It costs a nonzero amount to get a certificate at all, and a self-signed certificate is barely better than raw http.
It also costs a nonzero amount in server CPU usage and/or dedicated hardware to do the crypto itself, especially the https sessions. For example, Google App Engine will handle the SSL for you for free, using a wildcard cert for *.appspot.com, but the crypto does count towards your CPU quotas.
These two factors suggest that it makes sense for crypto to be used only where needed, rather than using it everywhere we can. Combine that with corporate sluggishness to approve any spending, and you can imagine why even where it is needed, it can be an uphill battle to get it actually adopted.
Nope. As I've repeatedly said, I wish things were otherwise here. I like open formats. I prefer Vorbis, or better yet, Flac, for audio. Unfortunately, Theora just isn't there yet for video.
Please, try to understand that it's possible for someone to actually share your values, yet disagree with you on a factual issue. The fact that I realize Photoshop is generally better than Gimp doesn't mean I'm suddenly an astroturfer for Adobe. The fact that I realize Mumble is better than Ventrilo doesn't mean I'm suddenly a Free Software religious zealot.
Do you see how that works? I actually look at the available evidence and make up my own mind, instead of just believing what I want to believe.
Yes, it's trivial to support Theora,
Great! Have some chipset designs for me?
No?
Then please explain how it's "trivial" to add hardware support for Theora.
not to mention no licensing costs.
I'm a bit tired of repeating myself here...
No licensing costs is great. The question is whether it actually offsets the cost of implementing Theora. You haven't addressed this, you've just handwaved it as "trivial".
As for content, duh. See what the actual Slashdot story is all about?
And did you see the several points in my last post alone in which I pointed out why Google is unlikely to choose Theora? Chicken and egg scenarios aren't fair, but they are reality.
For Google, it's probably cheaper to pay slightly more for Theora storage than the outrageous cost of H.264 in the future.
Citation needed.
And it's not just storage. It's storage and bandwidth, and their consumers' bandwidth -- it's mobile users paying more in data fees, too.
The point with control is that smaller platforms/companies won't easily be able to pay the insane prices the owners are going to charge.
Nor will they be able to develop custom hardware targeted at Theora, will they? No, they'll be taking what they can from the lowest bidder -- which means they'll be looking for stuff that's already mass-produced and has a fair amount of competition.
BTW, that last link of yours is from 2007. Using Theora 1.0. Epic fail on your part.
Provide a better one, then, because every comparison I can find favors h.264 on quality per bit.
All you seem capable of is spreading FUD and lies against Theora.
I'll paypal you $5 if you can show me actually lying.
Is the R&D cost for developing this really going to be lower than a license cost for a hardware design that already exists?
with major players like Mozilla on the desktop and mobile browser leader Opera pushing it in the mobile market, there's a real reason to support it.
Nope, you're still missing a major component -- content.
Theora is more than good enough.
Tell that to Google. Again, we are talking about a major investment in real hardware to store larger files to keep the same amount of quality.
you are indeed arguing that private, commercial entities should be able to dictate what we use where.
You'll note in my original post that I said that Google is unlikely to choose an inferior codec. I didn't say what I would prefer that Google do, only what I suspect they will do, regardless of feedback.
You are also conflating one outcome of a suggestion I've made with the purpose of the suggestion. For example:
With closed, proprietary, costly technology like H.264, corporations are basically dictating what devices you are supposed to access online content from.
First, have you ever seen a corporation refused access to H.264? It costs money, but it's not "dictating" devices any more than the use of ARM is letting ARM dictate what devices you can use. Even OpenMoko used ARM.
But you almost seem to be deliberately missing my point. I am not claiming that I would prefer H.264. I am only claiming that it's ludicrous to suggest that the standard should dictate a format, or that a browser should refuse to support a format (even as a plugin), because of temporary legal restrictions.
Imagine where we'd be now if similar steps had been taken with <img> -- if some genius had "standardized" us on PNG, declaring it to be "good enough", and in particular, refusing to support GIF. Aside from the fact that GIF can be animated, and PNG still hasn't settled on a standard for animation (with poor browser and tool support for each of the options), there's also the need for lossy compression, like JPEG.
And on top of all that, there's the usefulness of being able to simply upload an image in whatever format you've got and expect it to display properly.
You seem to be arguing one size fits all, because you desperately don't want to allow even the possibility of a proprietary codec entering the mix. In the short term, I agree with your goal, and I'd rather not have proprietary codecs involved, at least until their patents expire. In the long term, forcing everyone to transcode to a single codec hurts adoption of the standard today, and its long-term viability.
The quality isn't notiecably lower,
Surely, you must be joking.
I mean, here's the very first hit from a Google search for "h.264 vs theora", which also brings up another problem: Dirac. Suppose Dirac gets their act together and becomes a viable alternative. Should Firefox have to be patched?
Wouldn't it be better if Firefox would simply automatically pick up Dirac, as soon as people install the codec for whatever their OS media framework is?
Mozilla is aiming to reach beyond the desktop. You won't be able to hook into a decoder on all those smaller platforms out there.
Many of them already have decoders, also -- in hardware -- something Theora doesn't have at all, at any price.
You are arguing that H.264 should be able to dictate what devices people use!
No, I am arguing that if we're going to standardize on a codec, it should at least be a state-of-the-art codec, which Theora isn't.
More generally, I am arguing that we should not standardize on a codec yet.
But like it or not, that's the reality right now. Some devices have hardware h.264 decoders, so if you want to reach them, you encode in h.264. If you want to consume YouTube on a handheld device, it might be wise to invest in a hardware h.264 decoder. And so the cycle continues.
I don't like it, but in less than 15 years, the patents will expire, and h.264 will be open. The same can be said for whatever the codec du-jour is.
I mean, let me get this straight -- are you arguing that handheld devices should suck more bandwidth, or display lower-quality movies, while forcing all video hosting services to transcode their videos -- again -- to a lower-quality codec, all so that the handheld manufacturers don't have to pay for an h.264 license? Not that it's the only license they have to pay, mind you...
