Mozilla's VP of Engineering On H.264 675
We recently discussed news that YouTube and Vimeo are each testing their own HTML5 video players using the H.264 format. Firefox does not support H.264, and Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, has now made a post explaining why. Quoting: "For Mozilla, H.264 is not currently a suitable technology choice. In many countries, it is a patented technology, meaning that it is illegal to use without paying license fees to the MPEG-LA. Without such a license, it is not legal to use or distribute software that produces or consumes H.264-encoded content. Indeed, even distributing H.264 content over the internet or broadcasting it over the airwaves requires the consent of the MPEG-LA, and the current fee exemption for free-to-the-viewer internet delivery is only in effect until the end of 2010. These license fees affect not only browser developers and distributors, but also represent a toll booth on anyone who wishes to produce video content." Mozilla developer Robert O'Callahan has written a blog post on the same subject, following a talk he gave on Friday about the importance of open video on the web.
Re:sopssa (Score:1, Funny)
Everyone's a shill. Get cancer and die.
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:4, Funny)
If only there was a company who had licensed H264 and distributed a plug in for free that worked with all major browsers - their business model would be to make money from the authoring tools.
In fact, since this is going to be used for video, wouldn't it be even better if that plugin supported a Javascript like language, perhaps compiled to byte code and JITted to native code to get decent performance. Perhaps a custom graphics library that allowed people to make players with custom controls show a list of related clips once the video ended.
Then open source browsers could use the plugin to show H264 videos.
Re:Nonsense (Score:2, Funny)
He/She/It meant
Fixed that for you. Speciesist bastard.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
They just hadn't bought any companies for like, 2 whole days, and so they said "screw it" and bought one at random. That's whole Google rolls these days.
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
Look, they can quit whenever they want. It's not like they have a problem or anything.
Re:How to silently kill firefox (Score:2, Funny)
Adblock