Refusing to support h.264 in HTML5 is not going to stop anyone using h.264, it's going to stop people using HTML5 since they'll just use Flash instead.
They don't lose anything keeping the extra functionality,
No, there is a very real reason they are doing this: Somebody just recently cracked the hypervisor that they use to run Linux without exposing the entire hardware. This leads to a very real risk of cracking their copy protection system.
Now, you might argue that that's not actually a loss since it would make more people interested in the platform, or whatever, but clearly Sony don't see it that way. To them, losing the DRM is a real loss, and this is what they did to prevent this.
Open Source has consistently failed to produce anything remotely like a decent video codec so far. The only serious attempt is Theora, and that was commercially developed and donated as open source once it was irrelevant, and then people just polished it up a bit.
Codec design is hard, lots of work, and boring. It's exactly the kind of thing open source developers are bad at.
And iTunes and Quicktime are built on compatibility layers of OS X functionality. So they are suffering from the exact same problem, and are more examples of why Jobs is right.
Technically the agreement doesn't allow that, but Apple is not going to enforce that against you, because they don't care about that kind of thing (as evidenced by what Steve Jobs said) and do not have any way to tell in the first place.
The problem here is that in order to target Windows Phone 7 Series, Android, and iPhone OS, you'll have to completely rewrite both the front-end and the back-end in C#, Java, and Objective-C respectively.
And that's what you do, if you want to make a good app. Nobody has a problem with this, including Steve Jobs.
No, games are usually much easier to make work cross-platform. They are the ones that usually have the least problems with this, and even those people complain endlessly about.
I don't use it on OS X, because it does not behave very well on OS X, and that's after Mozilla put in a huge amount of effort to specialize their code for each platform.
This is the one. He wants apps written for the iPhone, not apps that try to shoehorn some kind of cross-platform abstraction on top of the iPhone, because that usually sucks, and (at least in his eyes) it makes the iPhone look bad if the apps look bad.
How many times do you hear gamers complain that a game is a crappy port because it is not properly written for the platform it is on, but instead tries squeeze in the functionality of some other platform? That is the exact thing he doesn't want on his platform.
The fact that some features might be less useful does not mean they are all useless. And pretty much everyone who knows anything about video formats agree that Theora is sorely lacking and is unable to ever catch up with h.264 as things stand right now.
All the yelling of "correlation is not causation" is pretty much the low mark of intellectual laziness on Slashdot. Most of the time when someone yells that, it actually means "I don't like the results of this research" or possibly "I like to look clever". In this case, I think it means "I only read the headline and I didn't like even that".
Besides, pretty much any driver for any modern video card out there supports OpenGL, why would they want to do this?
Maybe because they actually tried to use OpenGL and found it wouldn't work quite as smoothly as you think it does? You know, they are actually writing a browser used by a huge number of people here, they actually have some experience with these things. They're not doing this for the hell of it.
It's not so much that OpenGL ES is implemented on top of OpenGL, it's that you can just call OpenGL as usual instead of OpenGL ES, since most functions are just the exact same thing. OpenGL ES just leaves functionality out (assuming your OpenGL implementation is new enough).
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty fast.
So you do not use Flash, then?
If you hadn't noticed, Firefox already plays h.264 just fine. Through Flash.
Theora is particularly well suited for high bitrates
Actually, Theora is bad at exactly that. Or no so much high bitrates as high resolutions, which is often the same thing.
Anyway, the thing is that theora is as good as H264 or even better at low resolutions and bitrates,
This is not actually true. h.264 is significantly better, including at low resolution and bitrates.
(Theora loses a little bit less at low resolutions, but this is mainly because Theora is so bad at high-resolution video.)
You know, Firefox already plays h.264 just fine.
By using Flash.
Refusing to support h.264 in HTML5 is not going to stop anyone using h.264, it's going to stop people using HTML5 since they'll just use Flash instead.
And so, Mozilla loses twice.
Everybody is already using h.264. It's pretty much impossible already to get people to change to something else.
The only way to get people to change to a new codec is to launch a better one. And Theora is not and will never be that.
They don't lose anything keeping the extra functionality,
No, there is a very real reason they are doing this: Somebody just recently cracked the hypervisor that they use to run Linux without exposing the entire hardware. This leads to a very real risk of cracking their copy protection system.
Now, you might argue that that's not actually a loss since it would make more people interested in the platform, or whatever, but clearly Sony don't see it that way. To them, losing the DRM is a real loss, and this is what they did to prevent this.
H.264 only which would work on only devices with Hardware support and not in firefox.
h.264 works perfectly in Firefox.
As long as you use Flash.
So Mozilla's grandstanding on that issue is not telling people "Don't use h.264", it's telling them "Use more Flash".
Open Source has consistently failed to produce anything remotely like a decent video codec so far. The only serious attempt is Theora, and that was commercially developed and donated as open source once it was irrelevant, and then people just polished it up a bit.
Codec design is hard, lots of work, and boring. It's exactly the kind of thing open source developers are bad at.
And iTunes and Quicktime are built on compatibility layers of OS X functionality. So they are suffering from the exact same problem, and are more examples of why Jobs is right.
Technically the agreement doesn't allow that, but Apple is not going to enforce that against you, because they don't care about that kind of thing (as evidenced by what Steve Jobs said) and do not have any way to tell in the first place.
The problem here is that in order to target Windows Phone 7 Series, Android, and iPhone OS, you'll have to completely rewrite both the front-end and the back-end in C#, Java, and Objective-C respectively.
And that's what you do, if you want to make a good app. Nobody has a problem with this, including Steve Jobs.
You can't possibly compare games to iphone apps.
No, games are usually much easier to make work cross-platform. They are the ones that usually have the least problems with this, and even those people complain endlessly about.
I don't use it on OS X, because it does not behave very well on OS X, and that's after Mozilla put in a huge amount of effort to specialize their code for each platform.
I have used Google Earth, VLC and LyX, and none of them work very well at all on OS X. They stand out like sore thumbs.
Which is exactly the problem Steve Jobs is trying to avoid here.
Those are indeed English words, but they don't seem to make any sense at all!
(or, of course, writing it twice)
This is the one. He wants apps written for the iPhone, not apps that try to shoehorn some kind of cross-platform abstraction on top of the iPhone, because that usually sucks, and (at least in his eyes) it makes the iPhone look bad if the apps look bad.
How many times do you hear gamers complain that a game is a crappy port because it is not properly written for the platform it is on, but instead tries squeeze in the functionality of some other platform? That is the exact thing he doesn't want on his platform.
The fact that some features might be less useful does not mean they are all useless. And pretty much everyone who knows anything about video formats agree that Theora is sorely lacking and is unable to ever catch up with h.264 as things stand right now.
VC-1 has been open for several years now.
Because I am not the guy trying to make arguments about it. You are.
And does this crack actually WORK?
All the yelling of "correlation is not causation" is pretty much the low mark of intellectual laziness on Slashdot. Most of the time when someone yells that, it actually means "I don't like the results of this research" or possibly "I like to look clever". In this case, I think it means "I only read the headline and I didn't like even that".
Besides, pretty much any driver for any modern video card out there supports OpenGL, why would they want to do this?
Maybe because they actually tried to use OpenGL and found it wouldn't work quite as smoothly as you think it does? You know, they are actually writing a browser used by a huge number of people here, they actually have some experience with these things. They're not doing this for the hell of it.
It's not so much that OpenGL ES is implemented on top of OpenGL, it's that you can just call OpenGL as usual instead of OpenGL ES, since most functions are just the exact same thing. OpenGL ES just leaves functionality out (assuming your OpenGL implementation is new enough).