I'm not sure to what extent this is "storm-in-a-teacup" status, but the DMCA has been frequently abused on YouTube as a means of censorship -- not just by corporations, but by individuals. So has "false flagging" -- a video says something you disagree with? Flag it as inappropriate.
Both of these seem to be handled somewhat mechanically by YouTube. For a good example, search for "What Islam Fears: Laughter," but it's much more common than that -- particularly, creationists like to use it to get atheist videos removed, when their votebots fail to reduce the video's score significantly.
Most recently, VenomFangX (remember him?) pulled a neat little trick in which he false-DMCA'd someone, then dropped it when a counter-notice was filed and accused this person of child molestation, using the personal information from the counter-notice to personally identify him.
So far, I see a ton of comments about HTML5, and that's well and good, open standards are important. But freedom of speech is more important. Granted, it is YouTube's right to censor whatever they wish, but this doesn't seem to be YouTube doing the censoring, or indeed a conscious choice on the part of any human at YouTube -- it's individuals abusing YouTube's flagging and DMCA notice system.
Of course, if Google notices this, expect the next wash of comments to be complaints about the new channel pages -- fair enough, given I don't know a single person who prefers it to the old system -- but not nearly as important as these two issues.
That's the important thing -- HTML5 can be improved by any browser. Flash can only realistically be improved by Adobe right now, at least until Gnash becomes relevant.
Words in boxes can be laid over the video for periods of time that the user selects.
Ah, the annotations. Trivial to do in HTML5.
Youtube currently provides detailed data about the behavior of viewers within the video - including their main interactions with the player. I'm just guessing here, but an open source codec playing a naked video seems highly unlikely to report back to somewhere about how many seconds the viewer watched,
Yes, you are obviously just guessing, and you're dead wrong.
The codec doesn't do the reporting, that's true. Neither does h.264. It's the Flash that does the reporting.
HTML5 has fairly sophisticated Javascript integration. There's absolutely nothing stopping client-side Javascript from reporting exactly the same statistics back to Google.
Flash will happily do it, and whatever else it's programmed to do.
Right. Flash doesn't just magically do this, you have to program it to do so -- just as Google did, and just as they'll do with HTML5.
More to the point, virtually every flash player in wide use does do this.
What makes you think Google just picked up a Flash video widget off the shelf? They wrote their own -- which makes the process exactly the same in HTML as it would be in Flash.
Right, but users of those are like linux users - a minority. Small enough to be a rounding error, frankly.
Frankly, about the same as you'd get with right-click and save-as -- and more than you think, I would guess. In particular, anyone who "mirrors" a YouTube video, or includes clips of others' YouTube videos in their own, if they do it intelligently, they do it by snatching with something like Video Downloader.
Google may be wise enough to know that they can't force savvy users to do anything, there is no point in trying, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Exactly my point.
You're saying that google cares so little about ad revenue on what they do that they may ditch flash anyway.
No, I'm saying they get plenty of ad revenue from "normal" users. There's really no reason to think they'd get less by sticking Vorbis in a <video> tag.
I'm saying that you're right, they don't really care about people using something like a video downloader, so they'll care about as much about the fact that an HTML widget could enable the same thing, only with far less of a kludge.
Let's make a bet. I think they disappoint everyone on HTML5,
They already have an HTML5 player. Not a very good one, but it exists.
and on top of that, you will see them finding more ways to monetize what they currently give away for free.
Yes, they generally do that, but tastefully, as they realize that if they turn into, oh, ign.com, they'll only drive the adoption of ad blockers. It's in their best interest to not overly annoy users.
The only way I see it going the other way is if HTML5 video had feature parity with Flash.
Every single one of the features you mentioned, yes, it does. Combine it with SVG, and the differences become even smaller and more boring.
Is there a solution for all of Google's overlay features
What do you mean by this?
customer spying- i mean, statistics and market intelligence capabilities
Sure, they assume most people will be watching it through a YouTube page. Even if you only grab the naked video, though, they still get your cookies and your IP.
I'm assuming anything that prevents i.e. second by second reporting of how much of the video you watch,
I'm sure they can live without that -- though again, they'd be assuming most people would watch it through the web player.
or current and future in-frame advertising capabilities,
You can already avoid all of the above by using a video downloader. You can also avoid them on any website using an adblocker extension -- yet Google says they welcome adblockers, think they are good for the Web.
And think about it -- if it was really so ludicrous that they'd do this,
Why does Gmail allow ad-free IMAP access?
Why does YouTube not use any kind of DRM, or at least Adobe's Streaming Server? (Seriously, it's not that hard to download naked videos now.)
Why does Google welcome adblockers, despite owning Doubleclick?
Why does Google offer many entirely ad-free services? Last I checked, GOOG-411 had no ads, and I doubt there are any on Google Voice.
As a user, why would I use the HTML version? Simple: First, it's easier for me to remove ads than in the Flash version, if I'm not going to download it. Second, I'm lazy -- much lazier to stream than to download. Third, sometimes the annotations are actually worth reading, or sometimes I want to comment -- all of that's right there, versus having to go find the page again after downloading.
Unlike strong copyleft licenses, the code under the MPL may be combined with proprietary files in one program ("Larger Work"). For example, Netscape 6 and later releases were proprietary versions of the Mozilla Application Suite, by adding the proprietary AIM and other parts. The MPL treats the source code file as the boundary between MPL code and proprietary parts...
There is thus absolutely nothing legally stopping someone from adding h.264 to Firefox. It would just no longer be Free Software.
But here's the kicker: They already provide a plugin interface. That's how we have Flash. But they refuse to provide any kind of plugin architecture for HTML5 codecs.
Most users already have some h.264 decoder, legally or otherwise -- all modern commercial OSes come with them. So there's no legitimate reason for Firefox to refuse to do this -- it's entirely Church of GNU people insisting that everything has to remain Free Software.
Google can take a rather unique approach to this problem. Chrome has AVC and Theora support, but Chrome is actually proprietary, licensed under the Google TOS. The free Chromium code on which it is based, however, does not contain any AVC support.
Chromium hooks into ffmpeg. I haven't tried it recently, but I remember h.264 working.
Sure, Theora is no H.264, but it handily beats the H.263 that YouTube currently uses for downlevel Flash Players
Which is worthless here. Why do you think YouTube is doing that, if, indeed, they're still doing that?
