are off topic there.
Well, thanks for restating what I've been saying all along. What non web-enabled devices use is not relevant. I remind that you argued H.264 should be used because "it's used everywhere", without specifying the everywhere.
So we should all adopt H.264 and pay the MPEG LA through the nose because what you personally believe other people are content or not content with?
Said explanation will probably not be necessary on big sites that would be out of their mind to drop flash support. However trying and failing to load an appropriate system codec might lead to breakage and reflect badly on Firefox even if it wasn't their bug.
No one has to install anything to just view websites, you need to install the Flash plugin (which is not a Firefox add-on as such) to play certain games and watch videos. Mozilla wants to bring the videos back into "no additional installation" land, not into "install Flash and a, possibly shady H.264 codec, unless on Win7" land.
Not to mention giving people like me the ability to actually take advantage of the video tag without paying for the rights to encode H.264 and god knows what else after MPEG LA modifies the terms.
Theoretically that is the case for MP3 as well, nonetheless no one in their right mind will claim that AAC is "used everywhere" which was the point. MPEG-2 rules, because the DVD isn't going away quite yet. None of this directly relevant to web video.
For people who are content to ignore anything but Flash 9 maybe.
And Firefox will be paired with Theora if it isn't yet. Or maybe people who are content with Sorenson Spark will see no reason to shell out for H.264, unless you have a crystal ball you can't know what MPEG LA will do at the end of the year.
When I say "good enough", I don't mean good enough for postmark size. Thusnelda is good enough for anything you could realistically stream (bandwidth for full HD is not there yet by a long shot, no matter what the numbers in the ads say). There is a reason why JPEG 2000 hasn't gone anywhere even with digital cameras commonly being over 10 megapixels, JPEG is good enough and not a patent minefield.
Theora is the best we can do right now if licensing issues are not ignored. In a few years the average computer might be able to handle Dirac, but we aren't there yet.
Flash can be H.264, but that's only true for Flash 9. If you want to support Flash 6 and 7 you need Sorenson Spark. If you are content to just support Flash 8 you still need On2 VP6. In short, Flash is Flash, but might play some video formats, Flash 9 and up will play H.264, older versions will not.
Are the two sites named DailyMotion? http://openvideo.dailymotion.com/us
As far as I'm aware Google and Apple are the only ones implementing the video tag with H.264. Mozilla and Opera along with Google are implementing it with Theora. Who are "all the rest"? Enlighten me please.
Do you volunteer to maintain this mess?
Yes, consistency is better then (from the users point of view) random breakage. If you are dealing with a large number of technically unsophisticated users then having youtube work on one computer and not another without being able to transparently fix it (as opposed to "Click here to install Flash") is worse then it consistently not working with and explanation.
Chrome and Safare is only "everyone else" in the sense that they are a small minority. IE and Firefox have most of the desktop market and Opera is still the mobile leader outside of the iPhone.
Did you just reply without even trying to understand the point? Flash became the de-facto web video standard *because* you couldn't rely on having RealPlayer, Windows Media or Quicktime being installed and have the codec in question. Just using whatever codecs are on any given machine leads down exactly the same path.
Browser extensions and content plugins are completely unrelated, web sites don't rely on extensions, so whatever problems you personally have with those is irrelevant to the discussion.
MPEG-LA didn't "open" anything, they are a post-factum licensing agency, the actual standard was created by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group.
Only "everyone" who is already distributing video on the web, that is to say, a small minority of web sites. Nd even then, not all flash video is H.264 a huge chunk (if not most) is Sorenson Spark as it is has been supported longer in Flash. People who do not yet stream videos are more likely to be affected by what MPEG LA decides to do about distributors. Support in HD video cameras is irrelevant, unless you plan to post full resolution, un-edited videos from them.
Not even close. MPEG-2 is more widely used in general and on the web flash is more often paired up with Sorenson Spark. Only Chrome and Safari support H.264 for HTML5 video tags.
Only cell phones are dominated by H.264 and the lifetime of the average cell phone is short enough to upgrade in a few years if MPEG LA really starts going after content providers.
Any benchmarks out there comparing Theora and H.264 CPU only encoding and decoding? Visual quality for web video only need to be "good enough".
True, completely false and the last two are irrelevant for web video.
Again, mostly irrelevant for web video. If you are going to talk about hardware support you talk mobile phones, many of which have hardware H.264 decoders. That is the biggest advantage H.264 has over Theora for web video, but if MPEG LA decides to charge content providers and actively enforce it, then even that can't make enough difference for smaller players.
They are. H.264 is not open enough to be shipped with a FLOSS product that is playing strictly by the rules. The question is why Apple and Microsoft are not supporting open standards, because Theora support is in Chrome and pre-release versions of Opera.
Please review the thread of why h.264 without external packages is not viable. There is no way to "prepare" for Apple paying to their patent interest (they have a patent in the MPEG LA pool for h.264, which at the very least means they have a good legal backing in cases of submarines and probably royalties) any better.