Duh -- to support people who won't (or can't) upgrade their Flash player.
Now, what makes you think those people would be able to play Theora in any sense? If they can install a new browser, they can just as well install Chrome, which supports h.264. If they can install a new Flash player, they've got h.264.
Just what market does this make sense for?
You appear to have just called the members of MPEG-LA "political assholes".
No, I just called the Mozilla Foundation "political assholes".
How much would it cost to move Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation out of the United States?
Not relevant -- they don't provide any framework or support, and in fact work against, any efforts that might be made outside the United States to develop a less-crippled Firefox. In particular, they flatly refuse to make codecs pluggable in any way, let alone native libraries like DirectShow or QuickTime.
Actually there was a bit of a format war about.gif [gnu.org], which is why we have.png [wikipedia.org] available.
There are two key points here.
bennomatic covered one already: The browser supports everything, and you don't have to worry about it. I can do this now for downloaded videos -- no matter what it is, I just open with VLC or mplayer, and it works. The only reason I can't do it for web videos is Firefox is being pissy about it, and Chrome actually has a fairly serious bug in their Linux video playback.
The other point is that PNG was actually much, much better than GIF. There was no way you could reasonably consider using GIF instead of PNG for anything that wasn't animated, other than browser support. So people did it anyway, and browser support followed. If this was the case, then yes, YouTube should support Theora and thus try to force IE to evolve.
The problem is, it's actually technically worse. H.264 licenses aren't cheap, but they're worth it to people who need to store and serve a lot of video.
For another, the LZW patent expired in June 20, 2003, whereas Mozilla Firefox became 1.0 on November 9, 2004.
Mozilla Firefox, if you recall, was the isolation of the web browser that was already present in Mozilla itself, which was released in 1998.
There is no guarantee of a native library for H.264
All modern commercial OSes have an H.264 decoder, at a minimum.
unless the end user has QuickTime installed.
And iTunes is very popular, for those OSes which aren't modern.
Mozilla Corporation, headquartered in the United States, refrains from violating United States patents in order not to get sued.
Which is why it was listed as a "worst case". What troubles and irritates me is that the Firefox developers seem to actively be campaigning against the sort of cooperation I'm talking about -- they don't want it to be easy for anyone to fork Firefox and add h.264, or to do exactly what I'm talking about -- tie it to the local media framework, and prompt the user to download codecs.
The stupidly simple solution is to at least make them pluggable -- even if you don't go the extra mile to plug into existing frameworks that exist for this very purpose, at least make it possible for the user to install additional codecs into the browser. But even this was flat rejected the last time I submitted it as an enhancement request.
Can a Limited User install Chrome Frame, or does it require running the installer as a member of the Administrators group?
Why does it matter?
YouTube uses an H.263 codec for low-power CPUs and down-level Flash players.
And they also use H.264 for HD videos, all the way up to 1080p.
Theora is significantly better than that.
Yes, it's better at something for which it's also a terrible choice. That is, on a low-power CPU, you can get h.264 hardware-accelerated, and h.263 And do you really think someone with a down-level Flash player is going to have an HTML5-enabled or otherwise Theora-friendly setup?
I suppose you might have a point if you're saying Theora is less CPU-intensive than h.263, but I can't actually find any meaningful comparisons, other than claims it's less CPU-intensive than h.264, which is what we're comparing it with.
Re:HTML5 for the win? Sorry, that's not a codec.
on
YouTube Revamp Imminent?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Ok, so how is it going to help Firefox and an open web by implementing that support?
The same way it helps Firefox to implement GIF. Yes, PNG is better, but showing an image, even with questionable legality, is better than showing a "broken picture" icon -- and on the creator side, the more codecs which are supported, the more of a chance people have of just being able to dump their videos on a fileserver and expect people to be able to stream them.
First off, how does it decide which version to download?
Use the native libraries.
What happens if someone downloads Firefox and gets sued because of the patented codecs?
That's not going to happen -- worst case, Mozilla gets sued. I don't think you can sue a consumer for doing that.
And again, use the native libraries. On Windows and OS X, you'll have those proprietary codecs out of the box. On Linux, users will either install them (Medibuntu) or they won't.
If we set a good, patent free standard, their web browsers can have it built in without having to pay for a costly license thus increasing the use of the standard.
Two problems:
First, you aren't going to set a good, patent free standard. A good patent-free codec doesn't exist (sorry, but theora is technically inferior). And Apple has actually said they won't support it, Microsoft doesn't, and there isn't any hardware support.
What's going to happen is, if you refuse to play ball, you will lose, and Firefox will lose market share because of it.
Second, even if you somehow did, it'd still be nice to be able to use old images in their native format. If I've got a Gif for whatever reason, why should I have to convert it to PNG? At least that's lossless -- what if I have a jpeg, should I be forced to convert that to PNG? And what happens when the next shiny new codec comes along?
Think about images, there are a lot of images that would be great as an SVG, but due to some browsers not supporting it (like IE) it has little use.
So?
Really, who cares? Google Wave doesn't support IE. If IE users really need modern technologies, they can install Chrome Frame.
If the video codec specified that videos should be a in a free format, IE would almost have to use a free format if it supported HTML5, or miss out on video sites coded to the standard.
Yes, but you are thinking about this backwards.
Think of it from Google's perspective. You're apparently hoping that Google will spend thousands of dollars (millions?) on extra hardware to re-encode their videos (again!), as well as extra storage to get the same quality in Vorbis, and then drop their Flash support, thus forcing everyone to upgrade.
Do you really think they'd take that gamble?
I mean, if it works, every YouTube user is forced to upgrade to a modern browser. But that's not going to happen everywhere (corporate environments), and everywhere else, you're gambling that the users will want YouTube badly enough to switch browsers, versus just switching to blip.tv, vimeo, dailymotion, revver, etc. Even if it works, it's still likely a significant hit in marketshare from users who either can't or won't make the switch.
The only way I can see them doing that is if something even crazier happens -- Microsoft supports HTML5 out of the goodness of their heart. But having good support for web standards in IE is actually counter to Microsoft's interests -- the stronger the Web is as a platform, the weaker Windows is.
Think of it in terms of actual corporations and dollars. It doesn't work.
Now, suppose the situation were different. If you can actually come up with a patent-free format which is technically better than the proprietary ones, I can definitely see Google taking that gamble, because that actually saves them money in the long term. And
Re:HTML5 for the win? Sorry, that's not a codec.
on
YouTube Revamp Imminent?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
This is like the open source proponents who mentioned Ogg Vorbis a few years ago as a solution to DRM, and it's clear now that DRM-free watermarked MP3 is the winner in the marketplace today.
Missing the point. Vorbis is not, and never was, about DRM. It's about having a patent-free codec. It's about having a format that works out of the box on something like Ubuntu, legally, anywhere in the world.
Contrast with MP3 -- it's actually very likely not legal to include mp3 support in open source software at all, at least if you're going to keep it free (as in beer).
The only technical reason to prefer MP3 to Vorbis is device support. The way to improve device support is to raise awareness about these issues and get people to actually use Vorbis.
Even worse, it's the same people behind it...
Who?
that's still under debate.
Actually, the debate is pretty much over. HTML5's <video> tag specifies codec and format precisely as much as HTML4's <img> tag specifies image format -- that is, not at all.
HTML5 doesn't solve Google's problems with YouTube.
Which problems would those be?
Using HTML5 without calling for a codec is like an incomplete function call.
Wow, even worse than BadAnalogyGuy. Really?
You need to say which codec you want YouTube to use,
No, I really don't.
I mean, yes, it might help to do so -- but that's unlikely to get anywhere. There currently isn't a free video codec that matches the proprietary ones, technologically, and even if there was, it seems incredibly unlikely that YouTube would go to the trouble of transcoding all of their video -- again.
If YouTube were to implement HTML5 support with, say, h.264 in an mp4 container, they'd have to do no transcoding, probably not even re-encapsulating. It would Just Work on Chrome and Safari, and there's no technological reason it couldn't work on Firefox -- only political assholes who refuse to implement such support, even in countries which don't respect software patents. If IE ever decides to support HTML5 at all, I very much doubt that Microsoft doesn't have h.264 licenses. Only Opera really has an excuse here.
Now, technically, if they went with Theora, it could be supported everywhere -- every browser which supports HTML5 supports Theora out of the box, except Safari, and it's trivial to install a QuickTime plugin. But the question then becomes whether it's worth it for Google to do HTML5 at all, if they have to transcode everything to get the best browser coverage.
we could just see HTML5 + Flash on YouTube while other sites use other codecs....and not make much of a change.
Surely you're joking.
There may be legal hurdles, but any browser that wants to could simply hook into a third-party codec library. On Windows, that's DirectShow. On OS X, it's QuickTime. On Linux, it's GStreamer, Xine, or ffmpeg. All of these support every codec that's even being considered for HTML5, and many more.
It would basically make it as easy to embed videos as it currently is to embed images. After all, <img> doesn't specify a format -- why aren't you waging a "codec war" about image formats?
It would also get us the ability to use purely open source software for our web browsing again, or at least for our YouTube -- no need for Flash. It'd also give us the ability to right-click and do something like "save video as", or click+drag a video to our desktop, or email. It'd also greatly simplify anything else which just wants the video -- for example, any sort of set-top box, etc, now only needs a web browser, or even just something that can scrape the YouTube HTML, instead of a web browser and a Flash port.
Do you honestly believe that HTML5, even without specifying a codec, would change nothing? Do I have to explicitly
We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data.
Bullshit.
Ok, maybe it's true, but it seems much more likely that this was about them conserving CPU, not about you getting your email faster. That would be why it's taken until now for them to take this step.
Of course, it's still fairly useless if I stay logged in -- then my session could still be hijacked from vanilla Google searches...
Even if that were the case, there are better approaches. After all, you don't want their reply to be lost in the spam -- better to set up an alias somewhere.
Or better yet, use a spamfilter that actually works.
Chrome also proves that users don't care about handing control of everything they see and do on the internet to a single private corporation,
Sorry, what? [Citation Needed]
Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium plus actually-licensed h.264 decoders and such. The very few ways in which Chrome may be telling Google about what you are doing can be disabled.
I think the big barrier here is that it's not going to show up in the right-click menu. However:
New Tab Homepage
Built in, I think.
Tooltip Plus
I doubt this would be a problem.
WebMail Notifier
Variants of this very likely already exist.
they do not need to modify browser UI so much.
Neither do at least a few of what you suggested.
Now, you're right, and I hope these eventually get fixed. But there is one good part: I was able to write a functional adblocker in an afternoon. Frankly, if Chrome doesn't add support for things like this, I will (though not soon).
Contrary to popular belief, people can't multitask.
You might have a valid point that a person can't multitask. People certainly can -- for instance, I am not in a position to actually do very much, but I can certainly write about it.
Also, contrary to popular belief, talking about it is doing something about it. It's convincing other people to choose OpenGL, or at least do their own research, rather than choosing DirectX because they assume it's better. It's also bringing attention to the problem.
Finally, the guy who wrote TFA is doing something about it -- he develops an OpenGL game.
I base this on the quality of my past coworkers. I was probably lucky, though.
2) the quality of commonly held CS degrees
I'm at Iowa State University right now. It seems to be an exceptionally-good CS program. Depending on the kinds of friends I make here, I'll probably end up in a job with some of my classmates.
3) how much of their education you or anyone else remembers five to ten years after leaving college
The parts you use.
It's also much easier to re-learn something than to learn it from scratch -- thus, Zed could've said "brush up on your statistics", not "learn statistics".
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pain in the ass to set up - do YOU want to have to configure everyone's email, etc. to use it?
Yes, actually, if I'm their admin. If I can't do something as simple as reconfigure everyone's email by throwing a switch, I'm probably a lousy admin.
Also only has to be set up once.
You're already leaking your sh*t all over the net
Only if you're careless, which is actually the point of the original question, I think -- why are people so careless about this?
if you use google docs, you're letting an advertising company look at all your information.
Better one advertising company under a contract that doesn't let them do evil stuff with it, than anyone who happens to sniff it, anywhere.
Yes, unsigned encryption is vulnerable to MITM. So what? It protects against the far more common traffic sniffing...
I wonder if traffic sniffing is far more common because it's easy to do, because we aren't really doing opportunistic encryption?
It costs a nonzero amount to get a certificate at all, and a self-signed certificate is barely better than raw http.
It also costs a nonzero amount in server CPU usage and/or dedicated hardware to do the crypto itself, especially the https sessions. For example, Google App Engine will handle the SSL for you for free, using a wildcard cert for *.appspot.com, but the crypto does count towards your CPU quotas.
These two factors suggest that it makes sense for crypto to be used only where needed, rather than using it everywhere we can. Combine that with corporate sluggishness to approve any spending, and you can imagine why even where it is needed, it can be an uphill battle to get it actually adopted.
Wow, do you work for the H.264 guys or something?
Nope. As I've repeatedly said, I wish things were otherwise here. I like open formats. I prefer Vorbis, or better yet, Flac, for audio. Unfortunately, Theora just isn't there yet for video.
Please, try to understand that it's possible for someone to actually share your values, yet disagree with you on a factual issue. The fact that I realize Photoshop is generally better than Gimp doesn't mean I'm suddenly an astroturfer for Adobe. The fact that I realize Mumble is better than Ventrilo doesn't mean I'm suddenly a Free Software religious zealot.
Do you see how that works? I actually look at the available evidence and make up my own mind, instead of just believing what I want to believe.
Yes, it's trivial to support Theora,
Great! Have some chipset designs for me?
No?
Then please explain how it's "trivial" to add hardware support for Theora.
not to mention no licensing costs.
I'm a bit tired of repeating myself here...
No licensing costs is great. The question is whether it actually offsets the cost of implementing Theora. You haven't addressed this, you've just handwaved it as "trivial".
As for content, duh. See what the actual Slashdot story is all about?
And did you see the several points in my last post alone in which I pointed out why Google is unlikely to choose Theora? Chicken and egg scenarios aren't fair, but they are reality.
For Google, it's probably cheaper to pay slightly more for Theora storage than the outrageous cost of H.264 in the future.
Citation needed.
And it's not just storage. It's storage and bandwidth, and their consumers' bandwidth -- it's mobile users paying more in data fees, too.
The point with control is that smaller platforms/companies won't easily be able to pay the insane prices the owners are going to charge.
Nor will they be able to develop custom hardware targeted at Theora, will they? No, they'll be taking what they can from the lowest bidder -- which means they'll be looking for stuff that's already mass-produced and has a fair amount of competition.
BTW, that last link of yours is from 2007. Using Theora 1.0. Epic fail on your part.
Provide a better one, then, because every comparison I can find favors h.264 on quality per bit.
All you seem capable of is spreading FUD and lies against Theora.
I'll paypal you $5 if you can show me actually lying.
But it's trivially easy to do.
Trivially? I mean...
In fact, there's no license cost at all,
Is the R&D cost for developing this really going to be lower than a license cost for a hardware design that already exists?
with major players like Mozilla on the desktop and mobile browser leader Opera pushing it in the mobile market, there's a real reason to support it.
Nope, you're still missing a major component -- content.
Theora is more than good enough.
Tell that to Google. Again, we are talking about a major investment in real hardware to store larger files to keep the same amount of quality.
you are indeed arguing that private, commercial entities should be able to dictate what we use where.
You'll note in my original post that I said that Google is unlikely to choose an inferior codec. I didn't say what I would prefer that Google do, only what I suspect they will do, regardless of feedback.
You are also conflating one outcome of a suggestion I've made with the purpose of the suggestion. For example:
With closed, proprietary, costly technology like H.264, corporations are basically dictating what devices you are supposed to access online content from.
First, have you ever seen a corporation refused access to H.264? It costs money, but it's not "dictating" devices any more than the use of ARM is letting ARM dictate what devices you can use. Even OpenMoko used ARM.
But you almost seem to be deliberately missing my point. I am not claiming that I would prefer H.264. I am only claiming that it's ludicrous to suggest that the standard should dictate a format, or that a browser should refuse to support a format (even as a plugin), because of temporary legal restrictions.
Imagine where we'd be now if similar steps had been taken with <img> -- if some genius had "standardized" us on PNG, declaring it to be "good enough", and in particular, refusing to support GIF. Aside from the fact that GIF can be animated, and PNG still hasn't settled on a standard for animation (with poor browser and tool support for each of the options), there's also the need for lossy compression, like JPEG.
And on top of all that, there's the usefulness of being able to simply upload an image in whatever format you've got and expect it to display properly.
You seem to be arguing one size fits all, because you desperately don't want to allow even the possibility of a proprietary codec entering the mix. In the short term, I agree with your goal, and I'd rather not have proprietary codecs involved, at least until their patents expire. In the long term, forcing everyone to transcode to a single codec hurts adoption of the standard today, and its long-term viability.
The quality isn't notiecably lower,
Surely, you must be joking.
I mean, here's the very first hit from a Google search for "h.264 vs theora", which also brings up another problem: Dirac. Suppose Dirac gets their act together and becomes a viable alternative. Should Firefox have to be patched?
Wouldn't it be better if Firefox would simply automatically pick up Dirac, as soon as people install the codec for whatever their OS media framework is?
Mozilla is aiming to reach beyond the desktop. You won't be able to hook into a decoder on all those smaller platforms out there.
Many of them already have decoders, also -- in hardware -- something Theora doesn't have at all, at any price.
You are arguing that H.264 should be able to dictate what devices people use!
No, I am arguing that if we're going to standardize on a codec, it should at least be a state-of-the-art codec, which Theora isn't.
More generally, I am arguing that we should not standardize on a codec yet.
But like it or not, that's the reality right now. Some devices have hardware h.264 decoders, so if you want to reach them, you encode in h.264. If you want to consume YouTube on a handheld device, it might be wise to invest in a hardware h.264 decoder. And so the cycle continues.
I don't like it, but in less than 15 years, the patents will expire, and h.264 will be open. The same can be said for whatever the codec du-jour is.
I mean, let me get this straight -- are you arguing that handheld devices should suck more bandwidth, or display lower-quality movies, while forcing all video hosting services to transcode their videos -- again -- to a lower-quality codec, all so that the handheld manufacturers don't have to pay for an h.264 license? Not that it's the only license they have to pay, mind you...
Why do I get the feeling that the bot's first words are going to be OMGWTFBBQ?
I'm not sure to what extent this is "storm-in-a-teacup" status, but the DMCA has been frequently abused on YouTube as a means of censorship -- not just by corporations, but by individuals. So has "false flagging" -- a video says something you disagree with? Flag it as inappropriate.
Both of these seem to be handled somewhat mechanically by YouTube. For a good example, search for "What Islam Fears: Laughter," but it's much more common than that -- particularly, creationists like to use it to get atheist videos removed, when their votebots fail to reduce the video's score significantly.
Most recently, VenomFangX (remember him?) pulled a neat little trick in which he false-DMCA'd someone, then dropped it when a counter-notice was filed and accused this person of child molestation, using the personal information from the counter-notice to personally identify him.
So far, I see a ton of comments about HTML5, and that's well and good, open standards are important. But freedom of speech is more important. Granted, it is YouTube's right to censor whatever they wish, but this doesn't seem to be YouTube doing the censoring, or indeed a conscious choice on the part of any human at YouTube -- it's individuals abusing YouTube's flagging and DMCA notice system.
Of course, if Google notices this, expect the next wash of comments to be complaints about the new channel pages -- fair enough, given I don't know a single person who prefers it to the old system -- but not nearly as important as these two issues.
Well, and only when Adobe makes it work.
That's the important thing -- HTML5 can be improved by any browser. Flash can only realistically be improved by Adobe right now, at least until Gnash becomes relevant.
Vimeo had HD first, and they currently give you a direct link to download the original video, if you have an account.
I don't know if they're doing any HTML5, though.
Words in boxes can be laid over the video for periods of time that the user selects.
Ah, the annotations. Trivial to do in HTML5.
Youtube currently provides detailed data about the behavior of viewers within the video - including their main interactions with the player. I'm just guessing here, but an open source codec playing a naked video seems highly unlikely to report back to somewhere about how many seconds the viewer watched,
Yes, you are obviously just guessing, and you're dead wrong.
The codec doesn't do the reporting, that's true. Neither does h.264. It's the Flash that does the reporting.
HTML5 has fairly sophisticated Javascript integration. There's absolutely nothing stopping client-side Javascript from reporting exactly the same statistics back to Google.
Flash will happily do it, and whatever else it's programmed to do.
Right. Flash doesn't just magically do this, you have to program it to do so -- just as Google did, and just as they'll do with HTML5.
More to the point, virtually every flash player in wide use does do this.
What makes you think Google just picked up a Flash video widget off the shelf? They wrote their own -- which makes the process exactly the same in HTML as it would be in Flash.
Right, but users of those are like linux users - a minority. Small enough to be a rounding error, frankly.
Frankly, about the same as you'd get with right-click and save-as -- and more than you think, I would guess. In particular, anyone who "mirrors" a YouTube video, or includes clips of others' YouTube videos in their own, if they do it intelligently, they do it by snatching with something like Video Downloader.
Google may be wise enough to know that they can't force savvy users to do anything, there is no point in trying, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Exactly my point.
You're saying that google cares so little about ad revenue on what they do that they may ditch flash anyway.
No, I'm saying they get plenty of ad revenue from "normal" users. There's really no reason to think they'd get less by sticking Vorbis in a <video> tag.
I'm saying that you're right, they don't really care about people using something like a video downloader, so they'll care about as much about the fact that an HTML widget could enable the same thing, only with far less of a kludge.
Let's make a bet. I think they disappoint everyone on HTML5,
They already have an HTML5 player. Not a very good one, but it exists.
and on top of that, you will see them finding more ways to monetize what they currently give away for free.
Yes, they generally do that, but tastefully, as they realize that if they turn into, oh, ign.com, they'll only drive the adoption of ad blockers. It's in their best interest to not overly annoy users.
The only way I see it going the other way is if HTML5 video had feature parity with Flash.
Every single one of the features you mentioned, yes, it does. Combine it with SVG, and the differences become even smaller and more boring.
Is there a solution for all of Google's overlay features
What do you mean by this?
customer spying- i mean, statistics and market intelligence capabilities
Sure, they assume most people will be watching it through a YouTube page. Even if you only grab the naked video, though, they still get your cookies and your IP.
I'm assuming anything that prevents i.e. second by second reporting of how much of the video you watch,
I'm sure they can live without that -- though again, they'd be assuming most people would watch it through the web player.
or current and future in-frame advertising capabilities,
You can already avoid all of the above by using a video downloader. You can also avoid them on any website using an adblocker extension -- yet Google says they welcome adblockers, think they are good for the Web.
And think about it -- if it was really so ludicrous that they'd do this,
As a user, why would I use the HTML version? Simple: First, it's easier for me to remove ads than in the Flash version, if I'm not going to download it. Second, I'm lazy -- much lazier to stream than to download. Third, sometimes the annotations are actually worth reading, or sometimes I want to comment -- all of that's right there, versus having to go find the page again after downloading.
Firefox, however, can not provide AVC support because of legal hurdles.
Sure they could, but that's not what I'm suggesting.
I haven't read the MPL,
Here's a summary:
Unlike strong copyleft licenses, the code under the MPL may be combined with proprietary files in one program ("Larger Work"). For example, Netscape 6 and later releases were proprietary versions of the Mozilla Application Suite, by adding the proprietary AIM and other parts. The MPL treats the source code file as the boundary between MPL code and proprietary parts...
There is thus absolutely nothing legally stopping someone from adding h.264 to Firefox. It would just no longer be Free Software.
But here's the kicker: They already provide a plugin interface. That's how we have Flash. But they refuse to provide any kind of plugin architecture for HTML5 codecs.
Most users already have some h.264 decoder, legally or otherwise -- all modern commercial OSes come with them. So there's no legitimate reason for Firefox to refuse to do this -- it's entirely Church of GNU people insisting that everything has to remain Free Software.
Google can take a rather unique approach to this problem. Chrome has AVC and Theora support, but Chrome is actually proprietary, licensed under the Google TOS. The free Chromium code on which it is based, however, does not contain any AVC support.
Chromium hooks into ffmpeg. I haven't tried it recently, but I remember h.264 working.
Sure, Theora is no H.264, but it handily beats the H.263 that YouTube currently uses for downlevel Flash Players
Which is worthless here. Why do you think YouTube is doing that, if, indeed, they're still doing that?
Duh -- to support people who won't (or can't) upgrade their Flash player.
Now, what makes you think those people would be able to play Theora in any sense? If they can install a new browser, they can just as well install Chrome, which supports h.264. If they can install a new Flash player, they've got h.264.
Just what market does this make sense for?
You appear to have just called the members of MPEG-LA "political assholes".
No, I just called the Mozilla Foundation "political assholes".
How much would it cost to move Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation out of the United States?
Not relevant -- they don't provide any framework or support, and in fact work against, any efforts that might be made outside the United States to develop a less-crippled Firefox. In particular, they flatly refuse to make codecs pluggable in any way, let alone native libraries like DirectShow or QuickTime.
Actually there was a bit of a format war about .gif [gnu.org], which is why we have .png [wikipedia.org] available.
There are two key points here.
bennomatic covered one already: The browser supports everything, and you don't have to worry about it. I can do this now for downloaded videos -- no matter what it is, I just open with VLC or mplayer, and it works. The only reason I can't do it for web videos is Firefox is being pissy about it, and Chrome actually has a fairly serious bug in their Linux video playback.
The other point is that PNG was actually much, much better than GIF. There was no way you could reasonably consider using GIF instead of PNG for anything that wasn't animated, other than browser support. So people did it anyway, and browser support followed. If this was the case, then yes, YouTube should support Theora and thus try to force IE to evolve.
The problem is, it's actually technically worse. H.264 licenses aren't cheap, but they're worth it to people who need to store and serve a lot of video.
For another, the LZW patent expired in June 20, 2003, whereas Mozilla Firefox became 1.0 on November 9, 2004.
Mozilla Firefox, if you recall, was the isolation of the web browser that was already present in Mozilla itself, which was released in 1998.
There is no guarantee of a native library for H.264
All modern commercial OSes have an H.264 decoder, at a minimum.
unless the end user has QuickTime installed.
And iTunes is very popular, for those OSes which aren't modern.
Mozilla Corporation, headquartered in the United States, refrains from violating United States patents in order not to get sued.
Which is why it was listed as a "worst case". What troubles and irritates me is that the Firefox developers seem to actively be campaigning against the sort of cooperation I'm talking about -- they don't want it to be easy for anyone to fork Firefox and add h.264, or to do exactly what I'm talking about -- tie it to the local media framework, and prompt the user to download codecs.
The stupidly simple solution is to at least make them pluggable -- even if you don't go the extra mile to plug into existing frameworks that exist for this very purpose, at least make it possible for the user to install additional codecs into the browser. But even this was flat rejected the last time I submitted it as an enhancement request.
Can a Limited User install Chrome Frame, or does it require running the installer as a member of the Administrators group?
Why does it matter?
YouTube uses an H.263 codec for low-power CPUs and down-level Flash players.
And they also use H.264 for HD videos, all the way up to 1080p.
Theora is significantly better than that.
Yes, it's better at something for which it's also a terrible choice. That is, on a low-power CPU, you can get h.264 hardware-accelerated, and h.263 And do you really think someone with a down-level Flash player is going to have an HTML5-enabled or otherwise Theora-friendly setup?
I suppose you might have a point if you're saying Theora is less CPU-intensive than h.263, but I can't actually find any meaningful comparisons, other than claims it's less CPU-intensive than h.264, which is what we're comparing it with.
Ok, so how is it going to help Firefox and an open web by implementing that support?
The same way it helps Firefox to implement GIF. Yes, PNG is better, but showing an image, even with questionable legality, is better than showing a "broken picture" icon -- and on the creator side, the more codecs which are supported, the more of a chance people have of just being able to dump their videos on a fileserver and expect people to be able to stream them.
First off, how does it decide which version to download?
Use the native libraries.
What happens if someone downloads Firefox and gets sued because of the patented codecs?
That's not going to happen -- worst case, Mozilla gets sued. I don't think you can sue a consumer for doing that.
And again, use the native libraries. On Windows and OS X, you'll have those proprietary codecs out of the box. On Linux, users will either install them (Medibuntu) or they won't.
If we set a good, patent free standard, their web browsers can have it built in without having to pay for a costly license thus increasing the use of the standard.
Two problems:
First, you aren't going to set a good, patent free standard. A good patent-free codec doesn't exist (sorry, but theora is technically inferior). And Apple has actually said they won't support it, Microsoft doesn't, and there isn't any hardware support.
What's going to happen is, if you refuse to play ball, you will lose, and Firefox will lose market share because of it.
Second, even if you somehow did, it'd still be nice to be able to use old images in their native format. If I've got a Gif for whatever reason, why should I have to convert it to PNG? At least that's lossless -- what if I have a jpeg, should I be forced to convert that to PNG? And what happens when the next shiny new codec comes along?
Think about images, there are a lot of images that would be great as an SVG, but due to some browsers not supporting it (like IE) it has little use.
So?
Really, who cares? Google Wave doesn't support IE. If IE users really need modern technologies, they can install Chrome Frame.
If the video codec specified that videos should be a in a free format, IE would almost have to use a free format if it supported HTML5, or miss out on video sites coded to the standard.
Yes, but you are thinking about this backwards.
Think of it from Google's perspective. You're apparently hoping that Google will spend thousands of dollars (millions?) on extra hardware to re-encode their videos (again!), as well as extra storage to get the same quality in Vorbis, and then drop their Flash support, thus forcing everyone to upgrade.
Do you really think they'd take that gamble?
I mean, if it works, every YouTube user is forced to upgrade to a modern browser. But that's not going to happen everywhere (corporate environments), and everywhere else, you're gambling that the users will want YouTube badly enough to switch browsers, versus just switching to blip.tv, vimeo, dailymotion, revver, etc. Even if it works, it's still likely a significant hit in marketshare from users who either can't or won't make the switch.
The only way I can see them doing that is if something even crazier happens -- Microsoft supports HTML5 out of the goodness of their heart. But having good support for web standards in IE is actually counter to Microsoft's interests -- the stronger the Web is as a platform, the weaker Windows is.
Think of it in terms of actual corporations and dollars. It doesn't work.
Now, suppose the situation were different. If you can actually come up with a patent-free format which is technically better than the proprietary ones, I can definitely see Google taking that gamble, because that actually saves them money in the long term. And
This is like the open source proponents who mentioned Ogg Vorbis a few years ago as a solution to DRM, and it's clear now that DRM-free watermarked MP3 is the winner in the marketplace today.
Missing the point. Vorbis is not, and never was, about DRM. It's about having a patent-free codec. It's about having a format that works out of the box on something like Ubuntu, legally, anywhere in the world.
Contrast with MP3 -- it's actually very likely not legal to include mp3 support in open source software at all, at least if you're going to keep it free (as in beer).
The only technical reason to prefer MP3 to Vorbis is device support. The way to improve device support is to raise awareness about these issues and get people to actually use Vorbis.
Even worse, it's the same people behind it...
Who?
that's still under debate.
Actually, the debate is pretty much over. HTML5's <video> tag specifies codec and format precisely as much as HTML4's <img> tag specifies image format -- that is, not at all.
HTML5 doesn't solve Google's problems with YouTube.
Which problems would those be?
Using HTML5 without calling for a codec is like an incomplete function call.
Wow, even worse than BadAnalogyGuy. Really?
You need to say which codec you want YouTube to use,
No, I really don't.
I mean, yes, it might help to do so -- but that's unlikely to get anywhere. There currently isn't a free video codec that matches the proprietary ones, technologically, and even if there was, it seems incredibly unlikely that YouTube would go to the trouble of transcoding all of their video -- again.
If YouTube were to implement HTML5 support with, say, h.264 in an mp4 container, they'd have to do no transcoding, probably not even re-encapsulating. It would Just Work on Chrome and Safari, and there's no technological reason it couldn't work on Firefox -- only political assholes who refuse to implement such support, even in countries which don't respect software patents. If IE ever decides to support HTML5 at all, I very much doubt that Microsoft doesn't have h.264 licenses. Only Opera really has an excuse here.
Now, technically, if they went with Theora, it could be supported everywhere -- every browser which supports HTML5 supports Theora out of the box, except Safari, and it's trivial to install a QuickTime plugin. But the question then becomes whether it's worth it for Google to do HTML5 at all, if they have to transcode everything to get the best browser coverage.
we could just see HTML5 + Flash on YouTube while other sites use other codecs....and not make much of a change.
Surely you're joking.
There may be legal hurdles, but any browser that wants to could simply hook into a third-party codec library. On Windows, that's DirectShow. On OS X, it's QuickTime. On Linux, it's GStreamer, Xine, or ffmpeg. All of these support every codec that's even being considered for HTML5, and many more.
It would basically make it as easy to embed videos as it currently is to embed images. After all, <img> doesn't specify a format -- why aren't you waging a "codec war" about image formats?
It would also get us the ability to use purely open source software for our web browsing again, or at least for our YouTube -- no need for Flash. It'd also give us the ability to right-click and do something like "save video as", or click+drag a video to our desktop, or email. It'd also greatly simplify anything else which just wants the video -- for example, any sort of set-top box, etc, now only needs a web browser, or even just something that can scrape the YouTube HTML, instead of a web browser and a Flash port.
Do you honestly believe that HTML5, even without specifying a codec, would change nothing? Do I have to explicitly
We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data.
Bullshit.
Ok, maybe it's true, but it seems much more likely that this was about them conserving CPU, not about you getting your email faster. That would be why it's taken until now for them to take this step.
Of course, it's still fairly useless if I stay logged in -- then my session could still be hijacked from vanilla Google searches...
Even if that were the case, there are better approaches. After all, you don't want their reply to be lost in the spam -- better to set up an alias somewhere.
Or better yet, use a spamfilter that actually works.
Chrome also proves that users don't care about handing control of everything they see and do on the internet to a single private corporation,
Sorry, what? [Citation Needed]
Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium plus actually-licensed h.264 decoders and such. The very few ways in which Chrome may be telling Google about what you are doing can be disabled.
IE View
There's an IETab.
Nuke Anything Enhanced
I think the big barrier here is that it's not going to show up in the right-click menu. However:
New Tab Homepage
Built in, I think.
Tooltip Plus
I doubt this would be a problem.
WebMail Notifier
Variants of this very likely already exist.
they do not need to modify browser UI so much.
Neither do at least a few of what you suggested.
Now, you're right, and I hope these eventually get fixed. But there is one good part: I was able to write a functional adblocker in an afternoon. Frankly, if Chrome doesn't add support for things like this, I will (though not soon).
Contrary to popular belief, people can't multitask.
You might have a valid point that a person can't multitask. People certainly can -- for instance, I am not in a position to actually do very much, but I can certainly write about it.
Also, contrary to popular belief, talking about it is doing something about it. It's convincing other people to choose OpenGL, or at least do their own research, rather than choosing DirectX because they assume it's better. It's also bringing attention to the problem.
Finally, the guy who wrote TFA is doing something about it -- he develops an OpenGL game.
I'm not sure what OS you use, but Chrome looks native on the OSes I run it on,
Really? The borders don't look, I don't know, distinctively blue?
And if you want to prove it, open a new tab, check your history, check your downloads, whatever... and hit ctrl+U.
1) the quality of your future coworkers
I base this on the quality of my past coworkers. I was probably lucky, though.
2) the quality of commonly held CS degrees
I'm at Iowa State University right now. It seems to be an exceptionally-good CS program. Depending on the kinds of friends I make here, I'll probably end up in a job with some of my classmates.
3) how much of their education you or anyone else remembers five to ten years after leaving college
The parts you use.
It's also much easier to re-learn something than to learn it from scratch -- thus, Zed could've said "brush up on your statistics", not "learn statistics".